
A Short History of Game Panics - acdanger
http://reason.com/archives/2014/05/07/a-short-history-of-game-panics
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Einstalbert
A tale as old as time. Or as old as generational gaps. I can't wait for the
next one involving virtual realities. Is YOUR child lost to an imaginary
world, stuck in his or her Oculus Rift? Here's a bunch of unsubstantiated
hyperbole to catch your attention.

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notdonspaulding
> A tale as old as time. Or as old as generational gaps.

Are you claiming that moral standards of the "younger generation" in this gap
haven't really declined as people in the "older generation" thought they
would?

Or are you saying that the moral standards have declined, but it's no big
deal, just the changing of the times?

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JoshTriplett
Most people inclined to mass concern about "moral standards" are hypocritical:
anything introduced in their generation that the previous generation didn't
understand was just fine, but anything introduced in a subsequent generation
that _they_ don't understand isn't. Or, more bluntly: their moral standards
are fine, it's everyone else that's wrong, both older and younger.

~~~
notdonspaulding
It's disingenuous, or maybe just naive, to think that a generation who has
been on the earth 20 years longer than you doesn't understand what's going on
in your generation.

Sometimes I think Hacker News doesn't take a long enough view of history. My
grandparents went to war in Europe. They saw and did things that shamed and
haunted them when they came home. They were emotionally disconnected and
stunted as they raised their children, my parents. My parent's generation,
consequently, decided in the 60's that sexuality should be liberated, in the
70's that everyone should experiment with drugs, in the 80's that money and
wealth were the most important priority, in the 90's that integrity was an
outdated notion.

In my generation, meanwhile, we've concluded that morality itself has run its
course and that we should be tolerant of everything except intolerance, that
faith and morality are all fine and well as long they're held privately, and
that taboos are the only taboo.

I asked my wife's grandparents what the biggest change is between now and the
time of war that they lived through. Their answer? Community. There is no I've
got your back, you get mine mentality really left in our nation.

I think the point they were making is that if our generation were faced with
the same question as theirs (Another sovereign nation is exterminating a race
and seeks world domination, what should we do?), we'd be paralyzed by a lack
of community. There would be no banding together, considering the price of
losing hundreds of thousands of lives, and deciding to pay that price because
it's the right thing to do.

Call that hypocritical if you like. I'll just take it as well-placed
criticism, because I've outlived my "everyone older than me is stoopid"
mentality.

EDIT: My point about taking a longer view of history is that all of these
changes have taken place over a span of maybe 80 years. That's short enough
that people have lived long enough to see it all happen. When older people
complain about changing morals, they aren't necessarily going senile.

~~~
fixermark
> I think the point they were making is that if our generation were faced with
> the same question as theirs (Another sovereign nation is exterminating a
> race and seeks world domination, what should we do?), we'd be paralyzed by a
> lack of community.

World War II was running for two years prior to the involvement of the United
States. The US passed a series of Neutrality Acts to keep out of the war. In
the years prior to 1941, the president actually deployed US naval assets in
the European theater as resource carriers in arguable contradiction of the
desire of Congress to stay out of the situation entirely. U.S. domestic
opinion on involvement in the European-Asian war was very divided until Pearl
Harbor.

A United States that got up and fought against world domination under its own
initiative without the prompting of Pearl Harbor is very revisionist history.

And if I may editorialize... I don't think that the sense of community that
your wife's grandparents remember was a "natural" state that we've "lost." I
think it was a side-effect of national galvanization under a war effort, and
it is not without its negatives (keep an eye out for an "us vs. them"
mentality that can make it hard to accept perceived past enemies as equal
people).

There are a lot of advantages to that sense of community; I'd like to hope we
can build it anew without the need for bloody global conflict as a trigger.

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tempestn
The online poker one at the end is particularly hypocritical. Some of the
greatest opponents of online gambling are those who have a financial stake in
offline gambling. I wonder what their motivations might be.

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theorique
You mean the city governments of Atlantic City and Las Vegas are _not_ just
concerned about people becoming problem gamblers in their own homes, and being
isolated and not able to get help?

Next, you'll be telling me that they would prefer those people visit casinos
in their respective cities ... _pssht_ ...

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mutor
Single page format: [http://reason.com/archives/2014/05/07/a-short-history-of-
gam...](http://reason.com/archives/2014/05/07/a-short-history-of-game-
panics/print)

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biff
I enjoyed the article, but I'm not entirely convinced online gambling can be
so easily lumped into the moral panic category with the rest. Unless it's
gotten to the point where the games are tightly regulated for fairness and
controlled for access to make sure only adults are playing.

On the other hand, I guess video game items having real world value already
allows young adults to test these waters somewhat. Just seems that when actual
money is involved you're moving beyond simply playing a video game. Or I'm old
and panicking morally.

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joe_the_user
Oh, they meant moral panics over games. I'm against that too but it's boring.

What I'd really be interested in would be a history of in-game panics across
MMORPGs and similar things. That would be interesting since it involves humans
interacting in a novel fashion in contrast to the predictable politic garbage
around dogs showing for the dog-whistle issues.

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pyrocat
That article just kind of... ended.

~~~
logfromblammo
Also, the author was aimlessly wandering for quite some time before finding
the save point. I wonder if there was a boss fight afterward.

