A Short History of Game Panics
reason.com
reason.com
I personally lucked out, my dad was into computers from an early age and had been buying games for me and my brother dating back to DOS, and he used to play them too.
So when my mum was panicked over the violence in GTA 3, my dad had already seen and played 1 and 2. The intent in your actions were no different in 1 or 3, just the graphics. If graphics are going to turn us into murderers and psychopaths, movies would have done it decades earlier at the height of horror movies.
I can only hope I too have enough sense to realize the stupidity of my own generation and comprehend the view point of my son when the next moral outrage occurs.
One of the outrages in my youth was the effect of pornography on teenagers due to ease of access. Funnily enough despite having access at a younger age than any of my peers (and admittedly frequent perusal of it) I ended up married in my very early twenties, my marriage is going on the 6 year mark, we've got our first child, we own a house. All those things generations of old did. In fact pornography made me such a sex craved pervert I've only ever had sex with my wife.
It's almost like the generational panic was... bullshit.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/05/03/facebook-twists-re...
Are you claiming that moral standards of the "younger generation" in this gap haven't really declined as people in the "older generation" thought they would?
Or are you saying that the moral standards have declined, but it's no big deal, just the changing of the times?
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
Sometimes I think Hacker News doesn't take a long enough view of history. My grandparents went to war in Europe. They saw and did things that shamed and haunted them when they came home. They were emotionally disconnected and stunted as they raised their children, my parents. My parent's generation, consequently, decided in the 60's that sexuality should be liberated, in the 70's that everyone should experiment with drugs, in the 80's that money and wealth were the most important priority, in the 90's that integrity was an outdated notion.
In my generation, meanwhile, we've concluded that morality itself has run its course and that we should be tolerant of everything except intolerance, that faith and morality are all fine and well as long they're held privately, and that taboos are the only taboo.
I asked my wife's grandparents what the biggest change is between now and the time of war that they lived through. Their answer? Community. There is no I've got your back, you get mine mentality really left in our nation.
I think the point they were making is that if our generation were faced with the same question as theirs (Another sovereign nation is exterminating a race and seeks world domination, what should we do?), we'd be paralyzed by a lack of community. There would be no banding together, considering the price of losing hundreds of thousands of lives, and deciding to pay that price because it's the right thing to do.
Call that hypocritical if you like. I'll just take it as well-placed criticism, because I've outlived my "everyone older than me is stoopid" mentality.
EDIT: My point about taking a longer view of history is that all of these changes have taken place over a span of maybe 80 years. That's short enough that people have lived long enough to see it all happen. When older people complain about changing morals, they aren't necessarily going senile.
World War II was running for two years prior to the involvement of the United States. The US passed a series of Neutrality Acts to keep out of the war. In the years prior to 1941, the president actually deployed US naval assets in the European theater as resource carriers in arguable contradiction of the desire of Congress to stay out of the situation entirely. U.S. domestic opinion on involvement in the European-Asian war was very divided until Pearl Harbor.
A United States that got up and fought against world domination under its own initiative without the prompting of Pearl Harbor is very revisionist history.
And if I may editorialize... I don't think that the sense of community that your wife's grandparents remember was a "natural" state that we've "lost." I think it was a side-effect of national galvanization under a war effort, and it is not without its negatives (keep an eye out for an "us vs. them" mentality that can make it hard to accept perceived past enemies as equal people).
There are a lot of advantages to that sense of community; I'd like to hope we can build it anew without the need for bloody global conflict as a trigger.
When talking about community and solidarity, one must always ask "among whom exactly?" and "how reciprocal is this?". I believe we've gone from tight but narrowly defined, exclusionary communities to looser, more inclusive and egalitarian ones.
The "should we intervene militarily in perceived overseas atrocities" question is also a lot more complex than it first appears, and too long to fit in this comment.
That's funny, most of the people I know who talk a lot about this, and think today's youth are just fine, are over 40.
The point is that there has always been rhetoric from elders about how terrible the youth are. Aristotle complained about the atrocious manners of the modern youth. Your grandparents' grandparents probably talked about the lack of community in the modern world.
The game panics in the OP are just one category of a general theme. My wife is doing a paper on the "Girl Problem"... turns out you can go back 500 years and find a continuous written record, in both popular writing and policy, of the "current" crisis of morality among young women.
With age comes wisdom, sure. But age also brings a sort of amnesia. The evidence is overwhelming.
Next, you'll be telling me that they would prefer those people visit casinos in their respective cities ... pssht ...
On the other hand, I guess video game items having real world value already allows young adults to test these waters somewhat. Just seems that when actual money is involved you're moving beyond simply playing a video game. Or I'm old and panicking morally.
What I'd really be interested in would be a history of in-game panics across MMORPGs and similar things. That would be interesting since it involves humans interacting in a novel fashion in contrast to the predictable politic garbage around dogs showing for the dog-whistle issues.