First the quotes, then the point.

"Society has traditionally always tried to find scapegoats for its problems.Well here I am."
--Marylin Manson

"Rock 'n Roll: The most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear."
-- Frank Sinatra

"Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression."
-- Ralph Ellison

"It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it."
-- Andy Warhol

"Movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century. Of their many sins, I offer as the worst their effect on the intellectual side of the nation. It is chiefly from that viewpoint I write of them - as an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people".
-- Ben Hecht

"Television is chewing gum for the eyes."
-- Frank Lloyd Wright

"The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little."
-- Ray Bradbury

The Point (or a maybe couple of them)

The ongoing ashes and sackcloth and gnashing of teeth over video game violence has been really bugging me lately. I feel like standing up for common sense and pointing out that obvious makes me an industry shill.

So, I took a few minutes to troll the Internet for some quotes that remind me that the fear-mongers of the game world have good company. There is a history of like-minded folks who just don't want to accept that new media arise and things change. There are always people looking for the worst in everything.

Unless you can convince me that film, television and rock and roll caused the Holocaust, the extermination of Muslims in Bosnia, the genocides of Africa and 9-11, I'm just not inclined to find a lot of fault in the emergence of new media for the world's tragedies.

Arguing that there is a link between video games and violence is the hysterical version of saying that the arts move us. Yes, thank god, they do.

It's good to remember that video games are in good company when it comes to the history of forms of expression that get asked to take the general blame for human stupidity.

The flip side is, games are not the second coming of media. They are a part of continuum of the forms of expression that trails off back into the mists of time. Games are emerging as the popular form of entertainment, sure. But we shouldn't be too quick to exhaust them above all other media--for better or for worse.

At the very least, the new crop of PhDs with diplomas from Chicken Little U. would do well to ask themselves a question:

Why didn't film/TV/rock and roll destroy the world/the nations youth? And why is now that video games will?