Hey all,
Seeing the recent surge in anti-video game propaganda lately I have had enough and felt like expressing my views on this issue, despite that fact that I am just some guy on the internet who should be working, so if you don't like text you might want to skip this one :P

Okay let me start off by saying I am a gamer. I have been playing video games all my life and a significant amount of those games were graphic and violent. And I can definitely say that I was not the legal age to be playing these games at their time of release.

So I was a young impressionable child/teen murdering my friends, running people over in cars and even tearing people limb from limb with my bare hands, and yet am I unbalanced? Is my sense of right and wrong so warped that I may kill the next person I bump into on the street because it might increase my score? Of course not. I am not overweight, I am not anti-social and I am most definitely not violent.

So when I see video games (and not even overly violent ones at that) yet again receiving the blame for every ill society has to offer I get angry at the fact that our beloved harmless pastime has unjustly become society's whipping boy as a medium in general.

When Halo 3 became the biggest entertainment launch in history last year it was a clear message to world that gaming is just as popular as film and TV. So with these three mediums on a relative par with each other you would think they would be judged equally right?

Wrong, film and TV have just as much sex and violence in them as video games do (hell games have less sex in them) yet if a game is violent or sexual, regardless of the big sticker on the front of the box saying it is meant for people aged 17+ people still cry foul and proclaim the game to be the cancer that is killing our children.

So why are video games still being treated by public opinion as a misfit underdog? A distraction for the masses that wastes peoples time, makes us overweight and turns us into potential killing machines?

Personally I believe one theory is the fact that the ignorant public and media believes that video games are still a silly child's pastime meant solely for children. This sad public view is illustrated so well in the the now infamous Fox News discussion about Mass Effect that I'm sure you have all seen, have a listen to the so-called expert brought in to discuss the game as she laughs incredulously when asked if she has played the game. As if it was such a preposterous notion that an adult like her would lower herself to play a video game, and I'm sure this 'expert' is not the only one who shares this dim-witted ideal.

They fail to see that all those people who grew up playing video games did in fact grow up, and are still playing video games. Sure we still love our platformers and our puzzle games and such but our tastes have also grown beyond that, we enjoy games that stimulate discussion between friends and strangers, games that drag us deep into a plot's twists and turns, games that make us feel in the most complex ways as much if not more than any book, show or film can.

Yet sadly the public still sees us gamers as a bunch of nerds playing doom in our basement, and this public opinion desperately needs to change.

I'll be writing more about if we can change things and what we would need to do to change an old dying status quo another day as my break is over and I need to get back to work to make money to buy games :)

Thanks for reading my rant. Cheers.