Connecticut town holds drive to collect and destroy violent video games

Will there be a town drive to get parents to be good parents and not blame video games, movies, or music for their kids' behaviour?

Link:

(edit: I forgot to post the link to the article)

This is an awesome idea! I have a ton of old "violent" games on my shelf ill never play again. I'd love to get some gift cards and take these people's money :P

If the cards are for any reasonable retailer I bet you can turn them into brand new video games too!

</sarcasm>

Sigh @ dingleberries

Can the gift certificates be used to buy even more violent video games?

I mean, what are these gift certificates for? Might it be worthwhile to clear my local Gamestop out of its selection of $2 XBox 1 and PS2 games nobody wants based on the hope that the people running this thing wouldn't know their Manhunt from their Barbie's Horse Adventure and as such I'm getting $5 gift certificates for garbage that cost me next to nothing? Cos Southington is not that far away!

Also, if I just record some footage from cable news, will they accept that?

So many questions, so few answers!

You know what I really find odd about those things? The burning.
So ok, you are a racists, a religious fanatic, clueless or just plain intolerant. But what is it with the burning of crosses, Qurans, music CDs and other stuff? Because for me it's really difficult to take someone seriously who thinks a pyre is the tool of choice to prove the supposed superiority of the kindler's point of view.

It's designed to catch your attention, in the way that "yeah, we threw that shit away in a dumpster" does not.

It also creates a frenzied dance of sweating, writhing bodies bowing down to the God of Flame.

I'll be in my bunk.

I like how the "board of education" is involved. Obviously composed of a number of very learned and well read members.

How many copies of the Left Behind game can you fit on a mid-sized pyre?

Not nearly enough.

Just as the "Beatle burnings" increased sales of their records after Lennon's "we're bigger than jesus" comment, I assume violent video game sales should increase

My mom took away my copy of Night Trap after she saw a news segment about it. I was pissed.

I had all those games. My mom also took my D&D dice and sent me to Baptist Youth Group when she found them in my school bag.

I spend all my free time now playing D&D and Call of Duty so screw you, Mom!!!!

But...Mazes and Monsters! Don't end up like Tom Hanks.

When I was a teenager, my mother threatened to to take away some of my CDs because she saw on scary local news that certain bands/genres were influencing kids into using drugs and becoming criminals. I was savvy enough to ask if she would let me listen to her Beatles records instead. When she smiled and said yes, I reminded her that The White Album was cited as an influence by a well-known mass murderer.

She never bothered me about my music again.

My mom once asked me about my heavy metal records during the media hysteria over backwards Judas Priest lyrics or whatever, and I showed her the lyrics to the song "Master of Puppets," which, for the non-Metallica folks in the audience, is about the horrors of drug addiction. While she didn't become an overnight metal fan, I think she realized that the media frenzy was not especially useful to parents.

That kid in the white bowl hat and his hands in his pockets is fucking pissed.

When I was a kid I went on some mission trips with my church youth group. On one our Youth Minister caught me listening to popular music (I want to say U2 or Van Halen or something like that) and took it away. I was maybe 13 or 14 years old. When we got back home, he gave me a copy of some ludicrous book about how Satan was ruling the airwaves and corrupting today's youth through his rock and role music. It had an index with a bunch of band names, each with a hilariously off base summation of their music and typical fire and brimstone language. I remember being particularly amused by one diagram that showed orbiting satellites with little devil horns on them.

The guy wanted me to read the book and write him a report on how I was endangering myself by listening to that music. I thumbed through it for a few seconds, laughed in his face, and said "No." So he went to my mom to get her to make me do it. She thumbed through the book for a few seconds, laughed in his face, and said "No."

You know, I really love my mom.

.....satellites with horns?

The first thing that flashed into my mind was a re-enactment of our soldiers burning piles of Korans in Afghanistan. Except this time it's passing nerds becoming violently incensed when they see copies of Planescape: Torment and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri on the pyre. Those officials better be prepared for a slap fight followed by rioting (resembling enormous bearded man-babies kicking and screaming on the floor.)

You Americans all have awesome childhood anecdotes - I had nothing of the sort. I remember leafing through my parents explicit edition of 1001 Nights as a teenager before finding out that just next to their Tolkien, they had Denmark's very first legal pornography, which they kept in their library for purely historical reasons.

Here's my first set of games with helpful hints on who gets it in these murder simulators.

My grandma always freaked out when we told her we played D&D.

Huh, I've listened to that song hundreds of times but never really paid attention to the lyrics. I always thought it was about fascism or something.

Growing up Catholic was great, because the Legion Of Decency were kind enough to make a list of condemned movies that I wasn't supposed to watch, so whenever I was stuck for a movie at the videostore I'd pick one from the list. You know, such gateways to immorality as The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, Breathless, 8 1/2, From Russia With Love, Dawn Of The Dead, The Outlaw Josey Wales, M, Rififi, etc. etc.

How about everything about this just dies in a fire.

Oh wait

I wasn't allowed watch the Simpsons when it first came out. Then my aunt and mother had a word with my father along the lines of, "Have you seen an episode? Sit down and watch an episode." We were allowed watch the Simpsons after that.

I don't know how what to make of these plentiful anecdotes. I kind of think of this whole "You can't have Led Zep or D&D dice" stuff as being the bad luck of that one kid at every school who has the mom from Carrie but it kind of seems like more people than that?

Thank god my parents were intelligent, took me to grown up movies and realized Rock and Roll was just updated swing music with guitars to the fore.

There is probably some human-historical background to it. A number of ancient languages (I'm talking super-ancient 4000 years ago language like Hittite, Sumerian, proto-Hebrew era shit) had words like "sacrifice" that appear to have been cognates/loanwords/homophonic of other words like "destroy" and "burn in a fire". The notion in my significantly amateur view is that before shredders and atomizing ray guns* there was no way to completely give something over to destruction except by immolation. I mean what else was there, throw it in the sea? toss it off a cliff? So burning something seems to be almost a universal human ritual to indicate that something is completely destroyed; not just the item but even the symbol/idea itself.

*wishful thinking

You should read Blood Meridian.

My catholic high school principal banned D&D from the strategic games club.

So they played Rifts.

Much better.

My Catholic high school gave us our own room at lunch time to play Magic: The Gathering. We were the only group in the entire school that was allowed in a class room unsupervised at lunch.

Won't burning CDs release A LOT of toxic gases? The north east is pretty strict on emissions since a great deal of the crap from the rest of the country ends up here. (It must be worse in the Canadian Maritimes) What I can't wait for is these dipshits to get an epic fine from the state / Feds.

(Re-read the blurb... It mentioned incineration, probably in a town incinerator - so a little better, but still not so good.)

I used to read D&D books as a kid. One day, the lunch lady saw me reading one of them with a group of friends, ran over, snatched it out of my hands, and in front of the entire packed cafeteria, pointed her finger at me and shouted "ARE YORE PARENTS SATANISTS, BOY?!?!" That was a fun experience. Certainly helped to make me a popular kid in that conservative christian backwater!

I WAS HAVING SEX WITH GIRLS *sunglasses*

Gross.

Is that word that appears in your avatar just a coincidence? I think not.

You. do. NOT. get to burn Freedom Force, you *monster*.

Holy shit, I'd forgotten about Freedom Force. Now I'm gonna have to dig up my ugh crap it's probably in Florida.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/8880/

3.99 euro, dunno about your shitty currency. Still worth it.

Dude, you have no Freedom Force.