I do not know about all of you but I am really enjoying this warm fuzzy nostalgia after reading the latest moral panic article. This time it was Andrew Scipione who weighed in on the derpfest that is blaming social ills on videogames. This is a line that is older than I am. I mean people have tried to blame violence on everything from heavy metal, all the way out to D&D. They love scapegoats because they are easier to tackle than the real problems.

First let me just point out the stupidity, if not the downright ignorance of the quotes from Andrew Scipione. The first being this little gem:

“You get rewarded for killing people, raping women, stealing money from prostitutes, driving cars crashing and killing people”

Ok for those of you who were around for GTA 3’s big emergence back in the not so long ago. You will know how completely inane this comment is. First off you never got rewarded for crashing cars, they would catch on fire and explode killing you. If you survived that you would probably attract the cops and get shot to hell. Moreover, raping women, I would love to know where that came from. Whilst it is true that you could pick up prostitutes in the original, you would get to watch a shaking car. Wow, that was hotter than fifty shades of grey. It is just the same old hyperbole laden garbage. If you are still taking this guy seriously then let us move on to his next certified brain explosion.

“How can it not affect you if you're a young adolescent growing up in an era where to be violent is almost praiseworthy, where you engage in virtual crime on a daily basis and many of these young people (do) for hours and hours on end?”

Look I cannot speak for everyone but I know that when I was just a ‘yittle kid’, I could tell the difference between reality and fiction. Fiction had lots of cool stuff, and reality had no poke’mon. Also I knew that hurting people in a game was ok, because they were a collection of lines of programming and I wasn’t Neo. To say that because a kid plays a videogame his or her mind is damaged, is like saying that anyone who is exposed to the bible will start stoning people to death. That is to say it would be retarded err I mean intellectually disingenuous. It is a straw man argument. What about Wii sports because it features boxing?

I am not going to say that there has not been an increase in youth crime. Of course there has. But to blame it on games is just a cop out. It is the road so frequently travelled there is a McDonalds on it. Why? Because trying to face up to the fact that this country has some truly difficult culturally ingrained problems is just too damned hard. What is easier blaming an easy target like games, or addressing the fact that Australia has a macho violent dominant culture? Or that there is a breakdown of the family unit, coupled with a growing disenfranchisement in the youth of today. Scipione talks about kids and alcohol being a problem, was this again something they picked up in the magical land of games? Or was it merely a case of monkey see monkey do at home. But let us not deal with this, it is just another one of those ‘Australian cultural too hard to deal with’ things. Or even more scandalous a thought, could it be that these young ruffians know that the police cannot do a god damn thing to them, because of the law.

I am not going to tell you what to think, instead I am just telling you to do what Scipione clearly did not do. Think. There is a far more complex set of circumstances that have conspired to bring us as a society to where we are today. Certainly more complex than kids button mashing themselves into stab frenzy mode.

Get real, get informed, get a clue Scip.