No, you don't get "points" for driving drunk in Grand Theft Auto IV (via). Driving drunk in the game isn't necessary, helpful or even fun, but the more serious problem with this claim is that you don't get points for anything in GTAIV. Like most modern games, it eschews the concept of overall point-scoring altogether.
Neither does GTAIV have "levels", for that matter, but I'm sure some child-protector out there is very worried about the "drunk driving level". Points, levels and the sound track from the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man (which celebrates its twenty-seventh birthday this year!) are still commonplace... but only in the depictions of video games in movies and TV shows.
The problem all of the people who're worried about GTAIV have, of course, is that they have not read Excerpts from The Alarmist's Guide to GTAIV (do not miss the second page).
(Both pages NSFW, unless you work somewhere where people have a sense of humour.)
Video games are getting more and more realistic, and some of their creators are using that realism to make more and more confrontingly believable interactive depictions of violence, horror and depravity.
While this is happening, though, actual rates of violence among children in every First World nation I know of continue to slowly fall.
That doesn't make for much of a headline, of course. Much better to claim that when some kid does buck the trend and shoot up his school, it must have been Wolfenstein 3D and Redneck Rampage that made him do it.
10 May 2008 at 10:04 pm
Of course the violence always comes from video games these days; it can't possibly have been paper-based role playing games, toy guns, Playboy magazines, or the gosh-darned EVIL comic books. All of course, have been previous targets of the moral crusaders.
Oddly, TV never gets a mention, either reality TV (including the utterly horrific NEWS programmes broadcast uncensored at dinnertime!) or fictional TV (Mighty-Morphin Power Rangers never, ever use violence to solve, no, wait...)
Nor do books: "Aaaaww, bless, little Timmy isn't playing those violent games anymore! He's into reading lots of stuff by someone called Heinlein and 'Slaughterhouse Five'"
Not to mention a certain famous and alledged completely true book that contains something in the vicinity of 60 million (!) deaths, most of them gruesome ones like being chopped apart alive, stoned to death, killed by meteors or turned into pillars of salt!