The reason I know about 'Tomb Raider' is from when I was researching 'Elephant.' It was 1999, and I was trying to research the Columbine-massacre kids, and they had played video games, and I, at the time, had never really seen one. It was a world I didn't know.
It's sad when 'Grand Theft Auto' has more consequences for criminal behavior than real life.
I think it would be impossible to make a movie about video games if there wasn't some violence that we know from video games.
Films are pushing envelopes in terms of what is horrific, but also on other areas: in video games, in comic books and outside life.
I'm very careful about how I portray violence in my films. I do believe that violence, especially violent video games, are not a good thing for young kids.
When it kind of went to 'Street Fighter', where you had to push 13 buttons with all 13 of your fingers and ripped the spine out of somebody, you know, violent games lost the women. Complexity lost the casual gamer.
Why are video games so violent? The ones I've seen remind me of the 4th of July, with everything exploding, buildings, cars, airplanes, men and women. Kill, kill, and kill for sport and entertainment.
I've made plenty of violent games in my life. I play violent games. They don't affect people in the way that a lot of people think they do. They just don't. It's demonstrably true that they don't, and anybody who thinks they do is just not thinking.
Pop culture, it's crazy. There's all this violence in video games. In 'Call of Duty,' people are literally just blowing other people up. Hey, let's protect your country from your couch while eating your sandwich.
The more children see of violence, the more numb they are to the deadly consequences of violence. Now, video games like 'Mortal Kombat,' 'Killer Instinct,' and 'Doom,' the very game played obsessively by the two young men who ended so many lives in Littleton, make our children more active participants in simulated violence.
Never played a video game. Actually, I try to keep them out of my house.
Congress should fund research on the effects that violent video games have on young minds... We don't benefit from ignorance. We don't benefit from not knowing the science.
Video games are bad for you? That's what they said about rock-n-roll.
There are so many games where you fight aliens or zombies, and they have very high-fidelity graphics, but they don't ask the question of why the events are happening.
Up until now, the biggest question in society about video games has been what to do about violent games. But it's almost like society in general considers video games to be something of a nuisance, that they want to toss into the garbage can.
Occasionally, especially on video games and with a lot of the fighting stuff, to get what you feel is the proper sound, you have to imitate what you're doing, and occasionally I've gotten carried away and kicked over mic stands or punched things.
There exists in this country, sadly, a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows violence against its own people through vicious and violent video games.
It's something that I am going over in my head about the whole video game thing, and whether you support violence by being in a film like this. I mean, to me, it's incredibly unreal and it's all about the action, and just explosions.
As for the claim that drone 'pilots' are not engaged in the extinguishing of human life via video games, the military's own term for its drone kills - 'bug splat,' which happens to be the name of a children's video game - and other evidence negates that.
'Grand Theft Auto', in its deification of antisocial behavior, is where I heap the most of my scorn.
I think where the criticism of videogames come from is where videogames are just Xeroxes of films, and when you get a film adaptation of that game, you've just Xeroxed something twice. I think that's where a lot of the criticism comes from - there are ultra-violent games that are already based on a million films.
If you play a game like 'Grand Theft Auto' you don't go home afterwards and cry because you ran over a couple characters, because you do not give them personhood.
