Fiction
Marge: A new violent video game has hit the streets! And we need to get rid of it, before it warps any children with its bloops and bleeps!
Homer: But that game sounds awesome!
Marge: And therefore should be destroyed!
Homer: But that game sounds awesome!
Marge: And therefore should be destroyed!
Rex Colt: Woah Doc, you play videogames?
Dr. Darling: Yes, Rex. Videogames are a proven coping mechanism, like any hobby. They've been shown to improve hand-eye coordination, problem solving, social interaction, and self-confidence. And no studies have managed to to prove a correlation between videogames and violence. Frankly, anyone who thinks games are bad for you is a f*cking idiot.
Rex Colt: Woah there Doc! Easy!
Dr. Darling: No Rex. F*ck stands for: Failing to Understand our Capacity for Kindness.
Dr. Darling: Yes, Rex. Videogames are a proven coping mechanism, like any hobby. They've been shown to improve hand-eye coordination, problem solving, social interaction, and self-confidence. And no studies have managed to to prove a correlation between videogames and violence. Frankly, anyone who thinks games are bad for you is a f*cking idiot.
Rex Colt: Woah there Doc! Easy!
Dr. Darling: No Rex. F*ck stands for: Failing to Understand our Capacity for Kindness.
— Dr. Darling's rant from Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon
Like all video games ever made, playing it increases your skills with guns. The critics were right.
— When a character plays an arcade machine in Death Road to Canada
Real Life
"Doctor Who has turned into tea-time brutality for tots."
—Professional buzzkill Mary Whitehouse
"There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?"
— Dick Cavett, mocking the TV violence debate
"Television has brought back murder into the home — where it belongs."
"Thou shalt not blame the entertainment industry for promoting violence or we'll shoot you in the head."
— one of the Top Ten Rejected Commandments in The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged)
"Computers games corrupted a computer?"
Spoony: That's how it starts off, people. Starts off innocent, with the gateway games. Asteroids, Q*bert. Then before you know it, you're in neck-deep with the hard stuff: Super Mario, Double Dragon, Mega Man. D.R.E.X. ever figures out Bayou Billy and the world's doomed.
Spoony: That's how it starts off, people. Starts off innocent, with the gateway games. Asteroids, Q*bert. Then before you know it, you're in neck-deep with the hard stuff: Super Mario, Double Dragon, Mega Man. D.R.E.X. ever figures out Bayou Billy and the world's doomed.
—Noah Antwiler on Game Over
"Speaking of questionable necessity: mainstream culture has gradually been coming around to the idea that video games probably aren't all murder porn aimed at the high-school massacre demographic, but this was not intended to be taken as a fucking CHALLENGE!"
—Zero Punctuation on Hatred, "Top 5 of 2015"
Yahtzee: These early stages of the game are a wee bit slow and wee bit boring, I'll fully admit that: But if I tell you now that this was one of the earliest games to be refused classification in Australia because of extreme gratuitous violence and full-frontal nudity, then hopefully that'll keep your interest alive long enough to keep watching through the dull bits.
Gabriel: How dare video games remind me the violence inherent in my own species.
Yahtzee: Yes, anybody might play this and think—
Gabriel: (GASP!) —think they have a penis.
Gabriel: How dare video games remind me the violence inherent in my own species.
Yahtzee: Yes, anybody might play this and think—
Gabriel: (GASP!) —think they have a penis.
""Controversy and the games industry go hand-in-hand like Ico and Yorda...and like Yorda, tends to stay focused for an average of about eight nanoseconds before getting bored and drifting off to do something else. But when it does get focused, it can get very exasperating...Then the media generally start drooling the usual uninformed questions as to whether wholesome, boyish pretend violence has any correlation with the real world. Short answer: No. Long answer: No, and go fuck yourselves, you ignorant, scaremongering cockbags.""
— Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw
"Most video game controversies have been repeats of that tiresome debate over whether it's healthy for little Timmy to make Sub-Zero tear out spinal columns, and which can be routinely countered with the argument that every spinal column torn out in Make-Believe Pixel Land is one real spinal column not torn out in the schoolyard."
— Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw
"Out of so many other issues — including our lacking mental healthcare safety net and our economically-competitive society that disproportionately disallows treatment for the most mentally-unhealthy people, and the institutionalization and industrialization of a military-industrial complex that has us almost financially dependent on military supremacy, and the oppressive social environment and prison-like architecture of public schools, and the historical and cultural significance of gun violence thoughout entirely of American political history, and the killer's family's lack of responsible and safe gun ownership practices — the NRA blamed video games."
It also appears that there is no antisocial theme too base for some in the video-game industry to exploit. There are games in which a player can take on the identity and reenact the killings carried out by the perpetrators of the murders at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech.[School Shooter] The objective of one game is to rape a mother and her daughters;[RapeLay] in another, the goal is to rape Native American women.[Custer's Revenge] There is a game in which players engage in “ethnic cleansing” and can choose to gun down African-Americans, Latinos, or Jews.[Ethnic Cleansing] In still another game, players attempt to fire a rifle shot into the head of President Kennedy as his motorcade passes by the Texas School Book Depository.[JFK: Reloaded]
—Justice Samuel Alito's dissent to Brown, et al. v. Entertainment Merchants Assn. et al. (2011)
