I’m sure video games are connected to our eating habits, the conflict in Syria and the severity of the consequences of the floodings in Bosnia and Serbia as well, but that doesn’t mean the connection is significant compared to other influences. Implying that young people shouldn’t play video games because it is a significant cause of them becoming impolite sounds like complete bullcrap to me.
I guess you ignored my 2,000 word research paper and all my sources too.
No evidence has shown that video game or media violence has has any long term effects on anyone, including our children. The only research that has attempted to show any correlation that was “successful” was paid for by anti-violence/anti-video game interest groups and mostly all of them are not taken seriously by the psychology community. If you really read into how the research was done in these experiments, it was extremely bias. 
Your example that people would whip out their phone and record someone being beaten on the street has nothing to do with video game violence, it has to do with the bystander effect. That has been a problem long before violent video games.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/bystander-effect
Not to mention that, like previously mentioned, teen violence is currently at record lows. The problem is the media wants to report every time any teen acts out anywhere.
because
I never said “because”. its an example of a society that doesnt value violent entertainment as much - showing that it can be different and the crime numbers are speaking for themselves. And yes its a culture thing, but I never said video games -> society of course its the other way around. Does that mean in a violent culture you just give up and expose a kid to everything ? In the US its ok, for people in Japan it would be like “oh my” and the reason is just “well its a different culture”… wow. doesnt change how the brain works.
The “crazy” types are in a spotlight in the west for “weird japan” trope - but in fact those games are not very common there, just like all the other “crazy japan” things are not common in everyday life.
Plus I would imagine that those age rating labels are a little more respected and adhered in japan, but thats very hard to say , might be wrong.
Not video games but any work nor suited for minors. And the cause is not direct but indirect: impressions that are hard to process - nothing more nothing less.
You are talking about video games -> violence.
I am talking about any kind of impressions -> bad influence in young subconscious minds due to hard to process subject matter and imagery.
Like I said this discussion would be the same with any kind of inappropriate movie or book or song or actual real life footage.
Let me bottom line this,… again.
Everything a mind is subjected to changes it. The younger a brain is the easier it is to change. Old guys dont really change anymore (on average).
If kids today play only half as much video games as I did, a sizable portion of their growing up will be video games.
Impressions that mold their young brains.
Which has nothing to do with imitating what you see on the screen.
Ok, let me rephrase. Every single little thing we do ever has a mild to moderate effect on our brains. That’s called “life experience”. So yes, video games do effect our brains. Having said that;
video games are not shown to have any negative affects on our brains what so ever in any way. All modern research shows the affects video games gives us are positive, like increased hand eye coordination and enhanced complex logic and problem solving skills.
All of your examples have nothing to do with video games, they have to do with jackass teenagers/adults who weren’t raised right, or societal problems that have existed since the dawn of man.
Really? Because from what I know the lower number of violent games comes more from lack of hardware. The most popular violent shooters were released on PC and Xbox, and neither of those two have a big market share in Japan. Many people were for example first exposed to shooters when Square-Enix published Call of Duty 4 on the PS3. CoD: Ghost sold 200 000 copies in Japan. If there was a significant effect on people due to those games, then Japan would be a prime example of a country where violent western video games are on the rise, but their crime rate has consistently decreased for 11 years straight and halved between 2002 and 2012.
I have never heard of shooter games being socially unacceptable in Japan. If you have any sources on that, I’d love to read them.
I can’t argue with that, but higher sales of course doesnt mean that minors play these games. And again I never said video games cause crimes ^^’
but at this point I have bottom lined this enough times…
I thought that includes parents who give no fucks about what kinda movies, games and media your child is subjected to and what kinda friends he /she is hanging around with
Which I have never said, to quote myself:
Paper that is kinda related to my argument: Digital media, the developingbrain and the interpretiveplasticity of neuroplasticity
Again if you feel like this has nothing to do with video games and disturbing imagery, I just dont have any breath anymore.
This seems to have completely changed its rail now.
However, theories, therories with studies or statistics, but theories.
Without touching any of the videogames/violence bickering, I’ll comment on the original point of the thread.
I’ve played a couple hours of it, and it’s… okay. Not great, not horrible, but about what you would expect from a typical summertime blockbuster action game.
Pros: My favorite part of this game is what it could have been. Just below the surface is another layer of mechanics that I wish they had explored more. I find myself thinking about “what if this part of the game worked slightly differently” and getting rather lost in my thoughts, which is pretty interesting. You can see the remnants of what they were going for (I hated that I couldn’t shoot while driving until I realized they’re encouraging me to think outside the gun and use more creative tactics), and when it works, it’s really satisfying (using my hacking skillz to build a beepy-throwy-thingy and luring a guy over to an explodey-thing and then using my amazing hacking phone thingy to explode the explodey thing hasn’t gotten old yet). The online bits are unobtrusive but interesting: between missions, the game occasionally invites you to play hide-and-seek with somebody trying to “hack you” which is pretty fun.
Cons: They took the original premise (let’s make an open world that you can screw around with to solve your problems without shooting anybody) and then dumped a whole lot of extra junk on it (why am I playing a minigame where I drive a spider tank around in a virtual world?), and then they dumbed the whole thing down by about 75% (now it’s sneaking time, ok now it’s shooting time, now it’s car chase time, uh oh your phone has detected a crime nearby to distract you from the story, do you want to do that). The story was written by a middle management guy in a blatant attempt to appeal to 18-35 year old guys who think they’re much smarter than the rest of the sheep because they know how to install firefox instead of IE, which makes me cringe about once every 3 minutes. And even the stuff that doesn’t make me cringe doesn’t make any sense: I’m chasing down a guy for killing an innocent person, but in the process I’ve killed about 30 people myself. What’s my motivation again?
Overall: The sneaky parts feel like one of the Arkham games, only instead of throwing bat-devices you’re throwing computer-hacker-thingies, and instead of grappling up to a gargoyle, you’re hacking into a camera. The shooty parts are shooty parts, and the driving parts aren’t as bad as people make them out to be. In fact, the driving parts are some of the more satisfying parts when they work. The on-foot open-world parts almost seem cool (use your hacker skillz to profile a person and prevent a crime without being seen or using a gun), but then you realize that they aren’t any more involved than the distractions you see in every open-world game and it all becomes much less interesting.
Bottom line: this game is incredibly overhyped, but I guess that was unavoidable. If you have 60 bucks to throw away and want to spend a Friday night drinking a beer and playing a new game, this isn’t a bad choice. If you aren’t sure about spending the money, you won’t miss much by waiting for the price drop or just redboxing it. If you’re expecting this to revolutionize open-world games, it won’t. But it does have some interesting mechanics that make you think… you’re just thinking about how they could have been done better.
One thing I do keep thinking about is this: with all of these open-world-but-with-a-twist games coming out, I wonder if it’s just a matter of time before somebody comes out with an open-world engine. I’d be very curious to see what kind of stuff indies come up with, if given the freedom to add their own layer on top of an open-world.
You didnt like the spider bit? I thought it was a clever way of adding some open world sandbox madness without completely blowing the premise of the story/character/game
Meh, not really. The “digital trips” as they’re called in-game just feel like extra tacked-on junk, like maybe they had some extra code from an old project laying around and decided to throw it in there. They could have added so many other interesting things instead: the ability to fly (by stealing a plane or helicopter), police boats (want to get away from the cops? Just jump in the water!), police anything really (oh you’re being particularly bad? That’s it! We’re calling the van!), the ability to shoot from your car (I go back on my previous statement about not being annoyed by that), other weapons or gadgets (how about non-lethal weapons, which would make so much more sense to the story). It almost feels like these things were left out on purpose, smells like future DLC to me.
I’ve since finished the story, and the whole thing was just kinda meh. I wasn’t expecting it to live up to the hype, and I’m not an irate fanboy or anything, it just wasn’t much to write home about.
I’m still waiting on a new Time Splitters game, haha.