riskroWe said:
This is laughably stupid.
Promoting terrorism as a leisure activity, as if that's ANYTHING like real terrorism.
Honestly, I'd be pretty receptive to the criticism that the interactivity of video games makes them somewhat different from movies, novels, and the like, though even there, one would have to argue that this is somehow different and worse than everything that's come before, such as GTA, Fallout, various sequences in Command and Conquer, or basically any other game where players are able to commit atrocities. Once again, there's room for that argument to be made and argued. That would be a worthy debate.
But that's not what's going on, here. As a point of fact, that guy's comment presumes an automatic link between the medium's interactivity and an unvarnished endorsement of the activity being depicted and jumps straight to decrying the presence of terrorism in video games because they're a leisure activity. Which doesn't pass the sniff test. Watching films and movies and television is a leisure activity, but there are literally hundreds of films that depict as-bad or worse atrocities. Books-reading is a leisure activity, but once again, confronting grotesqueness and atrocity through depiction in the medium is quite common. "Leisure activity" and emotionally intense serious subject matter are hardly mutually exclusive prospects, nor are all such depictions endorsement; if they were, the words "catharsis" and "pathos" wouldn't exist.
So, yeah, complaining because video games are a "leisure activity"? Stupid. Dude needs to read up on his greek tragedy. There is a reasonable argument that
could be had, but that guy just short-circuits it and jumps to the dumber parts.
