Hashy

Honestly if you buy Metal Gear Solid 5 after:

• Konami's employee conditions
• The way Konami pulled Kojima's name/authorial ownership of the game at the first opportunity
• The fact that Konami are no longer making AAA games, so you're effectively supporting the pachislots industry.
• Kojima's DISMAL treatment of women, historically. Every MGS game, Snatcher, Policenauts. Ugh. Oh god I just remembered Quiet.
• Konami with P.T. - how long do you really think the online servers for MGS5 will last? They have really very little incentive to keep them up once the game sales slow.

I don't know what you say. Half the talent behind this game are going to be scrubbing gym showers or looking for work in 3 months.

Glad I'm not the only one seeing this. It's a real blight on a great game

edit: oh a patch just came out

@pinner458: My dude, I gave you some earnest advice, and here's some more: find some humility.

I dunno duder, with sentences like "All you need to do is look at the poster to get a sense of what you’re in for" and "The film then quickly goes from scene to scene, each more uncomfortable and creative than the last using filming techniques I’ve never experienced before and it continues to slip into a feverish pitch of visual trickery and confusion, fast cuts get quicker and quicker, literally turning into a nauseating collection of close ups intertwined with flashes of the sun, eventually having 20 cuts in the space of a second." I don't think film criticism is going to be your strong suit (and if that's your passion you should look into film/media studies, like ol' Dan Ryckert).

I give the following advice as someone that has no experience with journalism or professional writing but it's this kind of advice that applies to all creative disciplines.

There's nothing stopping you from studying 'effective writing' techniques and advanced grammar, continually seeking out and absorbing writing you admire, and becoming a good writer while studying journalism. A journalism degree alone probably isn't going to build those skills for you, which you really do need to focus on going by what you've provided, but you seem pretty young and there's an absurd amount of resources and community help available online for free. If writing is your passion, then write. Set up a blog--it doesn't really matter if nobody ever reads it--and write on a fixed schedule about things that matter to you: game reviews, current events, short stories, editorials and artices; whatever. You'll be under a lot of stress with college but just keep writing, constantly, about things that matter to you. This is how you find a voice. Ideally you'll get people to read it, even if it's just family, because judgement and criticism is vital to being any kind of creative professional.

I'd be pretty worried if you've studied journalism for 2 years and you can only dredge up 3 very short surface-level reviews as examples of your work. Writing needs to be your passion. Expressing yourself and communicating ideas need to be a super rewarding experience for you. If it's not yet, you need to find out if it's ever going to be, so write.

...and read. Read extremely good shit--inspiring shit. A lot.

Right, so concepts that you can't easily empirically measure are off limits for topics of social change? Or is it not discussion like this that is the impetus for its scientific investigation? Its a pretty new psuedo-libertarian trend that says "leave me be unless you have an objective reason to do otherwise", especially when "leave me be" means "don't criticise the things I like"

@brodehouse: You can probably stop talking about family life cycle theory since it has no relevance, or rather is completely independent, to the idea that society's values can be shaped and is undergoing continuing, inwardly-influenced growth. Your point that environmentalism is self-serving is way out there. Most of what we're doing to change the course our impact is not to reduce its effect on us, but rather future generations. The contemporary environmentalism movement has fundamentally ~humanized~ future generations and forced us to empathize with their potential struggles due to our laziness and greed--beyond the jingoism of nation building--something conspicuously lacking on a societal level until recently.

Laws against violence in society are driven in part by a desire for order and safety, but it also comes and helped to build a newly found empathy for people outside of our immediate social circle--the ever expanding sense of community that characterizes society. With any amount of cynicism you must come to the conclusion that empathy is driven by the human need for safety and order in numbers, the psychological force of "do unto others", and that society influences empathy just as empathy builds society; that we might influence it, such as with mass media.

@oldirtybearon: Your point still appears to be "catharsis is real and works" but with a new mystical twist. I'm sorry, but "violence has always been with us" doesn't excuse it. As far back as there has been society there has been organized racial genocide, and yet its hard to imagine that happening in the contemporary west, largely because we have kept in check our racial prejudices through the careful examination of media and the careful cultivation of a racially enlightened society. We've essentially built an increased, fundamental empathy for people of all races, nearly overnight in the scope of humanity or even organized society.

Of course, racism goes beyond that. It continues to pervade the lives of millions. This is why it's a really obnoxious distraction to say "we're not portraying violence badly because violent crimes have decreased" - it's like saying "racism is decreasing in direct proportion to these graphs of race hate murders".

This is fundamentally a matter of capacity for empathy and dehumanization, things that can pervade society beyond the raw numbers on crime. It has direct and obvious consequences, like flushing empathy from the mentally unwell and socially isolated. So too it has less obvious consequences--situations that call for implicit humanization of, well, humans; forgiveness of acts of war with civilian causalities, acceptance of government-funded humanitarian aid, general policies on social welfare, you name it.

This is a literally a social paradigm my dude. The argument that violence is a part of human nature is well-trodden, but so too are the following things a huge part of human nature: sexism, sexual violence, race discrimination/violence, greed-driven destruction of the environment. These are all things we've changed and are continuing to change through sculpting of social paradigms, an idea core to modern civilization, and these are the means through which we might too change our capacity to dehumanize our fellow man, for better or worse.