Superchunk: Yes, I did. I saw one kid rip a good-sized chunk of hair and scalp off another kid's head. I saw two bloody noses one day, and shortly thereafter, their friends came back to "settle things." Luckily, the police were still around - and confiscated baseball bats, mostly, but also a can of Mace and a small pocketknife. And that was just the Street Fighter/Mortal Kombat fanboys - I'm not even counting the boyfriend/girlfriend fights, the "you're a cheap player" fights, the "you looked at me the wrong way" fights, and the fights that just didn't have a purpose in the first place. Humans are violent little primates.
To tell the truth, years later, I worked as a bouncer at a strip club, and I never saw the kind of customer-fighting that I did at the arcade. See what I'm getting at here? Kids fighting over whose video game is better can be more dangerous than an entire bar full of drunken bikers and naked women. Yeah, really. (Which is too bad, in a way - at the bar, at least I was allowed to crack some skulls. If I tried that at the arcade, the police would've been carting me away, too.)
If you don't believe me, just look at how tempers flare on here when someone starts in with the "PS3 sucks," or "wii is teh fail" nonsense. Now imagine that there isn't a computer separating people, but they're actually standing close enough to smell each others' breath when they're throwing insults at each others' systems of choice. If this wasn't the internet, this place would be a constant brawl.
Now, I'm not the kind of roughneck I used to be. I grew up, went to school, got a real job. And while I won't say anything so trite as "violence never solves anything," I will say that violence never wins an argument. Wins fights, sure - if you can call the person taken in the cop car instead of the ambulance the winner - but never wins an argument. Especially any argument that can't be won in the first place, and therefore never needs to be argued in the first place.
I know a lot of you guys have never been in a fight. Maybe a schoolyard scrap here and there, but never a real fight-for-your-life kind of brawl where people are trying to gouge out your eyeballs and break your hands and choke the life out of you. How can I tell? Because those of you who really contribute the most to those childish arguments are far too confrontational, too willing to insult, too ready to get personal, to have ever actually fought for their lives. I'm not saying that you should have to fight for your lives... just that I wish you folks could understand what that sort of hate-breeding leads to.
Like I said, I went to law school, and sometime in the next year or so, I'll finally be working at a DA's office. I'll be prosecuting criminal cases. I'm already in the courts now, but soon I'll be the trial attorney who gets to put people into prison for decades at a time. It's a heavy responsibility, and one that I take real seriously. And the last thing I ever want to see on my schedule is a trial for a kid that beat up some other kid just because he said he liked the XBox360... largely because everyone at work knows that I'm a big video gamer, too. (See, I'm not getting all mushy here. It's purely selfish, I assure you.)
-Darque
