![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Violence in Entertainment
Mar. 30th, 2009 11:05 amThere was a point in my life where I was hugely in favor of violence in entertainment. I played God of War and relished every beautifully rendered death combination. I watched Saw and salivated at all of the horribly creative contraptions and devices conceived and implemented by that demented old man. Today, though, I don't really find a lot of entertainment in that sort of thing anymore. Every once in a while I might be in the mood for a mindless horror or action movie, but Die Hard or Nightmare on Elm Street are enough for me (and much less violent than many of today's movies). For the most part I enjoy a movie with a great story line, and a solid one. I find myself stumbling across these things in more foreign movies than American. As far as games, I've significantly scaled down, and now spend most of my time playing online (text-based) RPGs and Real Time Strategy games (sometimes violent, but the figures are so small, it's negligible to me).
I'm not against violence in entertainment though, in fact, quite the opposite. The case that most people make against violence in entertainment is that people (especially children) will copy the activities which they see on television, in movies, or in video games. I think that's ridiculous to tell you the truth. The first point against this is the numbers. For every college kid that runs rampant on campus with a gun (and who happened to have played Doom 3) there are thousands and thousands more who played that same game, and yet don't. There is a minority in every group that does uncharacteristic things. Of course there are some exceptions, as in every statistic (unfortunately the WWE does not quite have the numbers pointing in it's advantage, as wrestling venues come through town, that city's violent crimes, particularly domestic, rise noticeably).
A point that I would like to make, though, is that the blame lands on the society as a whole. Just like with kids who join gangs, commit solo crime, or just burn out and drop out, children and people being interested in violence is in large part due to their surroundings. People deviate from the norm in such large numbers because something is wrong with the norm. Rockstar probably would not have put so much money into developing the Grand Theft Auto series if it didn't know there was a HUGE market for killing hookers, illegal street racing, and general "gangster" (in the Godfather sense) culture. People like these ideas, and are willing to pay money for them. That happened before the game came out. The folks who buy the violent games and such generally do so because they already have enough of a violent tendency to get entertainment out of acting it out in a digital realm, or seeing it played out on a television or movie screen.
Generally, people will not go out and buy or rent or pay to see a movie which they might not like. I know my family didn't. We only put money into movies and time into television programs which we knew we were already interested in or thought we might be interested in. This kept us from seeing a lot of great movies by the way which I'm trying to catch up on now. Think about how many movies you pass up when you go to Hollywood Video or when you browse NetFlix. Most people do that.
The solution to people (especially kids) becoming violent towards themselves or others (and in the case of mostly women, wanting to become objects) is not to ban the material which "perpetuates" this, but rather to make it to where there isn't an interest in these deviant ideas. Fix society, not the products of it. It's a lot like trying to put out a fire by aiming at the flames, it doesn't work, you have to aim at the base, the source.
I'm not against violence in entertainment though, in fact, quite the opposite. The case that most people make against violence in entertainment is that people (especially children) will copy the activities which they see on television, in movies, or in video games. I think that's ridiculous to tell you the truth. The first point against this is the numbers. For every college kid that runs rampant on campus with a gun (and who happened to have played Doom 3) there are thousands and thousands more who played that same game, and yet don't. There is a minority in every group that does uncharacteristic things. Of course there are some exceptions, as in every statistic (unfortunately the WWE does not quite have the numbers pointing in it's advantage, as wrestling venues come through town, that city's violent crimes, particularly domestic, rise noticeably).
A point that I would like to make, though, is that the blame lands on the society as a whole. Just like with kids who join gangs, commit solo crime, or just burn out and drop out, children and people being interested in violence is in large part due to their surroundings. People deviate from the norm in such large numbers because something is wrong with the norm. Rockstar probably would not have put so much money into developing the Grand Theft Auto series if it didn't know there was a HUGE market for killing hookers, illegal street racing, and general "gangster" (in the Godfather sense) culture. People like these ideas, and are willing to pay money for them. That happened before the game came out. The folks who buy the violent games and such generally do so because they already have enough of a violent tendency to get entertainment out of acting it out in a digital realm, or seeing it played out on a television or movie screen.
Generally, people will not go out and buy or rent or pay to see a movie which they might not like. I know my family didn't. We only put money into movies and time into television programs which we knew we were already interested in or thought we might be interested in. This kept us from seeing a lot of great movies by the way which I'm trying to catch up on now. Think about how many movies you pass up when you go to Hollywood Video or when you browse NetFlix. Most people do that.
The solution to people (especially kids) becoming violent towards themselves or others (and in the case of mostly women, wanting to become objects) is not to ban the material which "perpetuates" this, but rather to make it to where there isn't an interest in these deviant ideas. Fix society, not the products of it. It's a lot like trying to put out a fire by aiming at the flames, it doesn't work, you have to aim at the base, the source.
