Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Direction for second paper

The direction I'm takin in this paper is that the main character in GTA: Libert City Stories is the most ethical character in the game. I'm probably going to rely heavily on philosophers like Nietzche in order to define ethical behavior in way that is agreeable to my thesis.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Video Game Articles

http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20040121/Feature1.asp
"What Video Games Can teach Us"
Video games have many beneficial effects. They can teach players to multitask and create complex stategies. This can be coupled with the fact that in order to play a vast majority of games the player must have basic reading comprehension. By playing, young children are reinforcing their ability to read and understand the text because most games require the player to take what is displayed on the screen and perform tasks based on it. And as all of this happens, it usually requires players to develop better hand eye coordination in order to play and interact with the virtual world.

http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20040114/Feature1.asp
"The Violent Side of Video Games"
There is a key problem with the idea that video games cause violence. Technically there is no proof that video game violence causes real life violence. The only thing that can be said is that there is correlation between video game violence and real life violence. Correlation is not proof of anything. The correlation may simply mean that the violent people like violent games. The only real way this could be proved would be with documented nonviolent people being subjected to long term play until they became violent, but this would be extremely unethical. So any speculation on a causal relationship is completely unjustifiable.