Original “Long” thread on my old forums
So everyone has pretty much carried the link to the new york post story on how evil Take Two Interactive is and how they are forcing children to kill people. For those of you that don't read slashdot or penny arcade here is the link.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/12292003/business/14640.htm
First lets start with saying this is completely idiotic. People are stupid and gullible. I am not going to deny that, but to think that people have such a low concept of reality so that because they sit in front of a video game for a few hours that is going to cause them to go out and kill people is dumb. It is a new age version of “The Superman Syndrome” where it was largly reported that the original Superman television show was causing kids to jump out their window thinking they can fly. To date ZERO reported cases of kids jumping out of windows with capes on after watching that show.
That in itself is one rant and it is a huge one that is being pushed by almost all gamers out there, but there is a second rant that I would like to put here.
Penny arcade attempted to counteract this blantant bad press to gamers, but having a charity event for a Children's Hospital in Washington. The hospital was there because that is where they are. As a result they ask people to purchase gaming items from an amazon.com wishlist and the items would then be delivered to the hospital for xmas. All in all people donated over $200,000 worth of items and just plan money to the cause. Here is a quote of what happened (pardon and language):
Penny-Arcade wrote:
The first time the news dumbshits came out to talk about Child's Play, though they were clearly told who was responsible for it they excised one of the people behind it. I consider this a fairly minor issue, but they're still retarded. When they came to the Children's Hospital itself for the toy delivery, there was no reporter even down there with us. A cameraman got some footage and then (I believe) ran away. I thought I heard him say “Ghosts!”, but that's neither here nor there. When this footage was aired, I learned something new: that the toys had been donated by a local catholic school, and were valued at nearly a thousand dollars. Understand this. A single bin of GBA SPs was worth four thousand dollars, and we had four such bins. That's above and beyond the seventy GameCubes the other twenty carts of toys, which at our best estimates come to around $175,000. Then there was a check for twenty-seven thousand.
I myself gave them some cash, and I am rather pissed that it wasn't even reported correctly and so the point was completely missed by these bad news hungry propagandist. They aren't reporters. Reporters report facts and events, not shit they conjour up like these two news items.