Thursday, October 02, 2008

You don't say

Wow. Just wow. For a moment there, we were all ready to give credit to a Finnish gaming company for removing a violent game from their site. It's not so much the concept of violent video games that we have problems with, but more so the execution of this particular game, and games of its ilk. After all, it was a game about shooting kindergarten aged children. So here we were, all ready to congratulate them for their forward thinking.

Until we realized that they pulled it in reaction to the worst school shooting had ever seen. And it took them a week to do it.

Oh yeah, and it had been featured on a children's gaming site.

Honestly, at that point, what were they thinking? It's not like the game featured the ability to play marbles with other kids. Instead, the main character is someone walking around with a shotgun shooting kindergartners. Heck, we remember getting disturbed playing Silent Hill because some of the monsters looked to be the size of children. We simply can't fathom what would make someone decide that a game where the targets are obviously kids should be marketed to people in the game's "victim" demographic.

We don't normally get up in arms about video games. We tend to think that people can consume for themselves what they choose to, at least once their adults. We also tend to think that parents should take a more active role in the media that their children consume. However, with some many parents out of the house, the big bad internet has been utilized as something of an extra baby-sitter. In those situations, it would be nice for parents to not have to worry if their kids are finding a game called "Kindergarten Killer" just a click away from games like "Frogger" and "Pac-Man".

We'd ask Sarah Palin's advice on this, but either she won't be familiar with the concept of video games, or she'll dodge the question with circular logic. Which does mean that she's ready for her debate tonight.

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