View From the Phlipside - School Shooter

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, radio, the movies and more.  I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View from the Phlipside.

The realm of video games is open to all kinds of heated debate.  For myself I think blaming video games for the troubles faced by young people today is just a quick and easy excuse that let’s over look far more serious problems like poverty and the loss of hope that weigh heavily on our kids.  But there are lines that simply shouldn’t be crossed.  There’s a new video game that doesn’t just cross that line it goes screaming across it.  The game is called School Shooter - North American Tour 2012.

Gun Free School Zone

Now I’m not particularly well versed in the video gaming technical stuff but here goes.  School Shooter is what’s called a mod, that’s an add-on to a larger established program.  In this case the larger program is the long established Half-Life 2 game.  This mod gives you the chance to pretend to be a spree killer going into a school setting heavily armed.  The goal of the game is to kill as many unarmed students as you can in 5 minutes and then kill yourself.  As repugnant as it is to say I wish I were making this up.  The mods creator has stated that this is just “entertainment” and “just a game”.

Every time I read that article I want to be sick to my stomach.

I’ll be honest my favorite arcade video game is a first person shooter.  It’s called “Silent Scope”.  It’s a sniper game.  The difference is that first I’m shooting at terrorists and second they all shoot back.  Maybe you can’t understand someone getting entertainment from a game like that.  That’s fine.  But surely we can see the difference between that and a game based on wholesale slaughter.

The good news is that the backlash came almost immediately and the web site hosting the mod has pulled it.  Along the way a great many people in the gaming world have also rejected it.  If there’s a positive to come from this maybe it will be deeper conversations about what we find amusing and what it says about us.  Somewhere between this game and the folks who want to ban anything that has the tiniest of whiff of violence is a reasonable middle ground.

There is nothing reasonable, acceptable or rational with the idea that this game is entertainment or just a game.
Call that the View From the Phlipside

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2011

View From the Phlipside - High Tech Textbooks

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, Radio, the Movies and more.  I love them and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this The View From the Phlipside.

A rare occurrence may be headed our way.  A convergence of old media and new media with new technology that may not only benefit both media industries but just might help the health of our children and generations to come.


If there was ever a dinosaur media industry that was just asking for extinction that wasn't the newspaper business it would be the textbook industry.  We're talking media technology that hasn't changed very much in over a hundred years.  I remember some of the books that I used in school had been around for years.  You'd find names of a half dozen students or more that had used the same text book year after year after year.  The world doesn't turn at that leisurely pace anymore.  When the Berlin Wall fell and took the U.S.S.R. with it shortly thereafter history books, geography books, political science books all became instantly obsolete.  And that meant an enormous expense for cash strapped school districts.  Well that may be changing in the very near future.


A group of some of the top text book publishers are working with software companies plus folks like Apple's iPad, Amazon's Kindle and netbook manufacturers to put the next generation of textbooks on high tech personal devices.  It's very forward thinking by the textbook folks who unlike TV, music and newspapers are actually paying attention to the writing on the wall.  The move isn't surprising at all for the Apple folks.  Getting their products into student hands has been one of the smartest business moves they ever made.  And the benefit to our kids health?  That's easy.  No more 40, 50 or 60 pound backpacks for kids any more.  All their textbooks on a single device.  Textbooks that can be updated just as quickly as updating software on your computer.  And eliminating the unreasonable influence that large school systems like the Texas schools have on what goes into the nation's textbooks.  The board that controls history texts in Texas recently tried a little revisionist history by eliminating folks that they didn't like. 


The really exciting part is that electronic textbooks could offer many more resources.  Built in media, search engines, glossaries and interactive quizzes would only scratch the surface.  The devices could also offer note taking functions so that everything needed could be in a single device.  The real question is what exactly this digital hand held educational system might look like.  That's why this cooperative effort among the various parties may offer the best chance of coming up with the proverbial "killer app".


After that it's just a matter of figuring out what the notebook manufacturers are going to do and what we're going to put in all these empty back packs.


Call that the View From the Phlipside.

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010