BY (Updated on April 27, 2010)
The following was broadcast on KUNM FM, Albuquerque as part of a series Youth Speak Out, a collaboration between Youth Radio, Youth Media Project in Santa Fe, KUNM’s Youth Radio in Albuquerque, and New Mexico's Youth Alliance, made possible by a grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. For more information about Youth Speak Out go to www.youthradio.org/new-mexico.
by Conor Cole
From the Salem Witch Trials to the Jews, people have always had a need for scapegoats. Any child who has gotten on their knees to beg their parents repeatedly for Grand Theft Auto 4 only to be turned down knows that video games are the new victim. See, it is not television’s fault, because many adults also like to watch that. So there’s nothing wrong with kids seeing The Terminator massacre hundreds of people with a Gatling gun, because adults do that too. In the minds of these parents, a kid's bad behavior couldn’t ever be poor parenting skills. It must be those interactive moving pictures.
I am sick and tired of being criticized for playing video games. The whole idea that they are unnatural and not right just isn’t true. If you are a human being, then you have some instinct to kill in you. Why do you think video games are so popular? Because humans are predators: we hunt and kill. Playing video games helps us cope with this primal part of us, since killing things in a suburban life is not such an easy thing to do without getting arrested. All humans need some way to get out the need to kill, and I say better to kill a computer than to kill another human.
Another thing that bothers me about America’s obsession with the negative effects of video games is the idea they rot your brain. Are you kidding me? Can you tv pundits tell me with a straight face that your brain is more active watching your show on cable news than playing video games? Compared to the state of what passes for news these days, the gaming community is nothing to be scared of. Every single time I meet someone new and tell them I’m a gamer, I have to hear some random “statistic” they heard that is often not true. The reality: we scold people for calling our prized PSPs “dirty gameboys.” We had a countdown to Modern Warfare II written into our calendars. And we can talk about energy drinks for hours on end.
When people tell me I should do something real with my life, I think, “yeah, I should get a facebook account and live an alternate life of a 23-year-old fireman, like all the other, normal teenagers.” I’m still unconvinced that there’s nothing worse I could be doing at fifteen years old than playing video games.
So true
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