Magazines (at least in the USA) are always predated. Theoretically it means that they are supposed to be left on the shelves until the month on them. Kind of like the new 2015 cars coming out in 2014.
You can replace âgamesâ with any medium ever invented and have the same argument that people have made throughout history.
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Yeah, people today, with their iPhones and Google Glasses, just donât care about each other like they used to! Back in the days of child labor, imperialism, and slavery, we really knew how to value our fellow man.
Seriously, though.
Itâs the prerogative of every new generation to believe that their reasons for engendering the moral panic du jour are more significant/exceptional/justified than anything that had happened before them. Pretty much the same way that every new generation thinks it invented escapism, addiction, alienation, and all other human concepts that have existed for thousands of years.
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I use mine to put food on my table, and for entertainment as target shooting is much more fun in person than pushing a button to do it on a screen could ever be.
Have owned guns for fifteen years, in various calibers, never had the urge to go on a rampage yet. Same could be said for tens of thousands of others who have these same scary items in their possession, yet stageringly few of them seem inclined to kill.
Meanwhile, kitchen knives have proven they are readily capable to being used to murder five people at a house party in a pinch. Bad people will do bad things, regardless of what they have to hand.
Guns are useful, and fun, when used safely, much like any potentially dangerous item you can name, from kitchen knives to sport bikes.
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I was going to mention the same thing. The mixed-up sentences come from entirely different paragraphs, so Iâm not sure whatâs going on there, but itâs definitely worth pointing out⌠even if this is a blog.
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I wont bother you with the figures, Iâm too lazy to look them up, but consider the worldwide television advertising budgets. Adults taking cues from TV is the norm.
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Moar kittehs plz. That is all.
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are you sure? Ever been hunting?
Some people carry weapons to protect themselves from violence while engaged in these activities.
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Iâm not sure if youâre being intentionally disingenuous or unintentionally thick. No offense. Ha ha. 
Here are a few forms of entertainment:
Tic Tac Toe
Playing checkers.
Playing chess.
Playing cards.
Playing a board game.
Playing Odyssey.
Playing Atari.
Playing Nintendo / SNES.
Playing World of Warcraft.
Which of these game do you think has ever had the most players playing for the longest periods of time, to the exclusion of a normal life? Which of these games would get boring the quickest? Which wouldnât? Which of these games would probably never get boring, since it can be added to and broadened indefinitely?
Now just think of videgaming in general, no particular videogame, just gaming asâŚgaming. Playing videogames. How much time is spent on videogames, by the average video game player?
Yes, there have always been a handful of people who have taken things too far, obsessive/compulsive card players or dice players or chess players. But they were the exception, not the rule. The rule, the norm of video game playing is to play them a lot. Videogaming and online gaming is a mindset, a Way of Life, for many many players. As is The Internet.
Skat and Belote didnât make multiple generations of French and Germans overweight.
The Internet, computing, âsurfing the 'Netâ isnât even a thing anymore. Itâs taken for granted. Who even says âIâm into computersâ anymore? Nobody. Weâre all doing it, weâre all into our computers, our devices. They are an extension of us, of our personalities. Our devices are an expression of ourselves, our selves, and our souls.
How often are you online? How often do you check your email, spend time writing emails, texting, tweeting, blogging, and coming up with clever bon mots on various threads on multiple websites? How often do you go back to said threads to see who has responded (positively or negatively) to your comments?
Is your icon YOU? Is it âyouâ? Is it you? Or is it just an icon: not even close to being you?
Is your life tied up in your online presence? Do you feel invested in your username here on boingboing.net? Do you have anxiety that someone will score a âdigâ at your expense? Donât lie!
None of this is real. The only reality The Internet has is a pseudo reality, an intimation of reality, an imitation of life, a mockery of life, a travesty (âa travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.â)
Its only reality is that which we have vested, and invested, in it. Which is Way Too Much.
Turn Off, Tune Out, and Drop In!
Except, of course, that itâs, uhâŚ
I think I see the problem: this was originally âpublishedâ a month from now.
How longâs the lead time on the print edition, anyway? Has an editor seen this yet? Whatever else I happen to think about Reason, it seems like they have fairly high standards.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you sound really, really old. Like, not even physically.
My son likes anime, and he pointed out a delightful comedy the other day, about kids who âcompletely lose themselves in their characters, to the point where they canât tell fantasy from reality.â The comedy starts when they get a little older and try to live down their embarrassing behavior.
Thing is, these kids donât even play video games. They dream up these violent, antisocial fantasies using⌠their imagination. (Personally, I was a Jedi at that age. What were you?)
Somebody once pointed out that if you forbid kids to have toy guns, theyâll pick up a carrot and go bang. Clearly, the problem here isnât video games; itâs imagination. Fortunately, a cure has been found â standardized testing.
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As children of the 80âs (12 during the Great Mortal Kombat Panic) we used to wonder why Adults never seemed to notice that Japan, which we were aware had a big gaming culture - as far as we knew gaming started there, didnât seem to suffer the same problems that were being blamed on video games that the Western World did.
We concluded, as 12 year olds, that video games were being used as a handy scapegoat because admitting the real problems with your society meant you had to fix them.
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The reason Gran Tursimoâs developers gave, right from day one, for why there was no damage to the cars in their game, was that manufacturers would not allow it. Mathew isnât guessing on that one, they actually straightup told magazines thatâs why no damage occurs.
Are they lying? Doubtful - I think itâs more likely that because the game was sold as hyper realistic, the manufacturers revisited how they felt about games showing their cars broken, and decided for that series it was a no-go.
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I bet if you dug around hard enough you could find a case where someone was trying to play Angry Birds or something while driving a car and ran over someone.
I guess thatâs technically they were operating both the motor vehicle and the video game at the same time, so you could get by on a loophole.
IIRC there was a case a couple of years ago where a guy was murdered over griefing someone in a MMO. They found the internet cafe he was in (this was in Asia) and killed him. In this case it was the victim operating the video game, not the attacker though.
And that their kids are ruining marriage. Seriously, somehow every generation has been ruining marriage for at least 2000 years.
Everyone I know who used to play World of Warcraft doesnât do so anymore, so that idea that it doesnât get boring is kind of silly. Whatâs more, having played newer games that are supposed to be more realistic and more engrossing, none of them grabbed me the way WoW did, and I suspect they just canât do it anymore. The reason I used to play a lot of WoW was because of who I was at the time, not because WoW was somehow miraculous.
You mention playing cards and playing chess in the same list, as if there arenât lots of people who have dedicated their entire lives to those pursuits? In fact, online poker is massively more popular than WoW, and Iâd easily bet even money that it is more popular than all MMORPGs at their peaks combined. And people play other games with cards as well, and they play games with cards in person.
From the list you gave and the questions you asked, âPlaying cards.â is the hands down winner, and itâs been ruining peopleâs lives for at least hundreds of years, maybe thousands (though not with our standard modern deck). People will be ruining their lives playing cards long after every game and game system to date is known only to esoteric historians.
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Hmm, I used to play pinball in NYC, down at the Penny Arcade lower Manhattan, as a kid in the 1960s, so donât think they were illegal.
I recall reading (at least 13 years after that) that it was still illegal to rack up credits (i.e. win free games) on pinball machines in NYC.
Obligatory Marcus Brigstocke quote:
âIf Pac-Man had affected us as kids, weâd all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.â
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