I always find it funny that people will always try to blame everything on video games. I'm looking at you Germany. Using a single event to justify massive reliation against video games is not okay. This isn't far from getting on to "internment camp" area and I AM NOT KIDDING. Sorry if this offends anyone who has had ancesors in an internment or concentration camp area. Randomly shutting down "gaming" websites is just poor behavior on the part of the government. This subject also can't be discussed without ever mentioning Mr. Jack Thompson the self proclaimed "video game industry's worst nightmare". Fortunately he ended up on Penn and Teller's Bullshit making him and basically everyone who was against video games look like complete idiots.

The video game defense is something that lawyers have tried to use like the insanity plea. The idea is to either get a lower sentence or to try to convince people that the person who committed the crime is not guilty because they were not aware of their actions or they were being influenced by something else (the video game) to do what they did. Luckily, this almost never works because video games did not exist before violent crimes and usually they only exist long after the criminals have had plans kill people. By now, probably 1 in 5 homes in the U.S. own a video game system of some sort and probably much more own a PC.

Columbine didn't happen because of Doom. People don't shoot cops because Grand Theft Auto was released. In most cases, video games may have been the medium, but not the cause of the problem. Gang members shot cops who knew too much or were in the way in their territory, odds are they weren't thinking of video games when shooting people and is more common in places where cops act poorly. If someone plays a game for 2 days straight non stop, shouldn't someone else nearby have noticed and tried to stop them? Why didn't anyone notice that they were there for 2 days straight and sent them home? When one person stabbed another over a game item, it wasn't because of the game, it was a dispute over money and the law did not recognize it as legitimate. Had the law recognized it as a legitimate claim such as theft (evidence could be provided through chat logs and trade records by the game company), it could have been avoided. If the parents take away the games of their child and their child runs away, the parents obvious did not take the time to raise their child. If the child was raised properly rather than be left to everything themselves, they wouldn't be spending so much time playing video games.

The best argument I found against blaming video games was from Penn and Teller's Bullshit. People believe that if they found violent video games in someone's house, it could be recognized legitimately as a cause of the problem if the courts declare it so. However, they should how some studies don't mean crap because all it does was show brain scans of blood flow and general brain activity. That just means that specific part of the brain is used more and is generally inaccurate for expressing anything other than superstitions. These studies were also shown to be pretty much baseless. The entire study can be thrown off by studying a group of primary left handed gamers as opposed to a study on right handed gamers and brain activity is suppose to differ between each person as well. On top of that, they went 1 step further and said that violent video games are COMMON in households like twizzlers and something else that I forgot. That means odds are if you asked people on the street if they have a violent video game in their house, maybe even 1 in 10 people you ask will say yes.

However, if video games were every legally recognized as a problem, it would be another step for gamers. Simply because recognizing video games as a problem would mean recognizing it as an entity like a corporation. If it is recognized as a problem, video games would effectively become a corporate like entity itself. This would have short term consequences such as rampant gold farmers in MMO, but in the long run, gold farmers would be forced to operate under the terms of the MMO publishers or risk legal issues. It would be like legalizing prostitution. There is actually less problems with legalizing anything illegal at the moment because the government can regulate it and keep it in check. Kind of like what happened to prostitution in some areas. Making it legal actually made it safer because the government can oversee it. They only negative thing I would hate about it so far is if they limited the amount of time we could spend online. That would suck.

Officially recognizing MMOs as a legal world where politics, economics, and social interactions work would make it safer in general for everyone and make it more popular. Some of these exist in some games already. The most significant problem tends to be that of gold farmers. However, they can also be the most beneficial. Gold farmers for the most part operate illegally against the Terms of Service. However, if a gold farming group is legally recognized as letigimate, it would be much better for both the farmers and the publisher. The gold farmers are providing a service to players who can't spend as much time on the game and in the mean time, the publisher can acquire a portion of what gold farmers earn by selling to players and use it to pay their staff and expand the game. If they don't want them at all, they can say so and have legal retaliation against people who don't follow because it is in fact a law that they're suppose to follow when operating in that area. The publisher could also limit the amount of gold they can sell in order to reduce inflationary pressures by a little. In game scammers would be caught and penalized accordingly. Players could hire other players as assassins that could carry out their dirty work against PKers or something and be paid upon completing the contract. There are limitless possibilities.

I would legitimately claim that I am addicted to internet usage and video games. I spend much of my time online chatting with my friends on AIM and MSN rather than give them a phone call. Phone calls charge more money if its on a cell phone and the internet I'm paying for is just a flat rate each month so I try to get the most out of it. I spend most of my free time in front of my computer since all the TV shows I liked ended up being cancelled or moved to ridiculous times so even the TV isn't something I spend much of my time in front of. When I was young, my parents were both working most of the time so me and my brother were left to ourselves most of the time. TV shows were boring and in between things we liked to watch, we would spend time on the SNES or Genesis simply because it was fun. This carried on through my high school years except for the brief period in the 6th grade where I spent about 2 months in a hospital because of a neck injury. I would say that the only reason I developed an addiction to video games and the internet was because I didn't have much else. In my schedule I try to make time for myself which I often spend in front of the computer chatting and playing games or watching things on Hulu and YouTube if its something I like. The way I experience it makes me see that internet addiction exists because parents tried to raise their children through TV but with computers becoming the fad, they turned to the internet rather than the TV and the PC has become more prominent than the TV ever was due to features available on the PC.

/end rant