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Ban the PlayStation

A cancer on our society and economic progress must be excised. It may be an unpleasant reality, but it is also inescapable.

Ivo Vegter
By Ivo Vegter, Contributor
Johannesburg, 29 Jan 2009

Hours and hours, days and days, they sit, zombie-like, immersed in their escape from reality. Blood and gore splatters, and the more real it looks, the more they cheer. Foreigners and alien races are mercilessly hunted and killed. Environmentally unfriendly cars are first glorified, and then raced to destruction. Laws are broken, and the more you break, the more points you score. Women, scantily clad and servile, are objectified in crude and demeaning ways. The police are stereotyped as the enemy of pleasure and freedom.

Is this what we value in a free, democratic, inclusive South Africa? Is this moral regeneration?

"We commit ourselves," says the charter of the Moral Regeneration Movement, "to a sense of social responsibility by respecting the rule of law, honesty, hard work and standards of ethical decency."

Where do games that glorify violence or crime fit in?

This argument is not new, but there's an economic side to the issue that all too often is ignored.

Make the pledge

"We commit ourselves," says the charter, "to use resources efficiently and equitably to the benefit of all family and community members."

How is it efficient use of South African money to spend thousands on a mere toy, imported from abroad? How is it efficient to spend thousands more on games, written by foreigners? Does it create jobs in South Africa? Of course not.

"We commit ourselves," we moral regenerators like to say, "to oppose greed, selfishness and undue self-enrichment at all times."

Is refusing to create local jobs not selfish?

Worse, is it not greedy of the most productive of our society (ie, those who can afford R6 000 toys and thousands of rands more in games) to fritter away time, as scarce a resource as there ever was, in front of a glaring big-screen TV, disturbing neighbours with the sounds of war and destruction, and depriving the community of their productive work?

If the most productive don't work, how will the rest of us ever get jobs? If they don't earn the money, where will our social services money come from?

Obscene

Yet the argument gets even stronger than this. The reason for giving Xboxen an easier ride is that Microsoft advertises... wait, scratch that. The reason is that Xbox software updates aren't as obscenely big as those forced on PlayStation owners by the yeller slant-eyes - sorry, must have got that expression from some racist game; see what it does? I'd quote the moral regeneration charter, but it is no secret what it says about abusive labels and derogatory language.

Every second week, before Sony allows you to continue playing the games you bought, it expects you to download patches that sometimes exceed the entire monthly quota of an average Internet access package sold in South Africa.

Ivo Vegter, ITWeb contributor

Every second week, before Sony allows you to continue playing the games you bought, it expects you to download patches that sometimes exceed the entire monthly quota of an average Internet access package sold in South Africa.

That means hours and hours of inactivity on the part of those potentially productive peers of ours, which only gives them more opportunity for drinking. And we know what people who drink do to the rights of the most vulnerable, and the caregivers in our society.

Hundreds and hundreds of megabytes of data, which the selfish rich casually download across their elitist broadband connections, grumbling only about how much it inconveniences *them*. Is this not bandwidth that can better be used for education, or telemedicine? Or eco-friendly telecommuting?

Moreover, basic economics teaches us that increased demand, even if enforced by low-skilled coders in foreign sweatshops, causes prices to increase.

So the high cost of telecommunication, which our former president and honourable communications minister so valiantly fought against, is perpetuated by these asocial ingrates. Imagine if all the scarce bandwidth they suck up is instead redistributed to those who really need it?

So, therefore, we should ban the PlayStation. Down with PlayStation, down! Viva moral regeneration, viva!

Second prize is to get telcos to give them away for free as a loss leader, but that's a column for another day.

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