A Reply.
Writing by Tim on Monday, 12 of May , 2008 at 11:13 pm
I am going to get shit on for this…
A few weeks ago, an article I wrote about the New Jersey Green Party Convention was quoted on Game Politics:http://gamepolitics.com/2008/04/14/report-green-party-presidential-candidate-blames-school-shootings-on-video-games/
I already posted a response to their less than kind words toward the Green Party, but since it was a whole week old and apparently that is the lifespan of interesting conversation on the internet (what do you expect when your average person has the attention span of a gnat?) I figure I’ll expand on it a little. So, YOU!, Game Politics Dot Com, your ass is on my plate today.
First off, there is enough punctuation in your “quote” to fill War and Peace if, for some reason, the periods and commas became animate and decided to get the hell out of Dodge. As a fellow writer, you should know that quoting (and misquoting) is a subtle art, and simply chucking in the ellipsis for the sake of grammatical correctness does not help your case. It gives away the fact that you are only pulling specific information out of an article that is otherwise unrelated to what you are talking about. That being said…
As I already stated in my response, I generally agree with the sentiment that video games are not the cause of youth violence. In addition, there is a wealth of literature, from psychologist’s reports to analysis of actual youth violence that proves this. Since this is the case, why don’t you cite any of it? Throwing out some statistics about how the average gamer is in his thirties isn’t going to convince anyone of anything. And when you cite it, don’t stop citing it. News viewers learn through rote; its how Fox does it and it works. Why do you think over half of this country thinks Saddam Hussein had something to do with September 11th? Sure, it takes more than a few searches on Google to come up with this stuff, and you might have to, I don’t know, go to a library, but it’s out there. This brings me to the core complaint. I neither have a problem with being misquoted nor mind negative feedback, but simply cranking on the flamethrowers will not actually change anything.
I’d think for a site called Game Politics, there would be more tolerance for people who disagree with you, but judging by the flood of angry responses (check the link above if you don’t believe me) there is not. If you bothered to read my article, you’d know that I don’t think much of candidate Johnson either, but here are some uncomfortable facts: he is the kind of person who gets news cameras pointed at him, not you; more people of wider age groups will believe him over you; most people don’t even know Game Politics exist – I’ll cite Howard Dean and Ron Paul as living examples of why the Internet is a poor tool to get any sort of meaningful message out. Any given politician, from Hillary Clinton to Alabama’s Joe Bumblefuck draws more attention from a wider audience. Therefore, the image that you want to project as intelligent, mature citizens is overshadowed by the image you are assigned by the more newsworthy. And getting to the point, simply exploding all over anyone who disagrees with you like a tightly packed wad of C4 is not intelligent or mature, so that is the image you give yourself. It’s fun and cathartic to look at anyone who disagrees with you, call them a cock jockey and be on your merry way, but if you actually want to get anything done, you need to be more civilized, sit them down, show them facts, and explain why they are wrong.
Just blowing up the way gamers are comfortable doing only galvanizes the negative image. Gamers across the board get labeled as immature kids who don’t give a damn about social change and don’t want the government to take their toys away. And the result is that something like Game Politics gets labeled as another front for game companies to keep making money.
The real issue here is how the ideas that all game fans are socially inept weirdos and how violent games turn our children in Charles Manson can be refuted. How do you get people into thinking the other way? I don’t claim to know the answer to that, but it certainly isn’t through just insulting them.
Category: Politics, Columns, Video Games
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