Violent games on the OLPC Activities page

[Ties Stuij]

On Jan 17, 2008 6:37 PM, Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net> wrote:
>
> > What's wrong with erring on the safe side with a controversial topic
> > like video game violence in a learning setting like the OLPC project.
>
> That doesn't solve anything.  It just pushes the decision point down the
> scale a bit.
>
> Instead of arguing whether something is "violent", we'll be arguing about
> weather it's "violent enough" to be controversial.

Just to keep on beating that dead horse:

As was mentioned earlier in this thread, there are always gliding
scales. The solution is not to just forget about them and just allow
everything to keep things simple. To clarify my sentence above, I
don't think the topic of violence in a learning setting is so
controversial. There are little learning packages I know of that
situate themselves in a post-apocalyptic setting with as goal to
murder as many henchmen of Satan as possible. And it's not so
controversial politically, or socially. The only groups who would
endorse a game like this that i can think of would be the arms lobby
and some extreme Christian sects.

I don't want to generalize but amongst a number of nay-sayers I sense
a strong cencorship fear, while I just see a pragmatic decision to not
include war material in an education project. This is the default
attitude in the educational world methinks. While on the other hand
the chance of a wave of gripping cencorship amongst the XO activities
seems pretty slim to me.

Still the strongest point to be concidered should be if a certain
class of children might not react well to it. How do vague conceptions
about freedom stack up against that?

So to me this is a no-brainer. But then again, one might argue that
one shouldn't confuse a developer-wiki with an educational package.
And then you would have me beat!

Btw, great game, Doom. Ah the memories.. especially on the later
levels when you got the hang of strafing and would comfortably slalom
around the fireballs of whole armies of those doom imps.

/Ties