Videogames Made Me a Criminal!
A national British newspaper is bribing criminals to attribute blame for their actions on video games. Offering "hundreds of pounds to the right person," they are soliciting people to "Write a few lines about how computer games turned you to crime and if it’s something we like, we’ll call you straight back."

Unfortunately, the ad was taken out last week, so it is not an April Fool's joke. Bruce On Games had the scoop.

In the spirit of April Fool's Day, I thought I'd offer my own story. Hopefully they'll get a bajillion of these:


VIDEO GAME MADE ME THE "TRAMPOLINE BANDIT"
I found the arcade game "Mappy" in a pizza restaurant in Maryland. The game appeared innocent and cute - as a mouse police officer, you'd chase criminal cats around a house filled with trampolines, stopping them from stealing tons of expensive electronics equipment and artwork as you and they bounced from floor to floor.

But the thing was - you were a mouse chasing cats. What's wrong with this picture? Inevitably, the cats would catch you, and your career as mouse-cop would come to an end. The cats always won in the end. After hours of playing the game, it all became clear to me. The cops were mice, chumps that always lost. The bad guys were the predators, and always won in the end.

After spending hours and hours trying to beat the second level of the game, something snapped. I couldn't distinguish reality from the lurid fantasy of the game, so great were its graphics and compellingly realistic my actions. The game trained me, over the hours, to look for things worth stealing, teaching me lessons from the cats' actions.

The next thing I know, I found myself at a sporting goods store, buying one of those exercise trampolines. I told myself hat it was just for exercise, but even then I knew subconsciously that there was no reason anybody to have an exercise trampoline except to commit trampoline-crimes. I'll tell you straight up, these devices, like videogames, should be banned outright. Don't fall for the "trampolines don't steal stereos, people steal stereos" crap the trampoline-industry-funded lobby groups try to use as smokescreen for the real issues.

It wasn't a week later that I found myself inside an apartment in my own neighborhood when the owners were gone, jumping on the trampoline and stealing all of their paintings, TVs, and stereos. I admit, it was a little harder to do than I had been taught by the videogame, but the seeds had been planted. After I got away with the apartment, I found myself breaking in and jumping and robbing two other houses, and finally a department store.

It was the department store that ended my life of crime. I thought it was a terrible mistake, but in the end I call myself fortunate I was stopped when I did. It was too hard to jump to the second floor in a single jump, but since they had several of the exercise trampolines in stock, I assembled them on-site and arranged them carefully on the non-running escalator steps using stacks of catalogs to level them out. I tried to jump back down the line of trampolines while carrying a Sony Betamax player (this was the early 80's, after all), when one of the stacks of catalogs collapsed, sending me flying off the tramp over the side of the escalator, landing on a cosmetics cabinet. Neither the cabinet not the betamax survived the ordeal, and I broke my leg and lost consciousness due to the overwhelming oder caused by spilled contents of six broken perfume bottles.

When I came to, I was surrounded by paramedics and police officers. I realized then that the police officers didn't resemble mice at all, and I'd been living a lie. During the next two years in juvenile detention, I wasn't allowed to play videogames. The habit was broken, and the smell of perfume finally faded. I have no doubt in my mind that the creators of this videogame purposely built it to warp young minds to cause crime and mayhem.

I have now served my time and my community to make up for my misdeeds. I only wish these video game creators could be forced to do the same...

Labels: Politics, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:51 AM (Permalink)