Cold Constructs Blog

Earlier in my lifetime I sincerely believed that violence depicted in video games wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just a video game, an artificial and often a poor representation of reality. I know that it’s fake–isn’t that all that matters?

Turns out I didn’t care about violence in my games–I just wanted to play violent games. But now that I can play and see whatever I want, I’ve dedicated a lot of time and effort discussing and thinking about the issue seriously. Thing is, video games aren’t “just another” medium for creative folks to play with. Video games are the first truly interactive form of art we’ve created due to its computational qualities (capable of true simulation). There’s been others before, but they’ve been extremely limited and rare (non-computational), and video games standardize the interaction as an accepted method of expression/entertainment. But what makes VGs potentially harmful is not only that they’re a complete audio/visual experience, but they’re fully interactive–they can react to our in-game decisions in ways not possible in other forms entertainment. This makes all the difference.

In books, the reader supplies the imagery for the story being told. With VGs, everything is drawn out for you, and since the PS2 generation of consoles (much earlier for PC games), the imagery has been vivid and detailed enough to desensitize us to blood and gore. Movies have been doing this for some time. However, with VGs, the experience is much more immersive (due to the interactivity) and therefore more potent as a medium of relaying new audio/visual experiences.

So after we’ve played so many games where we (not the distant actors seen in movies) hack apart and gun down virtual people, we no longer feel repulsed by scenes (real or not) that used to be considered disturbing and otherwise repugnant. Many of us wouldn’t think about doing such hideous things in real life, but because of the extreme desensitizing of doing the acts ourselves virtually, it becomes easier to do them in real life. Now, video games can be used as a tool to vent our frustrations, but more often they tend to teach us, subconsciously, that violence isn’t all that bad–in fact they teach that violence can be fun.

Think about that. Fighting and killing = fun? No. Sex is fun; building cool stuff is fun; going to new places is fun; playing real sports is fun. Harming other people (and other animals alike) as an action by itself is fucked up (unless you’re defending yourself!) but harming others as an act of entertaining yourself is ground for wiping you off the face of the planet. If you think violence is ok, then I’ll smash your face in and see how you feel about violence afterwards. (Come to think of it, inflicting pain on yourself and friends is a common passtime these days, but such activities have been around longer than video games. Some VGs simply enforce the belief that such violence is fun.)

And that’s the problem. Violence in video games is helping immensely to desensitize us to violence in real life, which builds the belief that violence in real life can be fun. That’s pretty fucked up and needs to stop.

But don’t get me wrong–there are some games that depict violence in a way that is actually disturbing, enhancing the story-telling, and not an explicit part of the gameplay. This way, the game is accurately telling the player that violence is wrong and not at all a good time. And that’s awesome. It’s other games where the objective or a level-progressing option is to beat, murder, and otherwise harm virtual humans that is disgusting and wrong.

The problem is that these types of violent games (that depict it wrong, like it’s some kind of reward) are readily available to ages that they should not be. If you’re a teenager or younger, you shouldn’t get to play those games because you’re still very suggestible (no, really) and in a fragile phase of your life. You’re still developing your mental abilities and fortifying perspectives of reality, so during these times you should be exposed to experiences that enforce creativity (with certain RPG games or non-violent sandbox-style games like Spore), strategic thinking (like Supreme Commander–it’s war, but there’s no humans getting brutalized), analytic skills (…I personally hate games of the puzzling variety, so I can’t offer any suggestions, but most people love them so you should have no trouble finding good ones on shit like Xbox Live or your local VG store), and many other valuable mental exercises, as well as spatial reasoning and even eye-hand coordination.

There are endless ways to make a game really fun, so developers who make bloody games either lack the talent and/or creative resources to do so, or they simply lack a mind of their own, much less a sense of social responsibility.

Hydrogen costs energy to turn into energy and is difficult to store and transport. Building new infrastructure to support a hydrogen economy is itself incredibly expensive and difficult to accomplish.

Hydrogen is not the answer to our energy problem. We need a clean, renewable fuel that is easy to produce, store, transport and is also capable of providing an efficient power/space ratio so that a little bit of it will take us a long way.

There’s already an energy revolution underway. Companies across the world are building wind farms, ocean current harvesters, solar panel arrays and many other types of green energy sources. We can kill two birds with one stone by building electric cars instead of fuel cell ones. But not battery-powered electric cars. Instead: ultracapacitors (UCs). Simply fill your UCs using power generated by those new renewable plants that are being built. You can refill at your house, a connected station, or anywhere else with a plug–or even a place without one, since solar/wind combo generators can be put almost anywhere and set to generate the power you need.

UCs are already here and can fit anywhere, large or small, and work reliably and are maintenance-free.