The voice of the movies trailers will never be the same again.

RIP
Don LaFontaine.
Sept 1 2008.
King of the Movie Trailers
VOg

Is it bad to look?

I may not have the saavy appeal of David Beckham nor his reputation but I can relate to how a guy would be in his shoes.

Married but still being male. Can't remove our intuition to at least glance.

Video games gets another blame for social problems in society

Sorry, but I refuse to believe that video games can be the scapegoat for all of our problems. Call me a video game apologist or just another gamer hack, but it's true. Why should the video game industry be blamed for the problems all of humanity faces?

According to reports, Thailand has halted the sale of Grand Theft Auto 4 after a teenage boy confessed to robbing and murdering a taxi driver in an attempt to recreate a scene from the game.

"We are sending out requests today to outlets and shops to pull the games off their shelves and we will replace them with other games," Sakchai Chotikachinda, sales and marketing director of New Era Interactive Media, told Reuters.

Always one to jump on the bandwagon, Reuters found an anti-video game hack to tell us all that it's only going to get worse, but we also should watch out for those GTAIV-wannabes.

"This time-bomb has already exploded and the situation could get worse," Ladda Thangsupachai, director of the ministry's Cultural Surveillance Centre, told Reuters. "Today it is a cab driver, but tomorrow it could be a video game shop owner."

Millions of copies of GTAIV have been sold around the world and when one crazed kid decides he wants to rob and kill a taxi driver, we need to stop selling the title for fear of more disturbed people resorting to violence? That doesn't make sense.

Sorry, but I fail to understand how a video game showing pixelated violence is somehow worse than a movie showing even worse violence. I know, I know, "it's the participatory element you're forgetting." Uh, no.

The fact of the matter is this: more than 99 percent of individuals playing video games don't kill people, don't want to reenact what they see in a video game, and don't perform these kinds of acts. Sure, it may be difficult for the average anti-gamer to fully comprehend when they don't hear the other side of the story, but it's true: video games are not the root of all evil and they shouldn't be the scapegoat when people try to make them evil.

This is just another case of an obviously disturbed person acting out in a way that doesn't fall in line with the norm. So he blamed it on GTAIV. Are we now supposed to believe that the video game is telling kids to go out and kill taxi drivers?

A dog told the Son of Sam to kill people. Should we start killing off every dog we see for fear that dogs are sending us subliminal messages telling us to kill other people?

It doesn't make any sense.

It's easy to blame video games when we don't want to blame ourselves, but it needs to stop. This person obviously suffers from some unique problems that the vast majority of gamers simply don't. I played violent video games all my life. You don't see me running out and finding the nearest taxi driver to kill, do you?

Each and every individual is different and there's no telling what might set them off. Sometimes it's a cheating wife, other times it's a dog, and still other times it's a video game. Until we start eliminating every cheating wife and dog in the world, I don't think we should eliminate violent video games.

Instead, let's try for some common sense.

By CNET editor - Don Reisinger

People fall short when thinking about reality sometimes.

VG Cats + Pokemon

http://www.vgcats.com/super/?strip_id=0

If you have played Pokemon for the first few minutes of a new game, that is enough to see this.

Slashbot - Guitar Hero Robot

Playing multiplayer on Expert, the robot finished "My Name is Jonas" with 97% accuracy. Vinny, the human challenger, finished with 96% but had a higher final score.

Left side: Slashbot
Right side: Vinny

SlashBot is the Electrical Engineering senior design project at Texas A&M. The system plays Guitar Hero by analyzing the video signal.
http://slashbot.wordpress.com/

Stress Reliever

A pair of Harvard researchers say violent video games don’t turn children into killers. In their two-year study, they found that there was no data to support any causation between games and real-life violence.

Video games don’t turn children into blood-thirsty killers – Harvard research

So boys (and girls)... play at least one console or one pc game [and have fun doing so].

"A danger sign for boys is not playing video games at all, because it looks like for this generation, video games are a measure of social competence."
-Kutner and Olsen.

Intelligence hurts

Intelligence, it turns out, is a high-priced option. It takes more upkeep, burns more fuel and is slow off the starting line because it depends on learning — a gradual process — instead of instinct. Plenty of other species are able to learn, and one of the things they’ve apparently learned is when to stop.

The Cost of Smarts

Is this the reason why I have so much white hair on my head? I think too much...