>I understand how quite a few game hackers would be in favor of a ruling like this, but if these are truly your convictions, I would like to see some video (not screencast, video) of your 12 year-old son playing some game with his mostly nude, thoroughly adult female character slavishly hacking on the corpses of other characters. Is that normal?

If it is normal to sedentarily stare at a pixellated screen, it does not matter what is on the screen; you may appeal to whichever emotions you choose. Conversely, I would not particularly want to see my child grow up without a healthy respect for other people's freedom, and this seems to represent a greater danger when they are going to join the ranks of the voting public. Is it not equally void that a child should be forced to grow up under the spectre of some cult such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or similar nonsense? Violent video games and pornography pale in comparison.

>Preview of that statement: "The strength of the correlation between media violence and aggressive behavior found on meta-analysis is greater than that of calcium intake and bone mass, lead ingestion and lower IQ, condom nonuse and sexually acquired human immunodeficiency virus infection, or environmental tobacco smoke and lung cancer."

From the article:

>Playing violent video games has been found to account for a 13% to 22% increase in adolescents' violent behavior; by comparison, smoking tobacco accounts for 14% of the increase in lung cancer.

This is one of the most misleading and intellectually dishonest statements I have ever had the misfortune of reading. It is true that an average tobacco smoker has approximately a 14% lifetime chance of developing lung cancer (it is closer to 17% for males and 12% for females), but this is absolutely not equivalent to a 14% increase in the chance of developing lung cancer. Rather, a nonsmoker has approximately a 1.5% chance of developing lung cancer: a smoker has nine times as large a chance to develop lung cancer as a nonsmoker. This is not a 14% "increase" in the same sense of a "13-22% increase in adolescents' violent behavior". It is an 800% increase! To assert that these risk factors are in any way similar is completely absurd and raises serious questions about your motivations.

>condom nonuse and sexually acquired human immunodeficiency virus infection

In reality, the chance of HIV transmission in the case of unprotected vaginal sex is 1 in 1000. Considering the severity of the disease, this is absolutely not an acceptable risk, but it is kind of laughable to see this phrase so wildly bandied about.

>[rambling story about the CIA]

>Here's the point: video game violence develop a shitty moral compass. It's just shit. I don't care if it points in the right direction or the wrong direction. I, your comrade in arms, don't know where it's going to point next time. And that's not the guy I want be sharing a tent with.

I fail to see how your argument supports your conclusions. Rather, it seems to show that a lack of education is what leads to poor moral decisions, not exposure to violent video games. The people in your example were not stratified on the grounds of having played Grand Theft Auto, they were stratified on the grounds of having some knowledge of ethics and morality, the latter having basically nothing to do with Grand Theft Auto.

Let me tell you a story. It is an ancient story, and it is highly relevant.

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
"What are you doing?" asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe," Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play," Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

If you want a society of people that understands values, you have to teach values. You cannot hope for them to arise on their own by simply depriving them of whatever you consider a corrupting influence.

>So enjoy your expanded access to an audience willing to pretend they understand violence. Moral consistency matters. Reliability matters. You can look forward to further international embarrassment when they grow up to make the wrong, randomly wrong, decisions behind the trigger or, worse, at the voting booth.

Hopefully they won't make the same mistakes as you.