Peggle Makes You Kill!

This article was brought to the attention of many a nerd this week and is another hyperbolic rant of fearful accusation that video games are a bad influence. This debate has existed as long as video games have and mainly comes from silly little people who have never played a game in their life before.
Their argument may seem sound, in a game a player is rewarded for acts of violence, and subsequently they will be conditioned to believe that this is the same in reality, with violence becoming the primary answer to a real life conflict. It makes sense if you word it like that and it may even be true in some cases, but some is the key word here. This won’t happen to EVERY gamer and it is close minded to label every gamer has a potential psycho rapist murderer and proclaim that Peggle makes you kill.
In this article, Carole Lieberman, apparently a psychiatrist (not a real science) and an author (anyone can write a book) said that “the increase of rapes can be attributed in large part to the playing out of sexual scenes in video games”. Carole Lieberman whoever the fuck she is has made the most idiotic thing argument I have ever heard within the video game debate. I’ve played games for as long as I can remember and not in one game have I controlled a character who has been able to rape someone. There have been very few occasions where a player has been able to have sex, and on these occasions it is always boring, and you never see anything. For example in GTA, you could take a prostitute into your car and the car would shake. Furthermore it was not vital to the progression of the game, nor did it reward you. Likewise in Fable (in which the screen blacks out) if you didn’t use a condom you would end up with an STD or a baby, which you would agree is far from a reward. Sex in video games has always been tedious, it will never be vital to the plot and this is why it has and always will appear so little in them, it’s not like Mario has been boning Princess Peach is it?
I’ve been a gamer all my life, I’ve not raped or murdered anyone, I’ve not been cruel to animals, I’ve never been in a fight in my life, I hate any kind of conflict, so can you really say that they have been a bad influence on me? I’m not the only one, I’m guessing that the majority of gamers are by modern standards, normal. The recent popularity of the industry proves this, otherwise the world would be overrun by vagrants raping and murdering each other, which it isn’t.
At a very young age I was constantly surrounded by “bad” influences, I played Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, I watched Schwarzenegger (wow, spelt that right first time) films all the time, I watched wrestling, there were naughty kids at school and out of school, and it was the same in my adolescence, I listened to Eminem, I watched Tarantino films, watched porn, politicians did bad things, footballers did bad things, everyone and thing around me was the epitome of immorality, and I have never stolen, raped or murdered. It is not always monkey see monkey do, in my experience bad influences are a deterrent. When I play something like GTA, and I’m shooting everyone who comes on screen, the police will come after me, and then SWAT teams, and the FBI, and the army, and eventually they will shoot and kill me, just as in real life games have consequences.
You could even argue that games are actually a good influence. Scientific research has shown that they can actually improve cognitive processing while in my experience playing the likes of Civilisation and Medieval: Total War has greatly improved my knowledge of history and geography. No longer is staying in your room all day anti-social, online gaming is a great way of socialising if used in the correct way, and playing games are one of the best ways to bond and cement a friendship. They are supposed to be fun and if the line between game and reality blurs, then you’re probably mental if you play games or not.