Back off censors – we’re close to the edgeColumn And we know where you liveBy Marc Ninthly: Wednesday 23 November 2005, 12:00[Advert]DOES ANYONE else think that that computer games are possibly being made a scapegoat for the world’s ills? As reported on yours truly this very day, it seems that the responsibility for our kids’ health (mental and physical) is increasingly being foisted on games developers, publishers, content providers etc. I always thought parents had a role to play in what their kids did on computers – at least at home – but these days a growing number of them are slow to monitor and quick to speed dial a solicitor when the s**t hits the fan.Now, I’m not naïve. There is no way to know what kids are up a lot of the time. After all, most of the crap I pulled was done outside of the home or at friends’ houses. But as 2005 comes to a close, there has been a disturbing trend of games being turned into the whipping post for all psychotic behaviour. If someone kills someone else over a virtual weapon in a game, then that person was a ticking bomb waiting to go off.The player in question was playing an online game called Lineage II, and trust me, this is no gory, ultra-violent first person shooter that cranks up your aggression levels. This guy was just waiting to pop. If it wasn’t this minor incident it would have been any number of other significant conflicts experienced in real life. The coverage of the story however glamorised the fact that he killed someone for an in-game item and what that says about games. Cue the ranting, feverish control mob. Not once did the fact that he was obviously disturbed, regardless of the trigger, come into play.If someone dies playing a video game – which they have, rarely – it is often down to exhaustion. Once it happens though, it is on every single newspaper and TV channel, which leads inevitably to the silly Text-in polls, a discussion on the dangers of video-games, the violence in video games, calls to parliament and so on and so on. The actual event soon becomes lost in the political agendas of reactionary politicians and spokespeople for quasi-religious groups. Someone did something for too long and died. That’s it, in a nutshell.People die jogging every day and nothing is said. No one is out to sue Nike – at least not for making running shoes, that is. iPods have been responsible for a massive rise in personal muggings and theft. Can Apple be sued for creating a product that’s too desirable? Medicine and tablets come with warnings telling people not to take too much, yet people do and die every day. I don’t see that on the news. I don’t hear about the lawsuits on News At Ten. I’m not making direct comparisons here just pointing out some of the absurdities.Yet, when someone dies while playing a game - there are global calls for stricter rules, censorship, punitive damages, bans. In the noise and fury surrounding these stories, people seem to have lost any kind of perspective on the issue. The media is resolutely sensationalist when it comes to games-related stories. They are not echoing the fears of parents, they are creating them.Games are fun. Otherwise they wouldn’t be the global billion-pound industry that they are. Like anything else, too much of anything can be bad. Unless, it’s fresh air or spinach, or something. Games-bashing is now a national sport but it is based on misinformation and hysteria, not fact. We have been here before though. Remember movie violence and how the children were being turned into axe-wielding lunatics. This, in the end, did not turn into the national epidemic it was made out to be. How surprising. Now you rarely hear anything on the news about movie violence because, well, they have found games instead. This, like that, will pass. In the meantime, eat your greens, play games for no more than 18 hours straight and always be kind to old people.
man sex is overrated
