This was posted on gampolitics.com a while ago, but I just had to compare it my mockup of what The Fifth Estate thinks game boxes should look like.  Although mine was meant to seem absurd, it really doesn’t hold a candle to this real-life example, which almost makes the title unreadable.  Apparently, knowing what you are buying isn’t really important when the government doesn’t think you should be buying it.

The controversies over videogame violence and addiction are, of course, just the latest in a long history of moral panics over things like Dungeons & Dragons, heavy metal music, comic books and even the waltz.  Knowing this, I always wondered if there were similar concerns triggered by the advent of cheaply available books after Gutenberg’s invention of movable type.  It wasn’t hard to imagine, but I never had a concrete example until I came across this article on gaurdian.co.uk.  about Samuel Auguste André David Tissot’s book, Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons, with Proper Rules for Preventing Their Fatal Consequences, and Instructions for Their Cure.  The article features some choice quotes in which the good doctor relates cases of patients suffering from fainting, palpitations, complete and total hair loss, madness, and ironically, idiocy as a result of too much studying.

Although I naturally felt vindicated by reading the article, I was surprised by the source.  I always imagined these concerns coming from illiterate, uneducated parents who were somehow able to scrape enough money together to send their children to school and then didn’t know what to make of their newfound tendency to sit and stare like zombies for hours on end at the incomprehensible squiggles on the page.  To hear this sort of thing from a highly educated, obviously literate person came as a surprise.

Then again, given what some of our so-called experts say about videogames, maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised.

(via Mind Hacks)

For those who missed it, there was a horrible article about the RE5 controversy written by Earl Ofari Hutchinson in the Huffington Post recently.  It’s rife with the kind of simplistic, knee-jerk, politically correct reasoning that really makes more sensible liberals look bad.  The article’s entire argument seems to be that Japanese companies have marketed racist things in the past and said that they weren’t racist, and now Capcom is saying that RE5 isn’t racist, therefore RE5 must be racist (reading it, I was reminded of the juror who insists that the defendant is guilty because he shows no remorse).  Ironically, I would say that the article offered a rather racist portrayal of Japanese businesses.

For a more sensible, reasoned response, I recommend Ben Fritz’s article on the same topic for Variety.  He brings up a point that I think is central to the confusion that arises in these kinds of controversies, which is that the question of whether Resident Evil is “racist” is actually comprised of at least 2 questions: Read the rest of this entry » »