Don't tread on Wii
Independent intern Leland Rzpecki has a bone to pick with people who blame videogames for social ills
BY LELAND RZPECKI INDEPENDENT INTERN
On the morning of April 16, a Virginia Tech student named Seung-Hui Cho shot 60 people in an engineering building, killing 30 of them, before shooting himself. An hour later, the Fox News Channel aired an interview with Jack Thompson, an anti-game lawyer whom Fox News introduced as a "School shooting expert." Thompson told Fox News that the shooting was inspired by images in violent videogames, stating that the killer was an avid player of the game "Counter-Strike." At this point, the killer hadn't even been identified.

The police investigations found no proof that Cho had ever even played a videogame before.

This incident is just one recent example of the media's habit of blaming videogames for the violent acts people commit - a snowball of blame that has prompted several states such as California and New York in recent months to attempt to pass antigame legislation, which would severely penalize retail stores for selling Mrated games to minors.

These laws view games in the same league as pornography, or outlaw them altogether.

The majority of these proposals have been stopped before they could become law, under the defense that preventing the sale of certain games is a violation of the First Amendment, which prevents such legislation from being proposed over movies and music nearly as often as they are over videogames, despite a negligible difference in content. In other words, even though movies are often just as violent as M-rated games, games are blamed much more often for society's woes.

As a medium whose appeal has spread, videogaming has diversified its content for adults and for children; just like there are movies for kids and movies for adults, there are games for kids and games for adults. There is also a rating system in place for videogames that is even more thorough than the rating system for movies.

Unfortunately, parents still buy violent games for their kids all the time, which leads to the most widely asked question of all: Are violent games harmful to children?

No matter what your opinion is on the matter, there's a study to back it up, which is to say that for every study showing that games are harmful, there is another study that says they aren't. According to the videogame advocacy group Entertainment Consumers Association, the Surgeon General concluded in 2001 that "the impact of videogames on violent behavior remains to be determined."

One thing that is not debatable, however, is that nearly 50 percent of the U.S. population plays videogames, and only 31 percent of that group is under the age of 18, according to the Entertainment Software Association. This means that most of the people who play videogames are actually adults.

The anti-game media often says that a person can learn how to kill from playing a videogame, as is implied when videogames are sometimes called "murder simulators" by figures like the previously mentioned Thompson on several occasions, including one in 2005 where he defended the families of police officers who were shot and killed by teenager Devin Moore, who Thompson said "trained himself on the murder simulator Grand Theft Auto: Vice City."

But as anyone who has actually played the game would know, the most you could possibly learn about operating a firearm from Grand Theft Auto is that you have to point at what you want to shoot. In the event that an individual could make the added effort to learn about loading, maintaining and operating a gun for some violent act, that person is undoubtedly the victim of much larger mental problems and a danger to society to begin with.

In short, videogames don't kill people - mentally ill people kill people. It just so happens that videogames are often the first blamed in the event of a violent act, when they are rarely the cause, as was the case with the Virginia Tech shooter. Also, take for example the Columbine shootings, which were reported as being inspired by images in violent games, while an FBI investigation of the 40 most likely causes of school shooting conducted shortly after Columbine did not include videogames of any kind as a likely cause.

The fact is that playing a videogame is every bit the emotional and inspiring experience that reading a book or watching a movie is, and the people who make them and the players who enjoy them deserve better than to be the media's whipping boy when it's too hard to consider other problems as

the cause of a violent act. I