A Moral look

I’m going to look at good and bad but more at a moral level.

I’m fully aware that I’m entering a career, which has a whole lot of bad publicity surrounding the products that get produced. Through the press, games have been associated with obesity, lack of social skills, death and even murder.

It seems that the playing video games have been blamed for causing a lot of problems in modern society like increases in violence and crime and now with many addictive games available to everyone such as mmo’s that games are also being connected with symptoms of Autism and Asperger’s syndrome. Click Here

Firstly it gives me mixed feelings towards this statement since I’ve grown up with games and so have a lot of other people that I’ve known through out the years and they’ve turned out fine. The problem with articles stating that games cause crime, cause obesity and death is that they all they do is concentrate on the extreme negativity that comes with playing games and not the positive and good points of playing games.

Some of the friends that I’ve made over the few years have been strengthened because of games. The way I think about it, I could be going out and staying out late and doing all sorts of crazy stuff except that I’d rather stay in and play a game. One thing that my mom has always said about my brother and I when we would play games till the early hours in the morning is that “At least I know where you are.” Some parents have no clue where their kids are at 2 , 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning.

Gamers have there own secret society which is theirs and people that don’t play games can’t relate to what they’re talking about or what they mean. Me and my brother can just talk about a certain game and it something that only we know about, it like talking in Morse code to some people. Some people strive to fit in and have some sort of community, which they can relate to people, some people can’t do that in “Real Life” and resort to games and Internet for social acceptance.

Games offer people more chances to be themselves as you are more known for your personality instead of your looks, race or class. It makes being social more easier and less daunting. People have made friends, formed relationships and even have had marriages because of the social networking due to online gaming.

However games still get bad publicity, it causes deaths – allegedly. I’m sure everyone knows about the manhunt incident, the World of Warcraft death and the Legend of Mir 3 murder. Click Here.

All I really say is that these are very special incidents and the choices were because of the individual not because the game influenced them to resort to these actions. Think of just how many people play games worldwide and that a very small proportion has incidents like these. Death and murder happen all the time and everyone regardless if that person has played GTA or manhunt, if a person has the mentality to harm someone then it will happen anyway.

The media blames a lot of things and contradicts itself on many occasions. For example, health specialists say that drinking bottled water has no benefits over regular tap water, yet health specialists also say that drinking tap water contains estrogen (due to women taking the pill) which is lowering men’s sperm count. So each view just contradicts itself over and over again.

The media is very willing to point blame wherever it feels like, so games get a heavy share of bad publicity. However when games help a disabled kid feel like they’re playing sports once again it doesn’t go as noticed. Click Here.

When I read these negative articles it makes me challenge my moral standpoint on games, but I’ll always go with my gut and remember just how much fun I had growing up because of games.