Who says all games are bad?

I was perusing through my aggregator a little while ago and stumbled upon this article through wired.com’s RSS feed. It’s about a surgeon who used his Nintendo Wii to hone his skills before going into surgery. Apparently, new programs are being worked on designed to do just that: help surgeons practice before actually performing surgery. I’m always reading about people who are bashing computer games. Now I’m hoping people will shut up about that.

What exactly do I mean by that? Well, as an avid gamer, I try to stay current on important gaming-related topics, such as when new games are coming out, latest patches/updates, etc. So every once in a while I see articles posted that bash games, or people will link to newspaper articles about how some guy who plays violent video games killed a bunch of people and the games are blamed for that. The Grand Theft Auto series has been in the news most for such things. GTA seemingly gets blamed the most, probably due to the ability to interact so much with the environment, and the fact that it’s the most realistic. What I don’t see, however, is research backing up the argument that video games are making people violent. Sure, I’ll make wild accusations and then not back them up, but these are reputable publications making said accusations with no proof to go along. (Okay, so these publications might not be The New York Times, but even a small local newspaper should have some kind of proof to go with what they say.)

Quite frankly, I take personal offense when someone says a video game is responsible for people being violent, or even murderers. The only reason for this that I can think of is the old cliché “monkey see, monkey do.” In general, this applies to younger kids. They’re very influential because they’re not yet old enough to make their own decisions or to make good choices. Ergo, parents censor things that they don’t want their kids exposed to. All to often there will be kids emulating what they see on TV so shows like MythBusters and Jackass have to put warnings on the show like “Warning: the following has been performed by trained professionals. Do not try this at home.” I’ve yet to see a computer game that includes a warning such as this. Not that I want to.

The majority of games that I play are first person shooters, highly violent and highly gory. These games are rated “M,” meaning people who aren’t 17 or older should not play that game and shouldn’t be allowed to purchase the game either. But many stores don’t care about those ratings and who’s purchasing the game; money is all they care about, and quite frankly I’m not going to blame them for that. It doesn’t bother me that little kids play games not rated for them so long as they are mature enough to handle it. Most kids aren’t so that’s why the rating system was set up by ESRB. I think the problem is that some parents are whipped and do whatever their child wants out of fear of looking like a bad parent. The child gets a game too mature for him, and he decides to imitate what he sees in the game. Hence you have little Timmy smacking little Billy upside the head with a two-by-four; or there’s Johnny who robs a store then shoots a few “ladies of the evening” before going on a wild police chase down I-95 followed by every cop within a three-state radius.

I realize here I may have gotten a little off course based upon my opening paragraph. Allow me to explain. The article I linked to provided a real life situation where video games have proven to be useful. Through most of the body, I’ve given examples of how people think video games are bad. Well, in general, people only think video games are bad; they don’t actually have proof. However, the article I posted illustrates that video games can be good, useful tools. I think people should do a little research before condemning something, especially because, as seen, video games aren’t necessarily all that bad.

A fellow classmate, Ben, wrote this blog post about video games. It’s more related to video games as a form of new media, but does touch on some similar points.