Tag Archives: Violence

Bioshock Infinite, Irrational Games, Review

Review: Bioshock Infinite

An image of a few of the pieces of the flying city of Columbia, with a statue of Zachary Comstock in the middle

Bioshock Infinite is a story about choices and their consequences, relationships, manipulation, the trousers of time, and how people react to terrible things. It’s also about a finger that is far more significant than it seems.

Bioshock Infinite is equal parts drama, horror, and The Outer Limits, spiced with flashbacks, flashforwards and Disney-Princess moments and littered with foreshadowings for those of you keeping score at home. And then, there’s the other stuff.

All of this is punctuated with violence. Not just any violence, but visceral, gory, ridiculous violence – The Evil Dead (1981) sort of violence, punctuating the story like a series of hand-crafted parodic set-pieces. Jarring, overdone, outré, overly-gamey, and yet, for all my distaste for the intricately-crafted bloodbaths of this single-path shooter, it remains that it is arguably vital to the core of the story.

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Gaming, Opinion

Guns, violence, video-games, and the media

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"Don't blame [GTA San Andreas logo], 'cos it ain't San Andreas' fault"

Within mere minutes of any mass-shooting, the media (and assorted interest groups) are keen to tell you why the shooter(s) did what they did. In the recent shooting at Sandy Hook, Newtown, Connecticut, everyone was keen to explain in detail exactly why Adam Lanza murdered a bunch of people and then killed himself.

Of course, since (at the time) they didn’t even have the right name, the various motivations espoused for Lanza’s killing-spree were nothing more than purest fabrication. Fantasy and lies, basically. If anyone actually has gotten it right (and the truth will probably never be known) then it was only by accident – not by any great feats of journalism, investigation, facts, statistics, or deductive reasoning.

Violent video-games (in fact, just video-games generally) once again take pride-of-place as the culprit for this incident, and that’s demonstrably a load of hooey. I won’t try to tell you why Adam Lanza (or many of these other mass-shooters) did what he did, or what would have made things better – I don’t have authoritative information on that – but I can show you that video-games are not to blame.

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Gaming, Opinion

No faith in Yee

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California State Senator Leland Yee has just spent somewhere in the ballpark of a million Californian taxpayer dollars to have his bill on violent video games struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. Again.

Yee says he’s going to do it again. In fact, that would make the third time he’s heaped all of that money into a pile and metaphorically set fire to it.

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