By Tim Colwill on August 6, 2012 at 5:23 pm
Turns out you don’t actually need to know anything about video games at all to be Police Commissioner in NSW, as Andrew Scipione demonstrated today when he claimed that violent video games were to blame for a rise in knife crime rates.
Mr. Scipione lambasted video games in which “you get rewarded for killing people, raping women, stealing money from prostitutes, driving cars crashing and killing people”, and suggested that “That’s not going to affect the vast majority but it’s only got to affect one or two and what have you got? You’ve got some potentially really disturbed young person out there who’s got access to weapons like knives or is good with the fist, can go out there and almost live that life now in the streets of modern Australia.”
Naturally, Mr. Scipione quickly found himself the target of people who actually know things about video games, including Dr. Ferguson from the University of Texas who described Mr. Scipione’s claims as “irresponsible”, and said that “in fact, in most countries youth violence has reached 40-year lows during the video game epoch”. The statement is backed up by Australia’s own Institute of Criminology studies which show car theft dropping by 60 percent and homicide dropping by 25 percent over the last decade.
As IGN’s Luke Reilly pointed out, “No video game that rewarded players for raping women would ever pass through the Australian Classification Board in a million years,” leading this reporter to wonder exactly whether Mr. Scipione has actually ever seen a video game being played in his life at all.
Source: GON Forums
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