Violence, yes, games made me do it

Like religion, violent video games are no more, or no less likely to turn someone into a killer. The realism in games has improved greatly, but it doesn't take Einstein to see that on screen graphics are not to the point of complete realism, they still require some mind power and imagination to transcript what's on screen into real life, although granted, graphics have come a long way and even game play, language etc. It can be the simplest thing, the merest coincidence that can be the catalyst or trigger for a killer, to go from being benign to malignant. I've been playing violent video games, amongst others, for years and years, I've had one speeding fine, that's it. Use parent's discretion, by all means, bring your kids up well, decide when and if they should have access to certain things, but for the love of all that's still holy, pollies need to just calm down, just because the good ol' US is having a moral dilemma every day, doesn't mean the rest of the world needs to follow. War in Iraq, or war on pixels?

Excellent, that covers everything, religion, war, politics and racism, now, where's my axe and list of people that have upset me?

Paul

Age

I love the criteria in that 'story wanted' thing:
Application criteria: Males & Females aged 0 to 60 from UK
Ages start at 0, so if you are say 4 you can tell you how your life of crime started with games.
And why is there no lower limit yet there is an upper limit? Wasn't there a law against age discrimination anyway in the UK?
You see what happened there? the games made them engage in the crime of age discrimination.

History Repeating Itself

This isn't very unlike what happened to Comic Books in the US back in the 1950s. A bright young doctor was doing psychiatric evaluations of juvenile criminals and when he asked the kids what kind of books they liked to read, the vast majority of them answered that they read "Comic Books." Low and behold, the reason why juveniles became criminals was because of those darned comic books! Thus said doctor went to Congress, made a big hooplah about Comic Books being bad for children, it was all just practice for the McCarthy trials really, and as a result, the CCA was formed (Comics Code Authority) and nothing really changed except there was a list of things Comic Books couldn't have in their stories and a stamp of approval on the top of the issues which didn't mean anything really because publishers would sometimes go to print without the approval anyway.

Odds are the same thing is going to happen here in the States and over across the pond. After all this is said and done, the ESRB is actually going to have to do its job and consult with video game publishers to make sure their "content" isn't too "influential" as to have some poor sap get depressed and/or aggressive and go on a shooting spree at some school somewhere.

As a note to those not familiar with whats going on over in the US. Kids already can't buy any video games here from a store if it has an ESRB rating of, I believe, T or higher without an adult doing the job of an adult, and buying it for them. After all, don't you think it would be so much easier of the parent didn't have to actually be a parent and regulate what gets into the hands of their children?

-Joe