The recent Supreme Court ruling that video games actually do enjoy free speech protections like every other form of expression (except that one, for some reason) has led to rather a bit of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Think Of The Children crowd. This is good, because if those people are rending their garments, it means we’re advancing as a culture.
In any case, CNN decided to go whoring for gamer traffic with a top ten list of violent video games that set off the kind of moral panics that led to the Supremes dropping the hammer. Gavel, whatever.
CNN has the story.
The fun part is these moral crusaders are nearly always the same politicians who vote to send the kids off to war, like in Vietnam and out over in the Middle East. Kind of a strange value system where they can vote in a draft to make real killing mandatory for kids, but then turn crusader against fake violence on fake people in a video game.
I remember a study I saw quoted on the internet (take it with a grain of salt) that said, kids who play violent video games are less likely to go out and shoot people for real. Something to do with kids being squeamish when it comes to real violence.
In any case, when they’re inside playing video games, they’re not outside stealing cars ;)