Good article but you seemed it completely misunderstand why baptismal forgiveness is important to the evolution of DeWitt into Comstock as well as its main critique. The unconditional forgiveness that Christianity offers is exactly what Levine is criticizing. DeWitt had huge regrets and baggage from his path, and instead of doing the right thing (which would have been to live with his regrets as a responsible person, and to face the consequences during the final scene) he caves into the baptism and becomes Comstock. Comstock at this point truly believes he is forgiven for his sins by the baptism, which later leads his to believe he can be justified in his sins. He sees his sins as necessary to spread his religion and gods forgiveness to everyone. This ties into the other horrendius idea from Christianity of everyone being inherently sinful and destined for hell. The idea of baptismal forgiveness is a false solution to a real problem, and it caused Comstock to be ridden of his guilt and to believe he has to bring this forgiveness to everyone.
If Booker can massacre innocents and then truly believe he is completely forgiven for his actions the entire concept of right and wrong is thrown out the window. If unconditional forgiveness is permitted, then all actions are permitted if Gods forgiveness extends to everyone. The pastor seems intent of blindfolding himself to this critique and its a shame he did not understand the plethora of arguments against Christianity from the game.
If you are dumb enough to believe in the bible I guess you would be dumb enough to ask for a refund for such a crazy reason. I cant believe Valve bent over for this fool.
They have done a horrible job with Spartan ops. Tremendously bad story and writing. Terrible pacing, recycled content. Lazy and a disappointment through and through.
@TomMcShea @gungrave45 Then there is no discussion to be had. If you know this to be true, there is no good reason to punish people for selling these games or making them in the first place.
Another classic McShea article. Its as if he goes out of his way to be wrong and take these masochistic positions. If video games influenced people to be more violent, even on a microscopic level, there would be an explosion of violent crime by youth that we simply do not see today. Considering the amount of people that play these games, it is unimaginable that they are creating any kind of problems relating to their actions. Only the opposite has been scientifically proven to be true. Anybody who says otherwise is a masochist, and begs to have culpability or is simply trying to point the blame at someone else.
Extremely lazy sayings like 'reflecting on ourselves' or 'examining our medium' are superfluous attempts for this journalist to try and grasp at straws to prove he is looking for a moral high ground. The industry has been constantly examining itself for decades, and the results have come in. Game violence does not even remotely translate into real world violence, in fact, the opposite is more likely the case. It is a pathetic attempt to ignore the real cause of these shootings, which is in fact, the mentally disturbed not getting the help they need, violent angry people and the easily accessible variety of guns these people can buy, and the media's constant coverage of these shootings that create anti hero's out of the shooters.
These are things, especially the latter, that have been researched and have consistently shown to be problems. But alas, then the video games get off scot free! We need a scapegoat for goodness sake or we could risk losing the popular vote! We already have the ESRB and ratings systems for parents, and enforcing them legally would only punish innocent people. A simple building block on the path to censorship and the dumbing down of free expression.
In the name of the enlightenment someone needs to pay for McShea to attend in a university and get a degree so he can come back to write meaningful articles for gamespot instead of this dribble.
You can sum up this article with one sentence. 'Paying for stuff costs money and I want money'. If xbox live was not a worthwhile service to charge for then people would never pay for it. And you can bet that Sony regrets not charging for online since day 1. On top of that, the reason why Sony's online infrastructure is vastly inferior to Microsoft's is because they don't have the money to invest back into their service. As long as Microsoft continues to update and support live, i have to problem paying 60$ a year.
It is also a massive failure to assume that if Microsoft did not charge money things would be the same. Live would be vastly inferior if this happened.
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