Comments on: Red Dead Redemption: Bigfoot

By: Tarzanboyy

Tarzanboyy — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 02:15:41 +0000

I like how the vast majority of people placing judgment have probably never played a game in their entire life. I am a gamer and an animal lover. I don’t play GTA and I’m not a shooter addict, but I do play games considered violent, and I do own red dead redemption. In the game, you kill people and animals, but anyone who thinks that it somehow encourages people to commit violent acts isn’t within hailing distance of earth. It’s no different than any other violent medium. I don’t enjoy senseless violence and I have never even been hunting. I wouldn’t kill another creature unless it was a life or death situation. Even if something is admittedly in bad taste, anyone who is inspired to commit an act of violence by a game or a movie or whatever else has problems to begin with. Hell, the guy who killed John Lennon claimed to be inspired by Catcher in the Rye. Manson was supposedly inspired by Beatles lyrics. People inherently have violent tendencies, and some very disturbed people can’t or choose not to put those things into context. There’s a time and a place where personal responsibility comes into play. Now I can’t speak for certain individuals, but for me and for most people, no matter how “realistic” the game is, it’s not real life and the psychological effect is completely different. How can people who don’t play video games have the temerity to spout off like this? They’re just parroting what they’ve been programmed to say. Ask yourself this: Who is more likely to kill someone in cold blood? A person who plays video games all day or someone who tortures animals in their basement?
The difference is this: A psychopath is a psychopath regardless of violent video games, movies, music or anything else. Will they use them to act out their fantasies? Certainly. But that doesn’t make the medium evil.
Anyway, the simulators the military uses don’t actually ‘desensitize’ soldiers to killing people to any significant degree. Even though I’ve never killed anyone, I’m willing to bet that most military personnel who have been in combat situations will tell you that actually shooting someone and watching them die is not the same as any simulator, regardless of how realistic it is. If you want evidence for this, people who chronically play first person shooters don’t develop post traumatic stress disorder. Returning soldiers do. Playing call of duty doesn’t make you a murderer. I play call of duty, but I get viscerally upset when I even see one of those animal cruelty videos.

By: paul_r

paul_r — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 19:45:35 +0000

I think those with fears that a video game will bring death to an innocent sasquatch are unfounded.

Video games are about people doing things that they can’t do in real life. It would take a real hunter with real guns to kill a saquatch. If that could be done in real life then we would all be expressing outrage about someone who did that already because we wouldn’t have “existence of” to argue about.

By: Fhqwhgads

Fhqwhgads — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 19:44:48 +0000

I can’t help notice how the sasquatch shown in the game is also both much slower than everyone says and much easier to kill than one would expect.

By: ILoveSnakes

ILoveSnakes — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 17:45:31 +0000

I find these “It’s just a game!” arguments to be rather pathetic. They say the same thing whenever anyone finds any game offensive for any reason whatsoever.

Let’s not forget that among other things, the military uses video games to desensitize soldiers from killing… But wait, it shouldn’t desensitize them, because after all, its “just a game”, right?

By: Fhqwhgads

Fhqwhgads — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 19:01:51 +0000

I’ve been killing ‘em in Nethack for years. There’s a lot of meat on ‘em, too, so if you’re not being attacked by something else it’s a good idea to eat the corpse. I never met a Y monster I liked, unless maybe it was my polymorphed dog or I had a scroll of taming.

By: red_pill_junkie

red_pill_junkie — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 17:39:17 +0000

Yo, this is Rockstar Games we’re talking about, Cryptos!

If their games don’t offend at least *one* demographic, their stock price plummets

By: CrimsonFox79

CrimsonFox79 — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 14:03:23 +0000

I agree with Mcleod.
I am a gamer. I have always been, and will always be a gamer. I’m 31 years old, and still have every system I ever owned from the atari (7800) to the wii and xbox360.
While playing games, even as a young child, I knew they were just games. They are interactive, fictional stories.
I love animals and nature. I would never deliberately harm a creature in real life. I may enjoy firing a virtual gun around in a fictional world made of pixels, but in real life I will go out of my way to save the life of even a little bug.
Playing super Mario bros, I never went outside afterwards and stomped on turtles. After playing Zelda, I never ran outside to break my neighbors’ flowerpots hoping to find money.
Most gamers do realize that they are playing something fictional. That’s what we love most about games- we go on quests and play as characters we would never do or be in real life.
There may be upsetting situations, or quests to shoot things we love in real life, or horrific scenes that would make you vomit in real life. But they are games. And if someone plays a game and takes it seriously and goes out and mimics what they saw on the tv screen, then there was probably something off in their brain to begin with….

By: tropicalwolf

tropicalwolf — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 13:20:46 +0000

Chrisc pretty much said it all. I am far mor offended by hoaxers and people giving their crap videos airtime. I have no love for Rockstar Games, but one could look at this from a devils advocate petspective: after killing a few, the gamer is presented with the oppurtunity to see the sasquatch as intelligent creature far more so (and able to speak English none the less) than probably in reality. It may even garner more interest in sasquatch from younger people than currently exists. Let’s not start the “real” kill vs no kill debate, however, at least Mr Red Dead would have something we don’t have…proof. Come on, it is a GAME people. I would expect the PETA people to be “offended” but not anyone else.

By: wolfatrest

wolfatrest — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 12:21:27 +0000

I have played this game and it’s lot of fun. I notice no one seemed to have a problem with the fact that you shoot hundreds of humans in the game, nor did anyone comment that it was an atrocity that you saw bears being gunned down. I haven’t seen anything in the game so far that had to do with sasquatch so I can’t comment on that part of the game, but everything else in the game seemed to have a rational (for it being a fictional game) reason for what happens. From doing a little research it appears that John Marsten was under the impression that the family of sasquatch were eating people’s babies. How many of us would react any differently?

By: Macleod

Macleod — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 09:47:54 +0000

@Hambone, I believe it was mike tyson, and as far as offensive I take offense to “roly poly gamers” lol
(Acheivment Unlocked)
(50g Roly Poly)