Ever since GTA took the world by storm, plenty of teenagers have drawn some pretty unbelievable criminal inspiration from it. Juvenile crime has clearly been giving the authorities a headache in recent years, and last month Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health put it on its list of dangerous goods. -_-!
The list of the 10 most dangerous games:
- GTA (Grand Theft Auto)
- Man Hunt (Manhunt)
- Scarface
- 50 Cent - Bulletproof
- 300
- The Godfather
- Killer 7
- Resident Evil 4
- God of War
- Hitman
So it seems that in some people’s eyes, playing crime games means you’re highly likely to go out and commit crimes.
Only a few days after I read those reports about Thailand banning GTA, I came across another report saying the exact opposite. According to a recent story in the Ottawa Times Weekly, an 11-year-old GTA4 player helped her family escape a car explosion in a crash — and she says the know-how came from playing GTA4.
When the Jeep carrying the five members of the Norris family was in a crash on the highway, it spun out of control, hit the guardrail and rolled over four times before it finally came to a stop. The vehicle was badly wrecked, and the Norris couple in the front seats were seriously injured in the impact. Their 11-year-old daughter, Audrey Plique, bravely climbed out of the window and helped her parents and siblings escape the car, which could have exploded at any moment… Afterwards she told reporters that her bravery and clearheadedness were thanks to Grand Theft Auto.
“She knew exactly what to do, from playing Grand Theft Auto,” Plique’s mother, Karen Norris, told reporters. “She’d seen (in the game) cars crash and roll over and then explode, so she knew exactly what danger we were facing.”
This almost unbelievable story was quickly picked up and reported by major US media outlets. Clearly, while the Grand Theft Auto series is easily tied to all kinds of crime, it can also awaken heroic qualities in an 11-year-old girl.
Of course, it’s not hard to imagine that many staunch opponents of violent video games would still rather believe in the vicious-circle theory that “violent games create violent teenagers who breed violent crime.” But at least this time, Plique’s heroism can remind us that, used well, video games can benefit us too.
-— http://cn.gamers.com/_news/forwardShowNewsArticle.php?newsid=6394
See? No matter what kind of game it is, if you can learn a lot from it, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. These games are a double-edged sword. In real life, those who mean well take the good and leave the bad; those who mean ill, being of unsound mind, get led astray. The key lies in the individual, not the game. An outright ban doesn’t seem very meaningful to me — why not guide people properly instead?
Playing GTA is more like watching a big-budget cops-and-robbers movie; there’s no need to copy the protagonist and go commit crimes.