Guerilla Gamers

Well well well, computer games aren't the evil addiction that everyone has been making them out to be.

And by everyone, I mean family values conservatives like Jack Thompson and Andrew Bolt.

I note the disclaimer in that article about huge periods of gaming being bad for social interaction.

The same can be said about huge periods of reading, watching films, listening to music, studying and almost all the fun individual activities.

However, I'm still waiting for an article to shut up the people who claim that computer games are training a generation of crack-shot killers. This might help.

Still, let's just sit down and look at the argument on the table: that computer games train or cause people to be murderers.

If I'm to be persuaded into agreeing, I want statistics showing a disproportionate number of murderers being gamers.

Certainly in terms of notable violent crimes, the computer game connection has only been made a handful of times. Columbine, Virginia Tech, some guy in Germany, probably a few others that I'm missing. But given that the overall amount of violent crime is so high, then one possible conclusion is that everyone should play games, since so few violent crimes are committed by gamers.

It's fuzzy logic, but no fuzzier than that used by the anti-games crowd.

Ultimately, the conclusive or correlative studies haven't been done yet. I might attempt a collection of data myself some time in the future.