WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT RIGHT NOW?

I liked the towns of Crystal Chronicles a little more than the dungeons. I felt like it was an interesting world that could've been really fleshed out if they actually put thought into it. (Seriously, Tida is all corrupted but the rest of the world isn't? I call shenanigans). I garnered a large amount of entertainment from just making a bunch of useless placeholder characters to sit in the wagon and build my town up, all the while coming up with little relationships and dramas between them as they spend their trek out in the wilds together.

My favorite dungeon would probably be the Mines. My favorite music track would be all of them.

I just discovered the game Sands of Destruction has an anime! How many anime series Are THERE ANYWAY?

Either way, I think I'll watch it!

*starts watching*

Morte's awesome as usual... Oh god, Kyrie's even more of a dork than in the game! Oh, goodness...

Edit: Well, the storyline's different... as well as everyone's voices...

I can't believe someone still see games in such a way. :\
Ofc games affects children, but no more than smooth wind affects trees. Games can change your mood, but they can't turn an innocent soul to a vicious murderer. There is no maniacs who became such 'cause of games. They've becamse maniacs because of bad environment, bad parenting, people's cruelty or stuff like this. Games, books and movies can't change people so much, you're either violent or not.

We don't let them play such a games because they should know it's not something appropriate for a children. But I don't mind children playing them secretly. Every kid does that. Hell, I was such a kid. My childhood was full of movies and games with blood and boobies in it. And it was cool. :D
It would've been bad thing if it was appropriate, if my mother and all other people wouldn't care about me doing this. Because then it's not a little sin you'd like to take secretly just for fun, it's a natural thing and totally ok.
Just to put it even more clearly - it's not so bad for a kids to look at such stuff, it's bad when they only see this stuff and nothing else. That's why parents should be a "light of purity" in kid's life. Not because there should be only this light in their life, but because only their parents can be this light with all this dark stuff aroung. Balance and stuff. Erm. Get it? :)

I don't wholly agree with Mirror, and here's why.

Children and other mentally immature people may be unable to tell the difference between killing a person in a game and killing them in real life. Often kids are unable to dissociate the two, which is why you see kids try and jump off roofs to fly like Superman. Eventually most people grow out of this, and at any rate this is often due to poor parenting and a lack of proper discussion concerning reality and media.

However, there's almost something to be said about misinforming your audience, and this can be just as dangerous. While most of us know killing is wrong and can tell the difference between reality and fiction, there are more subtle examples that influence us much more frequently, and can be just as dangerous. Sometimes people may not think to critically analyze a piece of media, and when that happens they may take a piece of information presented to them as true - even in a work of fiction.

A harmless example is someone watching an action flick and thinking that cops have to "keep people on the line to trace a call", something that hasn't been relevant for decades, but is added to movies to build suspense. This actually happens, but for the most part its harmless and irrelevant to people's lives anyway.

A dangerous example is something like Queer Eye, which, while in some ways it broadened acceptance of homosexuality, it also supported stereotypes that gay men are more fashion-focused than straight men. Now, anyone who bothers to spend a minute thinking about it should realize that you can't jump to that conclusion, but when you make a show like that you run the dangerous risk of teaching viewers things that aren't true.

A final and even more obvious example would be the whole Call of Juarez racism thing in which a game told pretty blatant lies about the drug wars, but presented them as fact - and if you're an average American who knows nothing about the drug wars, why would you think to question it?

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Art and media can influence people, even if it's not to kill. I'm not saying to censor yourself, but to be aware of the messages your are sending your players through your games.

slashphoenix, this is all so wrong. Well, maybe a kid with really low IQ will believe in every thing he saw in some game, but it applies to everything, not only games. Some people are just can't think for themselves. I, personally, have played SO MUCH games with killing, racism, killing, sexism and killing againt that I can't count. Yet, I ain't racist, sexist nor a killer. Same goes for my friends, who've played same games with me. So, where's all this huge destructive influence of those games?

I once played cool spot(tm) and to this day I still think I'm a small red circle wearing sunglasses because I was unable to tell that from reality

my impressionable young mind, laid low by gaming media

Yes, this does apply to any kind of media or art - books, movies, TV, games, and music - just like it does to real life.

No one's saying that you or any single person is absolutely going to be so easily influenced, but it does happen. Like I said, while it's really rare that people can't tell between reality & fiction when it comes to killing, it's not so rare when it comes to subtler stereotypes about certain cultures. The less ridiculous it seems, the more easily it can be believed.

http://www.kff.org/entmedia/loader.cfm?url=/commonspot/security/getfile.cfm&PageID=14516

"Worrying about appearance or weight, crying or whining, and weakness are all things both girls and boys say they associate more with female characters on television than male characters. Playing sports and wanting to be kissed or have sex, on the other hand, are more often thought of in association with male characters than female."


It's really not okay to represent women as nothing more than simpering housewives and emotional wrecks or blacks as nothing more than loudmouth gangsters. Yes, there are some dumb people who actually believe stereotypes (hint: everyone) and to an extent those stereotypes are at least copied in the media, if not supported by it.

I'm thinking about this odd convergence of timing... Just a few hours ago I happened to be reading about this topic.

Do violent video games cause people to murder in real life? I don't think so. I don't think they CAUSE it. Are they RELATED? Sure. The same desires fuel both fake-murder and real-murder; desire for power, for supremacy, for apex masculinity. Obviously it's better to have fake-murder than real-murder, but that misses out on an important issue, which is that there are ways for people to be absolute pieces of shit without actually killing people. Maybe video games don't cause real-life violence. Do they factor into harassment, or misogyny, or rape threats? Does the culture that thrives on the victory of the strong over the weak - of the badass motherfucker over the pussy faggot - REALLY have nothing to do with these things? When people are saying things like "sexism is integral to the fighting game community", or physically threatening people who criticize their culture, or taking films like Red Dawn and Olympus Has Fallen to heart...is this completely unrelated to the violent media that these cultures are centering around?

From here, somewhat of a long read. Not entirely my views on the matter, but fairly close and food for thought besides that.

I am also weeping over the fact I have to rip the seams off 11 yards of fabric. That's 33 feet, which converts to a lot of OTL.

Well, after discovering my love for potstickers at a Vietnamese restaurant, I tried making some boxed ones at home.

I failed miserably.

The insides were cooked, but the outside was soft and squishy and a lot like cooked pasta instead of the crunchy yumminess they were supposed to be. They also fell apart when I removed them from the pan. :(

Perhaps I should try the OTHER method the back of the box suggested...

Edit: Oh god, I think I'm gonna throw up... So there IS such a thing as too much curiosity... I wish I hadn't wondered what that word meant and looked it up... Ugh...