3) Psychopathic Idiots
These guys give gamers a bad name, plain and simple. They are theoverwhelming minority ofgamers, but they are the ones that represent gamers most often in the media. You never see theaverage joe gamer or successful family manwho plays GTA interviewed aboutvideo games.You'll get the dysfunctional, homicidal maniac whojust blew away his family.
Tragic situations aside, the worst part about these freaksis that they are the fuel for thepoliticians' fire. They'rethe big excuse haters use when trying to censor games.
Reason isn't part of the equation. We'll give you one veryrough, basic example: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas soldsomething like 14 million copies on the PS2 alone, andthere have been what, maybe around a dozen cases of extreme violence connected to video games, including the Columbine shootings and the more recent Planters gang stupidity in Oakland, CA? Now to us,fewer than one per million - one thousandth of one percent -seems like coincidence and not causation or correlation. Especially when you consider other social factors - depression, drug use, physically and mentally abusive homes, things like that - that are always part of the equation as well. But, then again, we didn't go to Harvard.
Howdo we fight them?
This is easily the hardest situation on this list to fix. In the end, these people have much bigger issues than having played GTA or any violent game. What we need to do isface up, as a society, to the real causes of these tragic situations. It's not easy, because parents have a really hard time admitting their children are either really messed up or completely lacking any sense of moral right and wrong. And politicians have a hard time not telling parents what they want to hear - that it's obviously someone else's fault.
Still,facing the real causes iswhat needs to happen, because that's the only way the people struggling withmental issues are ever going to get real help. We need to strive to heal our fellow man, and when games come under fire, defend them in a way that shows we're sensitive to the situation, and also mature and rational people. A tragedy is just that: tragic. And pulling together as people is the only way to survive them. Which is nice and easy and holistic to say, but really hard to actually do when someone's displacing their grief and anger on the games you love.
