You can't have missed all the negative publicity surrounding videogames at the moment, with titles like Quake being blamed for encouraging violence and even murder. Future Gamer take a look at the media attitude to games and wonders why we haven't grown up to be psychopathic killers...
Michael Foster

The hysterical newspaper articles and headlines that follow give a fairly typical example of the sort of knee-jerk response favoured by the media, although headlines like 'Space Invaders Drive a Boy of 13 to Crime' from the Daily Mail in 1981 show just how long this type of thinking has been in favour.

First gun test for US leaders since school massacre
'A Newsweek magazine poll this weekend showed that a majority of Americans think computer games manufacturers and the television industry should make "major changes" in their policies to help reduce teenage violence.'
(Source:Guardian Unlimited.)

This particular reference is in the middle of an article on gun control in the US, following the Columbine High School shootings. How it's relevant isn't immediately clear, but the journalist seems unable to resist dropping it in, in order to deflect attention away from the real issue: kids having access to real guns.

How a teen misfit's hate turned into murder
'The Kentucky killer [refers to previous school shooting in Kentucky] cited the movie [Basketball Diaries] as having inspired him, and Basketball Diaries was a favourite of Harris and Klebold [the Columbine High School killers] too. There are violent video games, Doom and Quake, whose designers and producers are also being sued by the Kentucky parents... He [Harris] and Klebold challenged each other in more and more violent computer games."He said less in philosophy class; he pulled away and got in with the outcast crowd," says Kridle.
(Source: Guardian Unlimited - re the Columbine High School Shootings.)

The above article, ironically on the Internet, which is also heavily blamed, makes repeated links to violent computer games being the cause, rather than the effect, of their violent tendencies.

Once upon a time, videogames were gentle things. Little white rectangles bounced tiny white squares around a black background in a manner vaguely reminiscent of tennis, to the sound of gentle bip-bippings. Everyone said, "How marvellous," and "It'll help with eye-hand co-ordination." Alas, it wasn't long before programmers cottoned on to the fact that it was far more fun to shoot things, and along came Space Invaders and the shoot 'em up. In a manner akin to the fall of the Roman Empire, if some commentators are to be believed, we rapidly progressed to games of pure violence and depravity, inevitably causing the mental degeneration of all involved and the beginning of a new Dark Age.