At the worst possible moment, Battlefield Hardline valorizes police violence

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I hear the game is so realistic that when you recklessly shoot a bystander, you're placed on a two week paid suspension until you respawn.

I have strong objections with this article, beyond what I would consider poor writing. The author has no cohesive point beyond trying to argue that the fictional video game is going to make the public accept cops that are also criminals. The first half of the article reads like a crappy article about a shock comedy game where the author tries to highlight the most morally corrupt parts and show how this game is tied to the declining morals of our society. The second half launches into a discussion about why first-person shooters are popular (is this really relevant to police violence? I don't think so) while failing to come to a conclusion about anything.

Anyone ever played the SWAT series? I've only played SWAT 4, but I've put several hundred hours into it. And the gentlest thing you can do is arrest someone (after tazing them, or hitting them with pepper spray or beanbags or flashbangs, or even shooting them). Even the civilians get handcuffs. And it came out in 2005!

All media mimics real life. However, games let people live in a fantasy world. Battlefield Hardline isn't the first or only game that lets you blur the lines between good and bad, and games are not the only media that offers that viewpoint. Dirty Harry, anyone?

The only reason this is newsworthy is because of the coincidence of current events. It reminds me of the Top Gear episode about the tragedy of car-train accidents that had to continue being delayed due to the multitude of car-train accidents. Wouldn't want to seem insensitive due to incidental timing.

This is more the inevitable outcome of a creative fictional work scraping up against the bottom of the barrel. They came up with the killer idea: "play as a cop!" but I bet they quickly realized that the avg cop in the United States doing their job correctly is not very exciting from a first-person-shooting perspective.

So, to make being a police officer more compelling, they had to ignore the fact an officer shouldn't really have cause fire a gun, much less draw one, very often. A first person shooter without the shooting is just, well, not a game. The inevitable result is a videogame about being a cop that does a lot of shooting. Call of Duty developers have done less responsible stuff for the sake of crafting a "unique" feature for their shooters.

Its 2014. People are still toting the "videogames lead to violence" crap? Sorry, but no.

Playing cops and robbers is generally going to copy the social perception of cops and robbers.

You can consider this game tasteless, but if it were wholly off the mark it wouldn't work as a cops and robbers game.

The game developers aren't the ones who gave the police military hardware in the first place.

Would be interesting to make a UK version of this where almost none of the cops are armed and if anyone shows a gun in public, the police pull back and wait for the trained snipers to arrive and surround the area. To make it properly realistic you could even divide the takings between both sides at the end of each level.

Just another example of how SJWs of the 2010s are like the moralist Christians of the 1980s. In this case they both view video games as being detrimental to society.