Friday 27 April 2007

A False Claim

I was reading a news article last night about the familiar violent-games-creates-violent-people debate. It was written in 2005 (don't ask why I still have the paper), so it wasn't influenced by the recent Virginia Tech shooting, instead it featured Grand Theft Auto (GTA) quite a bit since that was when the "Hot Coffee patch" incident occurred. One of the lines caught my eye. It quoted Hilary Clinton as claiming the game promoted "[having] sex with prostitutes and then murder them". Having played GTA myself I admit this is indeed something you can do in the game, but that's due to the non-linear nature of the game. There are no missions requiring the player to murder prostitutes and if you try to do that outside a mission the cops will come after you for killing pedestrians. I'm not sure how that promotes casual killing. Sure, there is no denying GTA requires the player to kill a lot of virtual characters and that might still have bad influences, but people should get their facts right when making such powerful statements.

Within the same article, author and retired colonel Dave Grossman aruged these games are "murder simulators" that teach "young people how to use guns while lessening the impact and shock value of real violence". I hope Mr. Grossman does not live in the U.S., because he would have a hard time explaining to me why the NRA, which advocates the ownership of guns, does not promote violent crimes in an even more direct way. I have said it already and I will say again. Having the intent to murder is different from having the ability to do so. Games may provide the intent (even that is debatable), but certainty not the ability. If people want to blame games or movies for violence, they should first blame the organisations that provide the means to carry out these violent acts.

Sunday 22 April 2007

Guns, Guns, Guns...

I just discovered another murder-suicide incident, this time at NASA. Should we even be surprised that these shootings just keep happening?

From what I read on a blog, it appears that most Americans don't believe these types of shooting are directly caused by the lack of gun control laws in the country, even though the rest of the world disagrees. Below I share with you two pro-gun comments on the blog, which asked the question whether NRA was responsible for these shootings.

One person tried to compare the situation to high powered vehicles causing traffic accidents. This analogy is flawed. Cars, even ones with abnormally powerful engines, are built for transportation. No one drives around with the intention to cause fatalities. The same cannot be said of guns, because they are designed to kill or at least seriously injure another person. NASCAR may promote speeding that may cause fatal accidents, but an organisation that promotes possessing guns must necessarily endorse using them (or there is no point carrying a gun around), and the direct effect of using a gun is taking someone's life. This is not a side effect, as is the case with speeding.

Another claimed "Guns don't kill; people do". This is not an accurate statement. A person intent to kill, and there is a chance that this person actually kills someone. The "probability of success" depends on the methodology, and clearly using a gun increases that probability substantially. In short, guns themselves don't kill, but they sure make the killer's job a lot easier. Can anyone dispute that had the killer been armed with a baseball bat or even a katana, the death toll would be much lower?

Clearly the merely act of restricting gun possession will not totally eliminate such killing-sprees. The black market will ensure these who are desperate, and rich, enough will get their weapons. However, it will prevent every other angry kid from causally taking the family gun from an unlocked drawer and carrying out a massacre in the classroom.

What's ironic, as one reader submitted to the newspaper, is that Americans need the right to bear arms in order to protect themselves from other citizens who have the right to bear arms. (I can't get a direct quote since I threw away the paper!)

Censorship

I suppose I will focus on TV censoring off obscene languages and gestures. I don't oppose censorship in general but the way it is done on TV just makes everything worse off. Let me explain. First of all, the shows that usually get censored are the so-called "reality shows". Now I don't know if the participates were told to swear their heads off or the producers just let nature runs its course, but clearly no one tried to prevent swearing in the first place. Perhaps it is thought that "natural swearing" makes the show more realistic, or that coarse language, albeit censored, is a selling point like nudity.

Then there are shows like Jerry Springer, where the main selling point is two people fighting their way out of the problem, and plenty of insults mixed in with the action. There are two reasons I can think of for censoring out the swearing -- to prevent children from learning them and to cater for those who find swearing offensive. So somehow it is not acceptable to expose children to obscene words but okay to show them scenes of physical assault, and that people who'd rather not hear rude words don't find real-life fighting offensive. People usually swear when they're angry, and angry people are likely to perform other undesirable behaviour such as physically assault other people, throwing objects and making threats, all of which are worse than swearing but are probably not censored.

Having established that censoring don't really shield anyone from offensive scenes, I now show censoring is also bad for those of us who don't mind hearing verbal abuse. It's not like I enjoy listening to people swear, but if they said it, they said it. Bleeping out part of the sentence just makes it difficult to understand what they are trying to say. On shows such as Jerry Springer, where other every word is a swear word, a constant bleeping block out other non-obscene words so you have absolutely no idea what they said. To a lesser extent, I find a few bleeps in the middle of a sentence is all it takes to render it meaningless. My theory is that the mind needs to capture some minimum number of words to make them meaningful. The bleeping cuts this short so it takes extra thinking to understand the sentence. Whatever the reason, the result is still that the censorship renders the exchange of words meaningless to the audience, which in turn makes the show less enjoyable.

Frankly I think the TV stations censor their shows in order to meet certain rating restrictions, so they can show Jerry Springer in the afternoon rather than 1am. I doubt they really care about influencing kids negatively or offending elderly people. I'm damn sure they don't care about making their show impossible to understand because 50% of the conversations were bleeped out.

Wednesday 18 April 2007

US School Shooting, Yet Again...

The whole world today is talking about the Virgina Tech massacre. This news item is grossly overrated, because it is not the first of its kind, nor will it be the last. As long as the Americans hang on to their right to bear arms, these tragedies will continue to happen. I'm not necessarily saying the Second Amendment is wrong or bad, but merely laying out the options: give up free access to guns or endure the consequences. Yesterday's events are the logical outcome of taking the second option. After the Columbine incident almost 8 years ago, the Amish school shooting last year, and everything else in between, is anyone still surprised that yet another shooting spree has taken place? If people really care they should start thinking about the underlying problem and do something about it, instead of just mindlessly learning the facts from news outlets and feeling shocked, confused, angry and sad all at once.

I do not have the evidence (too late, too sleepy), but the NRA is probably the main reason there still aren't any gun control laws in the US. Thanks to them, 33 lives were needlessly lost. Turns out America's greatest threat is right at home. Thank God it is not my home.

Monday 16 April 2007

Like Not Love

There are people that we like, and there are some that we love. What's the difference? Isn't love just the superlative form of like? Furthermore, we often like one person more than another, meaning there are varying degrees of like. So when does like becomes love? Does the affection for someone build up gradually so that it crosses the region of like and enters the love territory, or is there a sudden jump from like to love? From my observations the latter appears to be the case, though one wonders if it's possible to be "on the verge of love but not quite there".

So lately I have been getting these weird feelings. Not necessarily contradictory, but weird. I have identified some people that I like, whom I don't mind talking to or seeing everyday, would in fact be looking forward to doing that, but whom I know I will never love. Oh and of course these people are all female. This sounds like I'm a big pervert, but I'm not, because I do not want to be intimate with any of these girls, which is why I do not love them. I am obsessed and yet I am not. This is the most strange and confusing feeling I have ever experienced.

Friday 13 April 2007

Kiwi

There are a lot of crap on YouTube, but here is one worth watching. I had to re-watch the first half to understand everything, but when I did...I'll let you find out.

The Best Social Networking Site

I must apologise for playing a word game in the title, but my choice of social networking "site" would be a good old party. I am not a terribly sociable person and at times even find facing people a little daunting. Still, given a choice of online communication, phone and face-to-face meeting, I will pick the latter. It is hard to explain this is so; my guess is that the physical proximity forces both parties to give their full attention to the conversation and that makes the interaction more substantial. Which explains why I get pissed if my friend would interrupt the conversation to answer a phone call.

It is not that I do not believe in online technologies. Instant messaging can be very effective if friends are separated by great distances, and emails are good if instant feedback is not required. For some strange reason, I never seem to understand the purpose of a social networking service such as MySpace. I have a Friendster account for years now (don't ask why I got it), but I have done little with it except going through my friends' photos. I have tried sending messages to a friend, but couldn't see the point in using Friendster as a middleman, when I can just email my friend directly. Come to think of it, my friend probably found out about my message when Friendster sent her an email. Clearly this is getting nowhere.

My sister has a Facebook account, but it seems that she only uses it to check out her friends' photos, and I assume her friends use the service in a similar fashion. When they want to communicate, they do it on MSN. While there is nothing wrong with using Facebook as a photo album, the same job can be done equally well with Flickr or Picasa. Again, I'm missing the point on social networking.

The newest kid on the block is Twitter, where users tell the world what they are doing right this moment. For the life of me, I don't understand why I want to know gcorrin aka greg is currently "reheating [his] spaghetti". Conversely, I cannot find a reason to post an update every few hours, an exercise that is needlessly annoying and time consuming.

In short, these online services have some very interesting ideas and innovations, but for me they fall short of delivering a good socialising experience. Ideally I want to see and touch my friends, not a static picture or blocky video. When I laugh at a joke I want to hear my friends laugh too. Most online services facilitates keeping in touch constantly, but I argue it is the quality rather than frequency of each meeting that matters.

Friday 6 April 2007

Mind Games

Let's say you are stranded on an island by yourself. There is plenty of food around so you're not in danger of starving to death, but there is absolutely no way to communicate with the outside world. How long do you think you can last before boredom or loneliness drives you crazy?

If my livelihood is not in immediate danger, I dare say I can last quite a while before cracking. I have already established I am an introvert, so lack of human contact isn't the main problem. When I was by myself this pasting summer I often stayed home for days on end, only leaving to stock up on food. But then I had the Internet and TV to fully occupy my time. The island will have nothing of this sort. However I think I can live without them, because I will just start thinking. A lot.

You see, when I am lying on the bed or taking the train without my mp3 player, my mind starts thinking about things. The topic can vary from the next blog entry to an unresolved homework problem to pretending I am the powerful hero saving the world from catastrophic events (OK, you can stop laughing now). And it had just occurred to me that I never seem to run out of ideas. They might not represent a breakthrough in physical theory or turn into a profitable product, but they keep me entertained.

Then it strike me that "entertainment" for me always involve thinking. I enjoy playing a game because it makes me think. Watching TV or reading a story might appear to require less (some say no) thinking, but when you read a story, your mind is constantly building a mental picture of the scenario, essentially converting words into a movie of sorts in your mind. TV or movies remove the need for such conversion, but you still need to interpret the scenes and dialogues presented to you, to build up the storyline. Essentially these media give you interesting ideas, a push in the right direction, but the mind still needs to string them up and fill in the gaps to arrive at the final product which we call a story. Of course it doesn't need to be a story. The theory works equally well with textbooks in place of TV and knowledge instead of stories, though some people would find that sleep-inducing.

Therefore isn't it possible for the mind to come up with interesting ideas, without the help of external media, and then process them the same way as it does TV images or text? Doesn't that satisfy the definition of "entertainment"? In other words, entertainment is basically the mind thinking about interesting things. Outside stimulants help inject such ideas but they are not necessary, for the mind already possess the ability to create interesting thoughts. After all, someone has to come up with the story.

I do not wish to neglect the value of films or books, since I am an avid consumer of both media. I just think it wouldn't hurt to put them aside once in a while, and entertain ourselves with our own imagination. Try it, you might be pleasantly surprised.