Op Ed

CNET Australia - Anders Breivik, video games and the militarisation of society.
Both critics and supporters of games and gaming, it seems, are unable or unwilling to address the big picture: that Western societies are undergoing a process of militarisation.

Militarisation is the social process through which societies are organised in ways that allow for the production of violence. According to the feminist writer Cynthia Enloe, militarisation describes a process through which individuals come to view militaristic ideas and military needs as being significant and the norm.

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Apr 30, 2012, 20:03
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Re: Op Ed Apr 30, 2012, 20:03
Apr 30, 2012, 20:03
 
avianflu wrote on Apr 30, 2012, 10:01:
Australia's far right political conservatism is always surprising to me. It's in the middle of nowhere strategically and no one on the planet wants anything that it has. It is not a particularly religious country. And yet they are successfully passing more and more laws restricting content in the marketplace.

Umm, people are lining up down the block for our mineral wealth, to invest in our relatively stable economy which still actually has an interest return worth talking about etc... =)

Our societal conservatism is driven from the top down in response to the loudest complainers, mostly older people trying to hang on to our conservative past. Most Australian's are apathetic about politics, and both major parties display a disturbing lent towards authoritarianism to satisfy the minority who want to legislate everything, ie. ISP level internet filtering which the government has been proposing since 2007 and still hasn't axed.

The left (Labor) are currently ruled by the right wing faction of the party which believes in big government. The right (ironically named the Liberals, in a coalition with the aptly named Nationals) are supposed to believe in small government, but are socially conservative and aren't afraid to entrench that in law. The third option, for what it's worth, are the Greens who are basically Labor coalition members.

Back on topic, I'll just repost my comment from the article:

Ummm, this sort of casual correlation is the worst kind of way to support your hypothesis. There is no attempt to explore the role of the United States/USSR arms race and cold war, the first gulf war and 911 (both prior to the advent of high realism FPS games) which have resulted in an ongoing requirement for huge global military presences. You don't address the bizarre need for Australia to try and match the US in quality (if not quantity) of military hardware (Abrams tanks, F35's etc), or to send our forces in to engagements which have zero to do with us, which would account for our ridiculous expenditure.

Further, you don't address why our armed forces numbers haven't swelled dramatically since these games came out, or why casual people (such as myself) who have played these games for years aren't gun nuts or wannabe soldiers.

Anders Breivik may well be sane, but he's not a balanced individual. He's an extremist and a terrorist. What he used those games to accomplish is a symptom of his psyche, not a result of the game making him in to a killer.

What can be stated with some degree of certainty is that violent people are attracted to violent media, including violent games. Violent media does not necessarily make violent people, and none of the wowser 'studies' presented thus far that I have perused have come close to conclusively proving this.

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