British paper paying for game violence stories

I've already spun a tale about how I uncovered ancient relics of a forgotten age and used them to kill god. Think they'll believe me? I'm a god killer now.....

you english people make me sick

Pathetic.

You offer people an excuse for their poor behavior and they will always take it.

Yeah, video games cause cancer too - sure. Can I have some money now too?

And someone paid like 6 million dollars for a picture of Angelina Jolie's baby.

Diagnosis: People are sleazy bastards.

And this is why I get my news from http://news.bbc.co.uk rather than the horribly biased and hyperbole laden newspapers.

Again... this is the Daily Mail. I can't imagine that many thinking people taking that paper seriously.

GTA 3 made me rob a store, then rob a store again when I played it.

Sadly you need to pay for a membership. Sucks.

More like Daily Rag. amirite?

Prime Minister Jim Hacker: "I know exactly who reads the papers: The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by people who actually do run the country; The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; The Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is."
Sir Humphrey: "Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?"
Bernard Woolley: "Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits."

To be clear, this is not necessarily the Daily Mail making this offer. We don't know what paper is making the offer, as you'd know if you read the post. The picture was just to illustrate the checkbook journalism issues involved.

All the London tabloids are garbage. And most of the "quality" newspapers are filled with filler, football, celeb gossip, or middle class outrage. It's a joke. Journalism is a joke in this country.

Yet, some members of the public eat this stuff up. It's a wonderful distraction for them. Sigh.

I really hope the internet kills of some of these relics.

Think they'll give me any money for my story of the "Battletoads Incident"?

Banhammer please...

I'll send them a story about how Trauma Center allowed me to perform an emergency appendectomy on someone. Hundreds of pounds = thousands of dollars.

I had written a satirical response to this casting before submitting the story to Joystiq.

You can read it here:
http://rivaldi22.deviantart.com/art/Confessions-OfAn-AssaultJumper-81700239

Actually I do have a story for whoever these guys are. I've said before but a kid at my school years back stole used to say he was going to steal some cars "like in GTA". Not a major killing story but hey if I'll pay for a few DS games...

Have to hunt around for this paper now.

ok i work for an irish newspaper and i've decided to take on the role of video games journo in order to provide a gamer's perspective on um, games. everyday of the week i see how insanely cut-throat this industry is and that scare mongering seems to be the sole tactic employed by editors. currently there is little or no feedback from readers regarding my articles because they may not conform to the sales-through-fear business model which newspapers adopt. I'm sure that if i wrote an article lambasting the effects of interactive violence on our youth today then i'd probably get a major response. to stoop to this level for personal gain is, in my opinion, immoral and a serious abuse of publicity and propaganda. I'm not sure whether people realise how much of an impact trashy mainstream journalism actually has on the masses. it provides the radio with content and often raises the main topics of conversation amongst ignorant people who have nothing to say. that's a hell of a lot of people.
but i'm going to stand my corner! wait, our corner!
check out some of my stuff at http://jasoncoomey.blogspot.com/
actually this posting has given me a renewed incentive to update my blog more regularly. thanks.

SURPRISE! THE DAILY MAIL!

As this page was loading I was there saying "Gee, I wonder who it is." Page loaded, Daily Mail pic. I laughed, pretty loudly.

The paper is a load of shit, don't listen to a word of this middle-class, scaremongering toilet paper replacement, it has the journalistic integrity of Fox News.

I play video games, and after reading this post, I killed my soul. Does that count?

For the non English audience I'd like to clarify that The Daily Mail is a shit heap of a news paper with a reputation for pandering to middle England conservatives, reactionaries, racists and pig headed twat bandits. Nothing they say or do should be taken seriously by anyone.

I'm going to sell them a story about how I was turned to a life of fatally jumping on tortoises by that wicked, wicked Mario game.

And then I'll tell them about my crime spree that involved my childhood paper route and people's windows, all thanks to a video game.

And then I'll explain how I turned to a life of crime when exposed to a rousing, violent game of "Risk" -- The board game that turned me into a killer!!!

In time the vial non-gamers will all die off (maybe with a helping hand from someone) and we gamers can finally play in peace.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article3663097.ece

Not violence, but stupidity.

My rebuttal:
I must confess, I was incensed upon reading this article: ignorance of this scale must not go unchallenged. Hopefully, articles like this will open the eyes of many people that believe anything a broadsheet publishes is stone-cold fact.

Video games are a form of entertainment, just like books, movies and TV. They are something people of all ages enjoy in THEIR free time. The reason, of course, Mr Whittell does not pass judgement on other such media is because his target audience, the people he believes will read this, are not generally 'video gamers'; so basically, that gives him a green-light to talk about how much better life was before the internet came along.

Mr Whittell, when you put something on the internet, you should expect it to be scrutinized by a wider spectrum of people than the (generally) pretentious, pseudo-intelligent folk that buy The Times. A hobby is subjective: one person may get more out of a particular auxiliary activity than the next person. Can you be objective about the benefits of one hobby over another? Perhaps, but with little legitimacy - creativity cannot be quantified, and I assure you that much of my creativity was sparked by imaginative video games.

Mr Whittell’s diaphanous diatribe takes a ‘holier than thou’ attitude, yet offers no solutions. When I get home at 7pm after a hard day at work, feet sore and head aching, do I really want to put my climbing boots on and scale the nearest rock face at midnight? No, or course not, so what would he suggest? Something constructive? Like learning a language, or a new skill? Mr Whittell obviously doesn’t work hard enough - when I get home, I’m drained and take no issue with sitting down, putting my feet up and socialising with friends in a video game. Far better than glued to the Television passively watching a soap opera, surely?

Moderation is the key. Video games are this generations scapegoat; an excuse for bad parenting, a trait Mr Whittell seems to portray. Your narrow-mindedness will only slow the development of your children in this increasingly digital world. In 20 years time, people will look back at this article and laugh. And so they should. A “colossal waste of time”? You get what you give; perhaps Mr Whittell needs to explore this new world a little deeper before he so definitively casts it aside. He may even have fun.

Damn why dont they do that over here,....ID SOOOOO TELL EM THE TRUE GAMER STORYS if they payed me...
After that,id use that money and BUY GTA now LOL.
If anyone asks,i did those things inspired by the game,but motivated by the news.

Damn Daily Fascist!! I hate them so much. Best thing to come out of them was the free Flight of the Navigator DVD two weeks ago. Compliance!

And what I find funniest about this is that no one, and I mean ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY no one, who reads the Daily Mail has even the remotest clue about video games at all.
The Daily Mail's demographic is strictly Conservative, middle-class, 40-retirement aged, jingoistic, xenophobes.
The closest any of them would ever have gotten to a video game was either playing pong in the 80s or Wii Sports in their retirement home. Seriously I'd swear this was an April Fool if wasn't for the fact that I'm subjected to this rag every bloody day due to my work, and so get the pleasure of reading this sort of shit 5 days a week.

Pretty typical Daily Mail bollocks.

However, I do hope they are successful in finding plenty of reprobates claiming their criminal conviction was as a result of playing a videogame, as it's actually a breach of UK media laws to pay a criminal for his story that resulted in a conviction. Maybe the Mail will learn to STFU when the fines start rolling in.