Press start for murder

I must admit, I enjoy cruising through the downtown area running over old women and street bums while listening to the sweet tunes of Slayer and Judas Priest on the radio. Of course, this is in the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. It's not real life. After mowing down about a nursing home's worth of the elderly, I have come to the realization that video games can be really scary, but at the same time, I find them disturbingly entertaining. Am I to blame for this or are video games?\nIn any case involving juvenile murderers, the finger is placed on anything except for the murders themselves. Oftentimes, the blame has been placed on the shooters' misguided lust for violence -- a lust that has been allegedly born from movies, television, music and video games. I expect something similar with John Lee Malvo, who admitted to reportedly pulling the trigger in several of the recent shootings in the Washington D.C. area.\nDue to their interactive nature, video games are easily targeted as sources of violent tendencies in youth, but studies by the U.S. Surgeon General and the Government of Australia show little correlation. In fact, in a combined effort between the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education, violent behavior in children was found to be more affiliated with social withdrawal and bullying behavior, not video games. A contending report by the American Psychological Association details a few studies where a connection between violent video games and violent behavior was found.\nI often find myself being a defender of video games. I think this may be due to an underlying anxiety that there might be a future with no games like Doom, Max Payne or Grand Theft Auto. I definitely don't think video games instruct people to commit homicide, but I think they can certainly desensitize their younger audiences to violence by devaluing life, especially when killing is rewarded with points. Despite their interactivity, video games shouldn't be considered the sole source of desensitizing children to violence.\nAfter the shootings at Columbine High School in April of 1999 and the similar incidents that followed, blame was easily placed on entertainment like video games and movies. The fact that the Columbine shooters were fans of Doom, a popular shooting game, was enough evidence for the news media to find video games guilty of the murders which Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris committed. \n Politicians like Senator Joe Lieberman and Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson have taken it upon themselves to see regulation of violent video games. Lieberman has been an advocate for ratings systems like the one used by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (www.esrb.com) which is currently the industry standard for rating video games. While I hate seeing video games being targeted by the government and any form of authority, I hope that some enforcement in their purchase will at least keep video games from taking the blame.\nViolent video games are only a small factor. We have to face the fact that we live in a violent society. Somewhere in the evolution of the human mind, somebody thought it'd be pretty cool to see a guy rip another guy's head off with his bare hands, and somebody else thought they'd make people pay money to see it.