Happy Birthday Tetris

Happy Birthday Tetris!!!25 years ago Alexey Pazitnov created one of the most popular games ever.

I loved tetris, it's one of the first games I played on my GameBoy therefore I feel like I should dedicate to it a little bit of space on my blog.

Can we really blame games when bad things happen?

This is a common scene of violence in games, people that like this kind of game buy it and decide to view this.

This however is what mankind is really capable of and it is what Ch4 decided to show millions of people.




I haven’t posted anything for a while, I was busy with coursework deadlines but now I have plenty of time to dedicate to this blog, my personal project and obviously trying to get a placement or a summer job.

Recently I have been talking with friends about violence in games, and more specifically, about how the media seem to blame games for the actions of all those psychopaths that go around killing people in schools or generally places where normal people should feel safe.

I know I am a little bit biased being a Game Production Management student. For that exact reason I won’t write a really long post on how games do not inspire violence etc... I am just a GPM student, not an expert in sociology, psychology or in any kind of behavioural science. I can’t prove that what I think is right, and probably neither can most of the journalists and reporters that condemn games on national TV and newspapers.

However during a trip to Glasgow with some of my personal project team mates, we discussed the difference between the violence in games and real violence.
Ryan, who by the way is a very talented artist, (if you don’t believe me visit http://loakers.blogspot.com), pointed out that it is quite disturbing that people seem to think that the violence in games is so bad and nasty and makes you want to kill other people.

If you think about it violence in games is an exaggeration of reality, it’s FAKE, it is made up, no one is harmed when I shoot down a Nazi soldier or I run over a pedestrian in Liberty city. When I say it is an exaggeration of reality I really mean it, and that is the sad thing.
If you think about it even more, the news reports about war, murders and the shocking images of brutal violence around the world is REAL. Yet, games are blamed when a total idiot with mental issues breaks into a school and kills everyone.

The truth is, nowhere in a game I have ever played, and I have played some violent games, it says go and kill real people, there is no subtle message either that states go and kill all your class mates.
Even when you play GTA, if you have a little bit of commonsense and even if you are a stupid teenager that has been brought up with the slightest hint of moral education, you can understand that killing people is wrong!

Personally, I don’t think violence in games is bad. I know it is fake, I don’t find it disturbing and it doesn’t make me feel like I want to kill someone. What I find disturbing are the news reports. I think the violence the real world is capable of is really disturbing, and how much detail is given by the news about it.
I am scared about what real people do, even if it is in faraway places like Israel, Darfur, in many conflicts in Africa, all the murderers that keep coming up with new ways of slaughtering someone.
And that is all true, it is real, real people die and they don’t re-spawn 5 seconds later!

Unfortunately we do live in a violent world, we always have. I chose to show that horrifying picture at the beginning of this blog because I think that mankind doesn’t need any help...or inspiration from games to be brutally violent so, next time someone decides to kill all his or her classmates we should blame their upbringing, their education, their mental illness or simply the fact that they are humans and some are just more fucked up than most of us.

Ciao for now