No, Pat Robertson, Killing Someone in a Video Game Isn’t a Sin
"I've never played a video game." -- Pat Robertson, age 83
In the latest round of “Person Says Dumb Thing About Video Games,” Pat Robertson claimed that committing a sin like murder in a game is analogous to committing one in real life. He also admitted to never having played a video game, so he’s clearly the foremost authority on video game ethics.
Robertson said on his show, “If you’re murdering somebody in cyberspace in a sense, you’re performing the act whether you like it or not.”
Here’s the clip:
Nothing you do in video games is analogous to real life. Being great at Dr. Mario doesn’t make me a doctor, and I assure you: I am great at Dr. Mario. The fact that I stayed up late last night to kill a bunch of bandits in a dungeon in Skyrim doesn’t make me a murderer. (They attacked me first. I acted in self-defense. No jury would convict me!)
Opinions on sin aside, I’m saying this as someone who doesn’t particularly like violent video games. Not because I think it’s wrong to digitally kill digital people, but because it doesn’t seem fun to me. There’s a difference between killing someone in a game and killing someone in real life, and any reasonably sane person can see that difference.
Pat Robertson, apparently, can not.
(via Mediaite, image via Daniel Oines)
- Survey finds 60% of people see correlation between video games and violence
- That doesn’t give guns a free pass to let video games take all the blame
- Obama ordered the CDC to examine the link between games and violence
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