Such as when 33-year old Anders Behring Breivik bombed government buildings and open fired a semi-auto assault rifle on July 22, 2011: “… playing Modern Warfare II as part of his simulation training in advance of his attacks,” Parkin mentions on the topic of events that cause public sentiments of distrust regarding the game industry (109). Not to mention, it’s an unfortunate coincidence when there’s a mass shooting or bombing that becomes the breaking news headliner for every major news outlet across the nation including blowing up social media.
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And, to put it in the simplest of phrasing, binary is the universal grammar of all programming languages, one input and one output off and on, yes and no, in and out, up and down, left and right, etc., etc.Ĭomputers speak in mathematical functions, in algorithmic logic, thus, all game developers and programmers have to know how to make metaphorical circuit board switches–not literally, although the software is technically represented by hardware–and that translates into game avatars and characters dying and respawning.
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In layman’s terms, all games run on binary code, no matter the programming languages used, because all programming is binary, no matter what brand or hardware that’s used, all code is without fail always going to be binary. Quoted by author, Simon Parkin, of the book, Death By Video Game, in a brief historical survey of the beginnings of what is now a massive industry, in which Parkin discusses how game violence and virtual murder / death tends to always be the industry standard as the primary mechanic of progression and level designing.ĭespite the immediate impulse to blame game violence on corporate greed and unethical business practices, there’s still the fundamental aspect of game development with all programming languages being derived from computer binary in the form of inputs and outputs, and that’s something ubiquitous to all programming languages, first discovered by the founding father of computer science, Alan Turing, with the help (or not so much) of the Turing Model–aka the Turing Machine. Violence was part of the business model: in the battle between human and machine, the machine must always overwhelm the player.” “This was a decision driven by commerce, not art: their designers needed to kill off the player after a minute or so in order to make money. On the flip-side of this red herring argument, there have been such defenses of game violence as the fact that when games initially emerged into a wider audience in the 70’s with arcade machines being the local hangout for teenagers and misfits, the business world of the arcade gaming industry exploited players out of all of their lunch money by killing off the player mid-game on a cliff-hanger and demanding more quarters in order to continue their game. But, let’s delve deeper into this discussion, because, well, why not? Just for kicks.
So, what gives? Why does the world regard the video game industry as some malicious corporate conspiracy to brainwash millennials into becoming vicious murderers? Short answer: I honestly have no idea. But, yet again, this was just another rabbit hole some ivy-league psychologists fell into. In another article, “Understanding the Effects of Violent Video Games on Violent Crime” on a study conducted by the Social Science Research Network and published in the New York Times magazine, which, again, led a team of top notch researchers and put forth a valiant effort to provide methodical, empirical data to support that video games are the mastermind of all evils behind the curtain in society.
Yet, not even vague correlations existed between the two, despite how obvious the relation would seem to be, violent video games were simply too much of an average household staple in nearly everyone’s living rooms, that it was nearly impossible to come to any conclusive evidence of causation. Markey, psychologists attempted to find causal links between violent personalities and violent video games. In an article titled, “Vulnerability to Violent Video Games: A Review and Integration of Personality Research,” which was published in the academic research periodical journal, Review of General Psychology, and written by Patrick and Charlotte N.