Video Game Blamed For Death

This story, from the Houston Chronicle, is a sad story.  A 40 year old man shot his 17 year old son over a missing video game.  This story only directly relates to video games in that the mainstream press will add it to their ever growing list of stories claiming video games are bad. 

I, being a conservative Christian man, will never blame video games directly for anything.  Video games don't cause people to go out and shoot someone.  They don't cause people to go on rampages.  Many times, they are a convenient scape goat.  Sometimes they may ignite underlying issues that ultimately cause people to do things they woulndn't normally do, but never is the video game itself the object that causes these terrible things to happen.

In the story above a drunk man shoots his 17 year old son over a video game.  In the end, it could have been anything.  If he had been looking for the remote they wouldn't have even mentioned it, but because it's a video game he was mad about it gets press.  Video games have both good and bad qualities, like anything else we do in life.  Video games don't hurt people in the same way a gun doesn't kill a person, the person holding the gun does.

I cannot stand all the news stories that go out of their way to mention video games in a negative light because it's convenient.  You have to go to places like this, or Kotaku or Gamasutra to see the articles that show the beneficial qualitites of video games.  They can be used to increase a child's reading ability.  They help develop hand eye coordination.  They give some families the ability to open up and talk about things they might not otherwise talk about. 

I have never once seen a story where a video game hurt or killed a person.  It's always someone with other issues in their life, much like the man in the story above.  Gaming is entering more and more homes and it will continue to be more and more common to see a video game system in a home.  The media will then latch onto the fact that the person has that console in their house and say that is the cause of their problems, when in reality it is a bad home, relationship issues, too much alchohol or inattentive parents that are the root of the problem. 

I, personally, don't like the GTA games.  I won't have them in my home, but they're not the cause of the problem, generally that so many in the media tend to think.   There, in the end, are other issues that need to be looked at more than the video games.  They're just a convenient fall guy.