Video Games

If you know me, I like the occasional video game here and there. I don't live my life around the next one or devote all my free time playing them. However, it is a nice thing to know that I can kick up my Gamecube, Wii, or any of my other wonderful systems and escape from the shitty reality I live in for a few hours. The debate of video game violence is a long road of lies, deceit, and half-truths. While many people will come to the defense of video games and their connections to violence, there are still a select few who hate them with a passion. Of course, the forerunner in the campaign against video games being Jack Thompson. Video game violence isn't a new topic. It dates back to the days of Doom and the beginning of the era of 3D graphics. Games were crossing the line of not just being for fun, but to show more realistic situations. This, of course, sparked the debate on whether or not games were telling kids that it was alright to kill, because their video games basically told them so. If you believe that last statement, you are a fucking idiot. No way around it. While many people continue to believe that video games is the prime reason why someone at Virginia Tech, Columbine, or any other mass murder spree would do it, it just isn't true. Well, partly not true. The partly not true part being that while these violent people might have played a violent video game, it isn't the main reason behind why they did it. The main reason, of course, being the fact that they were fucked up to begin with. We are all born a different way, in a different part of town, to a different kind of family. A lot of us are going to go through the same issues in life. We are all going to grow up, we are all going to go to school to learn, and we are all going to live life. We are all going to go out dating, we are all going to "find true love" and then the next moment find out that there is nothing true about it. We are all going to handle it in different ways. While many will blow it off as being life, some will take it to the next level and make it an obsession of sorts. Those who take it to the next level do what the person at Virginia Tech did. The main argument I could make is look at the history of violence. Video games are violence only intersect at the point in which video games were created. However, look back further. To the Stalin's, the Hitler's, and the other evil dictators of the world before even them. They did not sit down and play Castle Wolfenstein and wonder how they could accomplish the same atrocities as the characters they were controlling. They did it because of what they believed in and what they thought was right. No one will ever know the real reason why were have to commit the most heinous crime known to man, we will always be left to guess. However, when you start blaming violent media, video games, movies, and TV combined, you start treading the waters of what we play in our games and watch in our movies. A world in which anything is possible and where the unexplainable is easily explained that doesn't make any sense. In summation, all those haters of video games need to shut the fuck up and pick up a game controller. Then, after you play the games that aren't named Grand Theft Auto and Doom, you tell me that I am going to turn violent and kill everyone in sight.