Video Games Made Me Kill My Neighbors With a Spoon !

Saturday, May 03, 2008

Well, the new GTA game is out and once again all the worlds ills are being laid squarely at the feet of the big bad video game boogie man. The theory being that violent and sexual images in video games causes real world violence and sexual activity.

I'd like to address the issue of sexuality first. Sexual activity doesn't occur because someone saw it in a video game. Sexual activity occurs because it is fun. Sex is a healthy and enjoyable activity provided, as with almost any other activity in creation, one uses a little common sense. I realize common sense isn't all that common and never really has been a high priority for our species but that isn't the fault of video games. Let's be honest here, if you don't want people to have sex, ENCOURAGE them to play video games for hours and hours. Fill the time that they would normally use to develop social skills with the development of keen fragging skills.

This brings up violence. On this point they are absolutely correct. Video games do, in fact, cause real world violence. I mean, it is not like there was any real world violence before the invention of the video game, right? Oh, wait...

Jack Thomson, a man who is still practicing law despite being certifiably insane, is one of the main proponents of this rather absurd notion. He even went so far as to say that the violent individuals who perpetrated the Colombine shootings "trained" on video games, specifically DOOM. This is incredibly stupid. I have played DOOM and I have shot a gun, the skill set necessary to do each task are not the same. The are not even close. In Mr Thomson's mind, there seems to be few other causes of violence than video games. I have to admit, it would be nice if that were the case. Remove the video games and you remove violence from our society. Know what? Not gonna happen!

We are a violent species. We always have been and it appears as if we will remain so for the foreseeable future. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, hell, it's one of the things that got us to the top rung of the food chain. It is what we are good at. The trick is to channel those violent impulses into non-harmful outlets, say, playing video games.

I freely admit that some truly fucked up people have also played video games, but coincidence does not equal causality. The human mind can take anything and twist it in a dangerous way, we're special like that. This includes video games, but a psychopath playing Pong was not made that way by the video game. This assertion does a tremendous disservice to the mentally ill and society in general. By focusing on this red herring you take time and effort away from things that really might actually help us.

And lets look back to the two boys at Columbine. How were they able to get their hands on all those guns? Did the video game give them to them? How were they allowed to spend all those hours playing? I don't know about you, but I would say that that video game was guilty of being a bad parent! Oh, wait...parents?

Maybe, just maybe, it is not the job of video games and television to act as parents to our precious little snowflakes. But if not video games then who, I ask you, who is supposed to act as parents to our children? Any ideas, folks?

This is a funny transcript of Mr. Thomson being called on his idiocy by G4TV's Adam Sessler on the NPR show Talk of the Nation: http://gamepolitics.com/2008/05/01/jack-thompson-on-npr-if-you-blinked-you-missed-it/


Bwahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!




Rant Over...For Now