id Software's John Carmack recently spoke with Industry Gamers and said that games are basically cathartic: they reduce aggression and violence rather than increase those levels as many anti-gaming parties would suggest.
Most of his short interview with the site reminisced on a time when DOOM was blamed for the violence that took place in the Columbine massacre back in 1999. Carmack said he never bought into the whole games-causes-violence debate, and seemingly believes that some of it was dished out in order to get a piece of the media spotlight.
“People just play games now and I never took seriously the violence in video games debate,” he said. “It was basically talking points for people to get on CNN and espouse their stuff on there. There was an E3 where all that was going on where I was giving interviews and the reporters would start going into their questions, and I wasn't supposed to talk about any of that. My wife was there and she'd start kicking me when I was about to go, ‘Well, I think...' And in the end it didn't matter, it didn't make any impact on things. I never felt threatened by it and it turned out not to matter.”
Without spouting actual statistics and sources, he then added that there's more evidence to show that games actually reduce aggression and violence. “There have actually been some studies about that, that it's cathartic,” he said. “If you go to QuakeCon and you walk by and you see the people there [and compare that to] a random cross section of a college campus, you're probably going to find a more peaceful crowd of people at the gaming convention. I think it's at worst neutral and potentially positive.”
Carmack also indicated that, despite the controversy surrounding the school shootings, DOOM was the turning point of the gaming industry; it brought games into the mainstream media based on what it could do, not how it reportedly influenced a couple of troubled high school seniors.
“I remember what I think was one of the turning points, really for the industry, when we were developing DOOM and we were at our office and I noticed that the janitor that was emptying the trash had just been sitting there watching… John Romero was playing something and he had just been sitting there, a guy who probably never had played a video game in his life,” he said. “And he was just mesmerized watching this. And I realized that we had reached a point now where we were reaching beyond the self-selected geeky gamer-type audience that used to be all that there was.”
Last week a clinical psychologist said that it was “racist” to place the blame of massacres solely on video games. “I know it's a little controversial to say but there's a certain type of racism in place with these killings,” said Christopher Ferguson of the Texas A&M International University. “When shootings happen in an inner city in minority-populated schools, video games are never brought up. But when these things happen in white majority schools and in the suburbs, people start to freak out and video games are inevitably blamed. I think that there's a certain element of racism or ignorance here.”
source: 2DayBlog.com
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