Headline Oct6,2012 /

''HELL'' AND ''SATAN'' 

THROUGH THE HISTORY OF MICROPROCESSOR!

Nobody quiet knows which will reach the stores first this approaching Holiday season: the new warning labels designed to advise shoppers of how much violence and human degradation new computer games contain or the most-violent-and-degradation-rich wave of games in the history of the microprocessor.

The warning labels have been conceived by the software industry, primarily as a way to keep the US Senate off its back. Marketers can voluntarily complete a questionnaire about a game they want to sell. That is ''Does the Title depict blood and gore of sentient beings!'' and in return receive a little warning sticker to plaster on the package. If a game delivers noteworthy violence,for example, the sticker will show a lit cherry bomb alongside a thermometer depicting a number from one to four.A four denotes ''wanton or gratuitous violence, torture and rape.''

Say what you want about the effects of dramatized brutality and the outcry to label it, I suggest that society's inescapable parade of fun-house slaughter may be harmless to those of us who see irony in the phrase: ''Plus ca change, plus c,est le meme chose.''

Doom II: Hell on earth follows Doom, a graphically rich 3-D shooting gallery that attracted over 7 million players worldwide within a year of its release.In Doom, you fled through a Demon-infested Martian labyrinth, killing anyone that moved, including other players, who could be linked in through modem or network. Doom 11 delivers a similar structured bloodbath but shifts the scene to an Earth overrun by demons, such as the Revenant.

In Take-2 Interactive Software's more simply named Hell, ..you are placed in Washington D.C. in the year 2095, after the Government has convinced everyone that it controls the gates of Hell. Rather than cowering in your home, ignoring the society's problems, you for some reason resolve to rectify the situation by personally visiting the underworld. Merit Software's Harvester isn't explicitly about Hell but was promoted as a ''graphically violent experience in terror.'' It was the brainchild of Gilbert Austin, a Texas Game Designer with a cult like following who publicly decries efforts to label media violence.

In Harvester you come across a Skull and Spinal Chord neatly draped across the bedspread of your fiancee. Naturally, you investigate by entering the creepy local town lodge, descending into its squalid bowels to battle assortment of atrocious freaks.

Should this stuff be labeled? Probably. Labels now reveal a how much of what they contain. And then when you plan a gift,and if that happens to be a computer game that celebrates gruesome dismemberment....?
On the other hand, we all know that games don.t hurt anybody. Miserable, Criminal, Atrocious Freaks Do!

Many thanks to !WOW! 

Good Night and God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless