The truth hurts.
I am a regular consumer of an on-line comic strip at Penny Arcade. To say that the two guys who run this site are hard core gamers would be an understatement of incredible magnitude. While I enjoy video games and have wasted more than a few hours in front of a game console or computer, I cannot be described as hard core by anyone's stretch of the imagination. Nevertheless I can appreciate the humor of the comics having spent much of my youth playing video games. Faint of heart beware: To say these guys are rough around the edges is another understatement to rival the first.
While the press seems to have fallen mostly silent about the whole "video games makes psychopaths out of our kids" garbage, someone still occasionally takes a pot shot at the gaming industry.
Penny Arcade has had more than a few words to say on the subject. However, their rebuttal to the previous cartoon gets right to the real problem.
That video games are becoming more graphic and violent cannot be disputed. When I stared playing video games, back in the stone age of computers, graphics were monochrome and aliens struck by my lasers disappeared with a small pop. Today graphics are in full color and people and aliens explode leaving blood stains on the walls and often send body parts flying to bounce off intervening surfaces. Still I have trouble with the opinion so often expressed that this teaches kids to be violent, or desensitizes them to violence.
Let's take Vice City, a favorite of my brother-in-law, as an example. I find Vice City to be the ultimate in moral turpitude. Still, I do not stay up nights worrying that my brother-in-law—who seems to find some perverse pleasure in playing the game—is going to start having sex with hookers then beating them up to get his money back. "Your brother-in-law?" you say. "So he's married to your sister, which would imply he's adult right?" Well, one hopes so. But yes, I think we can classify my brother-in-law as an adult, though my sister might disagree. "But that doesn't count. We are talking about the effects of violent video games on children." Exactly. My point is what are your children doing playing Vice City? My brother-in-law is not allowed to play Vice City when my girls are around. If your children are playing video games of which you do not approve, you have no one to blame but yourself.
I spent an enormous part of my youth blowing virtual people and things to bits. I seem to have turned out to be a pretty nice guy. The thought of anyone doing the kid of violence to a living being of any kind that I regularly do in a video game to digital representations thereof makes me ill. Maybe that's because my parents took the time to teach me that being nice to someone is generally better than being mean, that there is more to life than money and possessions, and helped me stay grounded enough that I could tell the difference between reality and a video game.