Re: Mortal Combat II and violence
Kevyn Loren Winkless (umwinkl0@cc.umanitoba.ca)
18 Dec 1994 00:04:16 GMT
In <3cvjsv$rj9@cmcl2.NYU.EDU> gans@scholar.chem.nyu.edu (Paul J. Gans) writes:
>ABOY (st003440@brownvm.brown.edu) wrote:
>: playing a video game for awhile find that my thoughts are completely
>: disjointed and jumpy. I seems to me that we're teaching our children a
>: new way to process information-- quick visuals, extracted from context--
>: no wonder so many of these kids have A.D.D. Last year I heard a story that
>: older people didn't like the "Burger King T.V." adds on television because
>: they couldn't understand them-- apparently they couldn't process the
>: information quickly enough.
>My 2 cents: Is this a new mode of thought or an old one being
>brought to the surface again. I can see a great survival advantage
>"out in the wild" to quickly noting possible threats and to quickly
>be able to respond.
This thread is very interesting indeed...
I have read a paper (I think it was in the mid-eighties.... Curses! I
_know_ I have it around here somewhere...) which dealt with the
phenomenon of "rambo" style films in North America (It didn't really deal
with the response to them elsewhere in the world). It briefly touched on
other dimensions of pop-culture in the US.
Are such games as Nintendo, Sega, etc in their manifestations of Mortal
Kombat etc. as huge elsewhere in the world besides the US? I don't
remember seeing the arcade machines around the last time I was back home
(UK), but then I didn't spend a lot of time hanging out where the market
would be either.
Is it a new way of thinking (or for that matter an old one resurfacing),
or is it in some way a reflection of culture and ideas of identity?
I notice that a lot of the opponents available in these games are quite
emphatically non-human, or stereotypically representative of another
culture. The suggestion in the paper I mentioned was that the reason
Rambo etc are so popular was because these films represent a "mythic"
agression against established authority.
Of course, that could be so much buffalo chips...;)
"...I drank WHAT!!?" - Socrates umwinkl0@cc.umanitoba.ca
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