VIOLENCE AND VIDEOGAMES, a lot of people might have already heard about this, that violent videogames are capable of corrupting the minds of the youth. That’s kind of an odd thing to say, that everyone under the age of forty are just naturally deranged and that merely featuring a pint of blood violently exiting the body of a living creature in a game could send anyone to go on a baseball bat rampage on the nearest orphanage for injured kittens. Actually the same thing was also said about television shows, movies, books, theater, dancing and zoetrope’s. But videogames are different from those that they’re an interactive medium. Unlike movies and books, where you only watch Arnold Schwarzenegger run over a policeman with a car in The Terminator, or read about whatever was going on in Clockwork Orange, most videogames require you to shoot, maim, ignite, impale, blow up, and torment either a number of baddies or one big baddy in order to progress to another room with more baddies to shoot, maim, ignite, etc. This kind of thing makes videogames an incredibly easy target for people to blame any sort of violence on. Some people who aren’t in any way familiar with interactive gaming don’t really understand anything about it except that a majority of titles feature violence and that young people have access to play them. This wasn’t really a big deal until the punchy-bloody-slaughter contest known as Mortal Kombat came out in 1992 and parents were worried that if their children started to play this arcade legend that they would go to school the next day and start separating the upper halves and lower halves of fellow students with their bare hands or blow up the principal’s head with a precise strike of lightning. It was that same year when the gaming industry started to staple content ratings to the back of game boxes to inform buyers to know which age group any game is appropriate for, ‘E’ for everyone, including children, ‘T’ for anyone but children, and ‘M’ exclusive for adults over the age of seventeen only, but even though each game has it’s own rating it still doesn’t stop children from playing it and it doesn’t stop parents from buying it for little Jimmy because he’s just so darn “mature”. Like how a city makes laws and consequences for crimes, but that won’t keep people from committing such crimes. So even though there is awareness for which game would be appropriate to purchase for a little Tina, kids are still enjoying games with bloody chainsaw dismembering and adults are still panicking over this. You might be saying, “Well who cares if a bunch of old sods are complaining about the excessive number of shotgun decapitations there are in Gore-Fest 2012? What threat can they oppose?” Well, the fact that “old sods” are complaining is a pretty big threat because political leaders are known for taking advantage of the public’s fear of anything they don’t understand. Some people don’t understand videogames and in response they fear them, so politicians rise up to ease their minds by telling them that, yes, videogames are something to be feared and that they could mentally damage your children. Politicians do this sort of thing just to have the public listen to them speak, have the product banned from the face of the earth, and feel important for one glorious year, and instead of sitting down and actually observing the videogames that game enthusiasts play, the public would just listen to the officials preach about how games are evil and that anyone who plays them is a genocide waiting to happen. There’s a big dent in that logic, I want you to do something for me, dear reader. I want you to imagine playing a videogame with console in hand and the game you happen to be playing features you smashing the heads of super mutants with a nine-iron, splattering blood all over the inside of the screen, and then say to yourself “Wow, this game is so fun that it has truly inspired me to go out in public and reenact this very moment!” It sounds very strange doesn’t it? I don’t believe that murders are cause by inspiration, but instead by passion. A tragedy in someone’s life that caused personal feelings of hatred towards someone specific, or random, or society as a whole and instead of expressing such pain, some people use violence and abuse to take care of their problems. If there are people who are still confused as to why developers feel as if they need blood and gore in there games then let me explain. Sometimes it is fun to play a game where you run around blasting at crazed space pirates and throwing them one by one by one into a pit of exposed wiring, it can be satisfying to really gun down hordes of robots dressed up as pirates and there is a sense of glee when one’s foul-mouthed confidence turns into girlish scream as he is thrown into an industrial fan. When you do that in real life, it’s a completely different story, from a completely different bookstore on the other side of the world. In games the people you kill are merely robots programmed to fight and get killed purely for the entertainment of the player. Mindless, emotionless things built just for someone to cave their skulls in with a colorful umbrella. Another reason for violence in videogames is because it sets the tone, when the story in game introduces violence it also introduces the consequence and gives a reason why you have to use violence as a means of defense and survival against those that threaten you. There’s not going to be much at stake if the only threat the bad guy has to offer is to steal all the pies from the innocent and you have to get them back with the power of love. That is proven to not be a successful recipe in dramatic story telling. The third reason is because not only is shooting zombies by truckload fun, it’s actually quite relaxing, something to put all your stress, anger and negative energy into after a day of losing money at the dog races. It’s like a stress ball that doesn’t really feel pain but still shouts pre-recorded yells of agony. Another thing is that the gaming industry does not secretly train people to become psycho deranged killers nor does it encourage people to kill innocent civilians (although, to be honest, people who play games might still run over robots dressed up as civilians for giggles, but remember, even if they do it virtually doesn’t mean they’re going to act on it in real life). Also that using a gun and a sword is very different from controlling an avatar or a pair of arms with a console or a keyboard. I’m not sure why we as a society have to blame videogames for any act of violence, not only videogames, but even gun manufacturers and the news are being framed for violence. Why can’t we blame the person who, you know, actually committed the crime? Try to blame him for his own actions because there shouldn’t be an excuse to why a man decided to take his anger and a baseball bat to an orphanage of kittens. It’s only common sense.