I was going to include a part in my last post about the shootings at VT about how the media will no doubt start blaming this incident on video games, tv, and music. I didn’t at the time because I didn’t want to belittle the message. But this morning I wake up and see a news story titled “Did VT Killer Learn From Video Games?,” and I could no longer resist posting it.
I think that blaming video games or tv or rap music is just an easy way out of having to confront the real issue. We don’t want to believe that anyone can do this apart from some outside influence, and we claim that that influence caused the tragedy. This just simply is not true. Even if we find some violent video games at the shooters apartment, that does not mean that games are responsible. He is responsible. Video games did not make this guy pick up a gun and start just randomly killing people.
We have got to get away from this idea as a society that everything else around is is to be blamed for our problems. No. We are to blame.
In the story they list 10 or 15 different games to blame for why this kid shot his fellow students, and only one of them is a game that is actually played today. The majority of the violence in video games that this guy sites are from games 5-10 years old, and no one plays them today. I am not arguing away violence in modern games I am just making a point that it is so cliche to blame games that as a knee jerk reaction the media continues to blame the same games. And something has happened since the years of those games such as “DOOM”. Video games have gotten extremely popular. Which makes me believe that the media wants to recall the day when only loners played them to get off on violence, instead of having to admit that video games as an industry is more popular than any other form of entertainment today. I mean look at the Wii, even grandmas are playing it.
Yes, a lot of games have violence in them, but it is not the game that causes death it is the evil inside a person, their slavery to sin that causes death.
What do you think about this topic? How do you think that video games shape the minds of individuals and our society?