At What Age Does The Video Game Get The Blame?
By Shawn on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 12:32 PM PST In Gamer Life
Joystiq hosts Dennis McCauyley’s column The Political Game. This week’s topic is how the age of a killer determines whether or not video games will be blamed. McCauley has researched all the stats of the most infamous mass murders, shootings, and heinous homicides and come to the conclusion there is indeed an age cut off to the phenomenon. The magic number is 30.
Apparently after adults hit 30, they are suddenly responsible for their own actions. Until then video games can take the blame even if the killer hasn’t played them for years. McCauley proposes that the age cut off is related to video game violence critics such as Jack Thompson’s need to publicize their agendas. The opinion piece is thoroughly researched and well written. Take a moment to check it out.
This is fascinating. Mr. McCauley cites some acts of violence by older folks in which there has been no suggestion of game play was some kind of proof that games should never be considered as part of the causal mix in acts of violence by teen gamers? This is logic from another solar system.
The fact is, the American Psychological Association has found a CAUSAL link between teen aggression and violent games.
Mr. McCauley can’t wipe that finding away with a pen subsidized financially by the video game industry on whose lap he dutifully sits.
Mr. McCauley acts as if he has never heard of Columbine, Paducah, Fayette, Ironton, Wellsboro, Oakland, Oaklyn, Tabor, Fairfax, and all the other countless towns and cities in which teens have gotten themselves filled up with game violence and then acted it out.
The industry itself, by putting “M” ratings on games is admitting they should not be sold to kids and that they are definitionally HARMFUL. If the industry wants to take the stickers off and stop at least the hypocrisy that comes with selling adult games to kids, then it should do that.
But until nitwits like McCauley deal with the fact that adult games are sold to kids, then they should stop lecturing me and others about our alleged inconsistencies. Mr. McCauley is nothing but a tool of his industry.
@ Jack Thompson
The findings you cited are true, but taken out of context and proportion. Due to that and your intervention, the industry has responded in kind and therefore a chain reaction of exagerrations and fierce and non-productive debates between pro- and anti-video games are the results. You may have raised awareness on video games effect and I thank you for the industry’s maturation, but you have left many alienated because of your fierce activism.
Either you didn’t take the time to actually read what I wrote or you are ignoring it and trying to warp what I wrote to fit your agenda.
My column had NOTHING to do with teenagers and video games. The entire point of my column was about ADULTS, 23-29 years old, whose acts of violence are blamed on video games – by you, in fact, or in some cases by those you have allied yourself with, like Rep. Burrell in Louisiana.
My column asks why you would raise the issue for a 23 or 26 or 29 year-old?
Can you explain how Cho Seung Hui’s alleged Counter-strike play at 16 or 17 possibly caused the VA Tech massacre some 6-7 years later? And yet you went on national TV while the bodies were still lying in Norris Hall and declared that video games were behind the rampage.
How do you justify that?