ALAN TITCHMARSH AND FRIENDS RAGE ABOUT THAT WHICH THEY DO NOT KNOW
This is like us going berserk over Dutch Elm Disease being allowed to rampage unchecked throughout the UK in the 60s and 70s, then going on television and trying to blame it all on Judy Finnigan.
Madness.
Link taken from RPS. And we thought Alan was such a nice man.
filed in OFF THE INTERNET on Mar.22, 2010
March 22nd, 2010 on 10:02 pm
I feel terrible for Tim Ingham, watching that. He did a commendable job defending games in that, but nobody in the studio was listening. The audience just wanted a villain to point fingers at, and unfortunately, that was gaming in this instance.
March 22nd, 2010 on 10:03 pm
My friend made a game. It’s good: http://templeweed.co.uk/julie.swf
March 22nd, 2010 on 10:07 pm
Just to make this seem even more legit, it’s worth noting the supposed expert Julie Peasgood [1] actually did the voice acting for forgettable violent horror game Martian Gothic [2].
She also wrote a horrific sex tips book (including sections such as “Meat and Greet” and “Holby Clitty” [3]), but that’s neither here nor there.
[1] http://www.juliepeasgood.com/acting.shtml
[2] http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=239985
[3] http://www.juliepeasgood.com/bookextracts/book01.htm
March 22nd, 2010 on 10:12 pm
Listen to that C&VG guy pretend not to like killing pretend people in videogames (though in the context I understand why).
Don’t know about anyone else, but I very much enjoy killing non-existent digital people. It’s quite thrilling. Just the same as I enjoy watching actors get shot to bits in a John Woo film. I don’t feel like I should be ashamed of this. It’s not real, you silly twats!
The amount of violence I’ve seen in films and games should, by that woman’s logic, have turned me into a mass murderer. I’ve had one fight in my entire life when I was 14 and I didn’t even start it. I’m the kind of person that feels sick when they accidentally see surgery on TV as I’m flicking through the channels.
I’m sorry about the long and boring rant, but this lazy demonisation of games really pisses me off.
March 22nd, 2010 on 10:57 pm
This is actually good progress, real people need to be put off games!
Normal people need to be told that games are not mainstream and that they are only for creepy psycho weirdos. It’s the only way to stop games like Gardening Hero from being produced.
March 22nd, 2010 on 11:28 pm
Would, by surprise while he was admiring my geraniums.
March 22nd, 2010 on 11:46 pm
That bloody woman used to be on telly advertising peas because her name is Julie Peasgood. She has now written a book on sex tips claiming, ‘Semen contains only 5 to 15 calories per ejaculation, and about 60% of our recommended daily intake of vitamin C’. So thanks for your opinion Julie Jizzgood! As for you Tittymarsh, stick your comments up your Azaleas!
March 23rd, 2010 on 12:03 am
The first computer game I played was called ‘thru the wall’ and it was like arkanoid. After perhaps twenty minutes of play time, I wandered outside, forgetting that my parents had forbidden me to do this, and walked until I found a building site. There was a wrecking ball hanging from a crane. I commandeered the crane and drove it back home. Once outside the house, I set the ball swinging. Bricks rained down on my poor mother and father, crushing them quickly, but not so quickly that I missed the horrified expressions on their bloodied faces.
Next came an asteroid blasting game on my friend’s Vectrex. After only five minutes of this I was desperate to replicate the experience. I fashioned myself a triangular ‘craft’ out of cardboard, stocked it with as many bowling balls as I could steal and took my position in the middle of the ice rink. I was ejected, but only after I ran out of bowling balls.
When I grew up, I discovered that the later versions of Call of Duty offered a graphical experience very similar to that I might expect in a real war. Hearing the bullets and shells fly past my head was thrilling. The scenarios appeared realistic – as if they’d been well put together through careful research and re-imagining. After only three hours of play, I found myself desperately hating war and slightly depressed. I felt better after I had Kelvin MacKenzie killed, though.
March 23rd, 2010 on 12:05 am
I love this news flash, ‘Ignorant Gits Applaud Double Standard, Human looks on in despair’. They seem to love pointing out that 18 rates games are not suitable for 8 year olds over and over while celebrating that someone spent money proving that fact with biased research, which only focused on the negative aspects of gaming’s influence on people. I also like how they assume games are getting more violent (something that is obviously not happening in films), guess they were too busy inhaling their own jizz to play Carmageddon.
March 23rd, 2010 on 12:36 am
I’d like to see Titchmarsh do a piece on, Gardening – It’s promotion of hatred, violence and sexism.
Hatred: because he promotes the segregation and destruction of ‘weeds’ which is also a derogatory term.
Violence: because he uses various pesticides to kill real, living insects, and
Sexism: for the segregation of male and female plant parts or forcing them to germinate against their will.
Oh, and gardening is addictive too, he can’t get enough of it – the monster!
March 23rd, 2010 on 1:28 am
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March 23rd, 2010 on 1:40 am
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March 23rd, 2010 on 1:44 am
That Tim fellow stood his ground like a true champion of the light.
If Charlie Brooker (from Madness fame) is recording another series of his Screenwipe programme or even the games one, he really needs to do a bit on it.
He seems to have seen it according to this lark:
http://twitter.com/charltonbrooker
March 23rd, 2010 on 9:44 am
That’s not a debate, that’s a public lynching. Has a definite Daily Mail feel to it too. I particularly like how when they spouted ‘facts’ (i.e. handily biased statistics, exaggerations, half-truths or out-and-out lies) they were accepted as 100% gospel truth, but when he countered with a fact of his own he was obviously wrong, mistaken or a dirty filthy liar.
I’ll also say well done to Tim, as you could tell he was getting fed up with it, but I think he succesfully proved games don’t make you violent by not smashing their faces in, something I doubt I (and I suspect many others) would have been able to resist. Mind you, I’ve not watched it all yet, for all I know he could go postal with a railgun before the end.
After the very first question to him I think I would have just walked out, they had their minds up from the start and they were just there to demonise every video game in existence because that’s what they were being paid to do. Reminds me of the Palin/Cleese/Muggeridge/Bishop of Southwark/Life of Brian TV debate in fact. Only slightly less balanced, it being 3 against one in this case.
Would’ve been interesting if they’d had Ant and Dec there to defend the wii and casual gaming, or Peter “Captain of the bullshit tanker” Molyneux to rave about all the wonderful new technological advances he’s making, but that possibly wouldn’t have been as easy a target as 1 lone journalist, no matter how well researched he was. After all, Tim’s obviously some incompetant manchild who needs to grow up, stop playing these horrible games and get a proper job. Working for the Daily Mail. On their video games review page no doubt.
I’m torn now, stuck between congratulating Tim for keeping it together and damning him for giving them a target – should’ve just said no to appearing on the show and let them bicker amongst themselves.
And as Supersonicjim above has mentioned Charlie Brooker, I feel obliged to mention a caption on one of the pictures from his review of Unreal, (many) years ago in PC Zone – there was a picture of some large garden area in the game (with big gun in foreground, naturally) and the caption was along the lines of “One of Epic’s new multiplayer modes: ‘Where’s that bastard Titchmarsh hiding?'”
Sponge finge – Was this the game? I can see how you went downhill so badly. Should’ve had a C64 ;)
In short, Ban this sick filth now!
March 23rd, 2010 on 10:17 am
Oh yeah, I had no idea who this Kelvin Mackenzie bloke was til now. had to look him up on wiki, what a horrible slimy turd of a man he is.
March 23rd, 2010 on 10:32 am
Giger: I read up until “editor of the The Sun” before judging the man and closing the page.
Everyone: I am outraged by the fact that Alan Titchmarsh has a talk show. Gardeners should not have talk shows. In fact, gardeners should not be on TV, they should be gardening in silence away from cameras. Who the fuck wants to watch people garden?
I lost track of what I was saying there, but essentially, that was painful to watch.
March 23rd, 2010 on 12:29 pm
Yes, hard to watch. Substantial minus points for everyone involved except your bloke who tried not to sound too much like he wanted to harm everyone.
What’s mainly wrong with kids these days, insofar as there IS anything wrong instead of the whole thing being cooked up by the media, is that many of them have parents like that horrible fucking dick of a woman. Parents who are perfectly happy to spout unfounded claptrap fed to them by tabloids and right-wing American “News” networks, brooking no argument from anyone because they’ve learned, despite their “horror” at what they’ve been told games contain, that there are apparenly no social penalties for going around being an ignorant, self obssessed total shit and shouting down anyone who doesn’t agree with their (recieved) views. Our societies problem (insofar as etc) is that these fuckwitts children, as they grow up, naturally oppose everything that their gobshite parents stand for, which is fair enough but not always productive) and then, MUCH WORSE, as they leave their youth behind they actually BECOME LIKE their parents.
Society is a collection of individuals. It’s easy to forget this. Unfortunately, as I look around me, I come to the conclusion that we’re all up shit creek and the paddle hasn’t been invented.
March 24th, 2010 on 12:11 am
Funny how no-one ever takes on board it is up for parents to learn about games because that would actually mean parents took some responsibility for their actions.
And what bollocks about there being no reward for watching violent films. If you’re rooting for the good guy and the bad guy dies, that’s your reward.
March 24th, 2010 on 2:05 am
This has been an on going problem for the last few decades and it isn’t about video games at all. What it IS about is the lack of parenting on the part of the adults. Children need guidance. You can’t give your children random entertainment and think it won’t change his or her behavior.
Parents NEED to take responsibility for their lack of care for their children. If you allow bad behaviors to flourish without any regulation then its YOUR fault not the entertainment industry.
March 29th, 2010 on 8:18 pm
(I write this having watched only this one video, only once.)
I wish America had shows like this. This is something I miss about Britain. Evening / late-night talk shows for adults that have big studio audiences and have civil discussions among different types of persons about all kinds of topics, without going the Oprah tear-jerker appeal-only-to-women route.
It does seem a bit canned in the sense that, while the ‘pro-game’ guest addresses the points brought up by the other three in the conversation, they have little to say about the ratings and absolutely NOTHING to say about parental involvement.
One thing dawned on me while I was watching this: I wish that, for once, one of these shows would arrange for an extended interview—really a teaching session—with one or more government persons, or at least well informed lawyer specialists, versed in the status quo of the law on these things. Imagine if, in the U.S., a Constitutional scholar or a federal judge or something like that were given a chance to explain to the audience WHY the present legal state of the limits and freedom of this form of speech are as they are, and how it actually makes sense, so that laymen would focus their attention appropriately. (I realize there are differences between countries: e.g., in the U.K. it’s legal to restrict the sale of the game on the basis of age, whereas in the U.S. it’s not. But the same principle, of informing the public about the legal reasoning behind the actual laws, still applies.)
Also, I know it’s hard in such a discussion to remember everything you want to say or should say; but I wish the gamer guy had brought up the difference between correlation and causation.
Finally, the facts that that the guy on the right (visually) repeatedly used the word “war-gamer” seemingly to mean “someone who plays video games”, and that the host at least once talked about video games as something you “watch”, could be taken as indicating that, at a fundamental level, these people don’t actually know what they’re talking about. They’re not familiar with the subjects they’ve decided to discuss. … Of course, that criticism goes only so far. Unfamiliarity with jargon doesn’t mean you’re completely ignorant of a subject.