If you take the title of this thread, and apply Paul’s Ambiguity Filter™ you will see that there is more than one way to read this.
• It would seem that Parliament is going to discuss the violence in a game entitled Modern Warfare.
• It would also seem that activities in Afghanistan are going to become more relentless and bloody and that Parliament will be instrumental in this change of direction.
Once, like me, you have failed to attach a singular meaning to the thread’s title, you have to question whether our elected representatives have a clue about any of this. On one hand, they have been sanctioning violence and excessive bloodletting for many years (longer than WWII now, folks) which will have caused injury and carnage to other human beings. On the other, it seems that there is much hand-wringing about the depiction of military operations in a computer game where the
depiction of carnage is done using what I can only describe as
digital puppets.
On the other hand, the BBC and other news outlets show the aftermath of genuine carnage — both from natural disasters and from various conflict zones around the world. The difference here is that what is shown is selective:
1 - You won’t see people actually being killed (this being down to taste and decency) though I have seen reports where they have got very, very close to pressing the stop button.
2 - You won’t see the after effects of the actions of the good guys. It’s only the other side that gets it’s grim handiwork on TV. This is called propaganda, and they are all at it.
Of course, the BBC gets criticised for its approach at times, but they know they have to toe the line when it comes to certain subject lest they have their access to key figures revoked. So we are caught in a tangled web of half-truths, deception and selective editing designed to illicit support for what is going on.
Let’s take Grand Theft Auto - a game which encourages the player to take on criminal activities? That was also raised in Parliament, and I would say that maybe this game should be more questionable than Modern warfare, simply because of the criminal activities portrayed and encouraged. I like these games, BTW, and while I have not got the current version, I’ll be getting it soon now that it is on the Platinum label (me = cheapskate). I may even buy MW just to make a point. I dunno yet - I’m not a huge fan of 1st person shooters.
Before we move on, and while we are on the subject of Grand Theft Auto, aren’t we forgetting the hidden sex scenes in some versions of the game? Remember the absolute fuss created over all of that? Lordy - a bit of digital rumpy-pumpy and every gets more outraged than Victorian with a What the Butler Saw machine. This shows us that we, as a society, are far more tolerant about the depiction of excessive violence than we are in the depiction of sex, despite what Mr Vaz would have us believe.
