Just wait until I am king. She and people like her will be a problem no longer.

I’m not really thrilled with the quote “how the conservative camp”. Lumping conservatives with this editorial is wrong. Heck, even Rush has defended video games and he is about a hardcore conservative as you can get.

@Chip: I can see your point (not politically of course, but my intent was not to ruffle the feathers of my red state brothers and sisters, as I have no bone to pick with them today). Please share, however, if you have an idea that’s less cumbersome than the original text which read “ignorant, holier than thou, me generation reformists who wouldn’t know modern fun if it bit them on the buttocks, poop heads”. I needed to conserve the space, and feared they might find the “poop head” reference supportive of their maturity argument.

I’m with Chip I think the “conservative camp” comment politicizes an issue that has more to do with being ill-informed than politics. Of course, The Washington Times is known for its conservative stance on political and social issues, but in this case I think Marybeth Hicks is flying solo. Listen, I’ll consent that conservatives are not big media lovers because of the questionable value system that is imparted to our youth, but in this case I think Hanlon’s Razor fully applies: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

Advanced enough stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

Advanced stupidity is not malice, it’s retardation.

Why do we even bother reading their rhetoric anymore? They’ve lost. Games are not going away, especially not games like Call of Duty, which is set to break records in sales.

Although I do find it funny she’s badmouthing something that’s stimulating a commercial industry during a recession.

COD and games like it are not made for children. You and I know this, but there are idiots like Marybeth Hicks who cannot comprehend that fact.

There are many movies, TV shows and even music that’s not intended for children, yet nobody complains about them. Somehow morons like Marybeth Hicks believe because it’s a video game, it somehow must be for children. Why?

I never understood that idiotic line of thinking.

“I never understood that idiotic line of thinking.”

My thoughts exactly.

Well, I’ve already chimed in on this issue in a three-part series I wrote up back in April 2008 (you can look it up in the features section since I can’t make a hyperlink right now). One of the chief problems I raised back then, and it is still a valid concern now, is that violent video games can’t really be linked to any of the atrocities which they supposedly the cause. Furthermore, mass shootings and school shootings were happening before video games of the kind they complain about existed. But don’t take my word for it. Check out the government’s report on Virgina Tech, or the Surgeon General’s report on youth violence. The information is available online (which means pundits like Hicks could read the info if they wanted to do so) but writers like this choose to ignore it. And of course she ignores it, just like Jack Thompson ignores it while filing his frivolous law suits. The empirical evidence demonstrates that their position is… ahem… fertilizer.

You could do a lot more to stop violence, youth violence in particular, in the United States by attending to the basics: poverty, problems with drug culture and the War on Drugs (a rant for a different day), domestic abuse witnessed by children, and direct child abuse. I am certain just these three things have far more impact on youth violence, and are more of a problem for the people living in our culture in general, than a bunch of gamers playing Modern War.

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EDITOR’S NOTE
Here are the links to Jason’s articles:

Part I – http://tinyurl.com/ybdgxt6
Part II – http://tinyurl.com/ybbqddy
Part III – http://tinyurl.com/ydonzdg

We completed a study in 2006 with over 1200 children between the ages of 8-16 from the UK and Greece. We were interested in seeing if playing games made children different in the way they went about resolving potential conflict in their lives – we found that there was no difference between children who did not play video games and those that played every day in terms of how they resolved conflict. What was interesting was that those children who stated that their parents wouldnt let them play games at all (as opposed to the children having no interest in playing) were the ones who significantly gave more negative solutions to resolving potential conflict (eg: blaming others, shouting at others, name calling etc)…. none of the children offered any violent solitions at all!!

@Simon: This is the kind of information that really needs to be put out to the masses. It’s interesting that the ones that were allowed no access had difficulty with conflict resolution – makes you wonder what else is going on in those households.

I hate people like this lady who are just a little pissed off parent looking to find a scapegoat to blame her kids bad behavior. P.S. look @ any of the god of war games, so much more violent.