Video games are evil

[nadinbrzezinski]

95. Because mine craft has zero guns (ok the laser mining laser could be seen as one)

And the games you are thinking about are rated mature, 17 and older, and if the Kidd-os have them, blame the adult. No, grand theft auto is not meant for twelve year olds, I don't care what people think, and the industry agrees. It is rated M.

I have seen this with my own eyes...

Sir this is rated M, not appropriate for a thirteen year old. (After parent asked what M means).

Parent still gets it, ''cause you know, it's only a game." Also, most of the gaming market is increasingly focused on adults. The average age of gamers is not, unlike common believe, 14, but 36.

That is why.

The industry has already done the responsible thing, it has a good rating system. It's like blaming the movie industry for parents taking young kids to adult movies.

The ESRB is easy as pie to find, and better to use it to consume this media like you consume movies. After all, this media is a tool for storytelling. But in many ways blame the parents in this case.

As I said, it's the easy answer, and sadly one that has almost zero science to it. The few studies, and there are very few, that have found any kind of link...are regularly critiqued, not by gamers, by scientists, for lousy methodology.

The people pushing the games are bad have found exactly one murder that might even be related to gaming... I don't know about you, but 1 out of the 34,000 for that year hardly qualifies.

Gets worst, except for Columbine, they played the tabletop game Battletech, (they used mall models of giant walking robots, dice and paper maps) for the most part, none of the people going on hunting sprees, this is what they are, have played any of these games. Hell, the guy in Aurora did not even read comic books.

So we go crazy and we destroy gaming and make it illegal (forget about the first amendment for a moment) who is going to get blame next time? What is the next not understood hobby we'll blame instead of actually dealing with the multiplicity of issues that are at the heart of this?

You know, given we attacked Iraq after 911 and did not finish the hard slough at Tora Bora...won't shock me. After all, as a society we like the "easy" answers that make us feel good, instead of the real answers that are actually hard, and chiefly...will require money.