Can we move past this already?
I mean, it’s almost been 30 years of blaming games for violence. Have we not moved past this?
Nobody ever thanks Fifa for teaching footballers how to play, or credits F1 for directly training championship F1 drivers. How about all those kids rushing to the world of golf, every one of them as good as Tiger Woods because they played his game? Everyone saw the replay of that heavyweight boxing champ getting knocked out by an amateur who trained on Fight Night?
The amount of different genre games I’ve played over the last 30 years, by rights I should be a world class rally driver, a crack shot sniper, a champion tennis player, footballer, boxer, golfer. I should be able to climb mountains and search for treasure without worry, fight off an entire army single handed, fly any number of airplanes, water based vehicles, and most wheel based transport. I should be able to skateboard in the X-games and win. Ride down the steepest drops in the world on nothing but a cheap mountain bike.
After playing the recent Donkey Kong on the Wii I’ve been eating my weight in banana’s and jumping on peoples pet dogs heads out on the street. Just the other night, once I got done playing From Dust, I went out into the garden and shaped the very land with nothing but the power of my thoughts. I flooded the entire neighbourhood for a laugh, then dropped lava on all the peoples houses on my street that I don’t like.
Funny that none of the above happens, but violent games apparently inspire most random acts of violence. Not only that but they train people to do it too apparently. What’s that? It’s silly to think a game could train someone to drive at 240mph around a race track, but using the same controller method you can train to snipe people from distance and learn to be an effective killer?
I guess the 1985 riots were caused by time travelling video gamers? In fact, all acts of civil unrest through the years are linked to a band of time travelling GTA inspired gamers? Because everyone knows, violence cannot exist without video games yes? RIGHT?
Of course, the police shooting someone dead in suspicious circumstances has nothing to do with people rioting. No, no… every single one of the rioters just got done playing GTA – according to a very insightful member of, you guessed it… the police.
