Halo, Halo! I don't know why you say goodbye I say Halo

The story is simple. You are the “protagonist,” and your aim is to rain destruction upon a foreign land, destroying everything in sight, brutally murdering the local wildlife, and stealing a copious amount of loot while you’re at it. At the end of every stage, you break into someone’s house and claim it as your own. Every so often you will come upon a castle, which you storm, killing everything inside and propel the master of the castle into a pit of molten lava.
This game is Super Mario Bros., and it is a danger to our children and everyone in contact with them. Or if you prefer, we could look into the dangerous subtext of Pac Man, which teaches our children that drugs are the best ways to combat their troubles. (The “power pellets” are an obvious a metaphor for drugs, giving Pac Man super powers which allow him to eat the ghosts. This in turn obviously symbolises the plight of the common man, battling his inner demons and finding solace only in the escapism provided to him by drugs; allowing, though only temporarily, his ghosts to go away.)
But it’s easy to extend an argument to ridiculous proportions in a bid to weaken its credibility; especially when the argument is: violent videogames cause violence in real life. This is a theory that has been rejected on multiple occasions but has been repeatedly brought up for several reasons:
A defence for child offenders, who had a warped sense of reality due to an obsession with a game: violent games desensitise them to murder and make them more inclined to commit such a crime; or they mimic a crime they see on a video game because it was “kewl.”
A scapegoat for those unwilling to believe that maybe they’re the ones responsible for their children growing up to perform acts of unspeakable evil: a mother buys her 13-year-old son an 18+ rated game and then he commits a violent crime; it is the videogames fault.
Or maybe it’s just a way for the media to create a story where previously there wasn’t one. A man commits a violent crime in which someone dies or policemen are injured; that won’t spark a debate, or interest the people, and it won’t sell papers. However, a man recreates a scene he saw in Grand Theft Auto 4 and as a result policemen were injured. Suddenly the government is involved, parents are screaming for a ban on violent videogames and everyone is worried little Jimmy down the street who also owns a copy of this game will unexpectedly snap, steal a car and endanger the lives of millions.
A good example is the story of Daniel Petric, a 17-year old boy who shot his parents in the head after they took the game Halo 3 away from him believing that he had developed an obsession with it. His case contained the defence that his view on reality was warped due to this addiction, and therefore, upon shooting his parents, he did not understand that they would stay dead. The line between reality and fiction being blurred created a belief that the respawn element of the game in question, where players come back to life, applied to the real world. This defence was rejected.
And of course, we have the proven link between violent videogames and violent behaviour. Now, we can all agree that statistics are fun. This comes from an ease of manipulation. Statistics enable us to use absurd statements that are in fact true for comedic effect. Nearly 100% of the population have more legs than the average. But we can also put maybe not so true statements in a way that sounds like they are true. There is a proven link between violent videogames and violent behaviour. For some this is enough to condemn videogames. However, Pastafarians have proven a link between the decline of pirates and increase in global warming; they have graphs and everything. With no causal link between the two, that argument holds as much water as the Pastafarians.
Studies show that boys who play violent videogames are more inclined to aggressive behaviour than those who don’t. Now, combine this piece of data with another from a popular study: violent video games cause abnormal activity in the amygdale of the brain. So violent videogames affect the brain and those who play them are more aggressive. What other conclusion can you draw other than these types of games do actually cause violence in youths? Well, it could easily be assumed that youths with violent tendencies are more inclined to play violent videogames – that would cause such a statistic – and another study recorded the same abnormal behaviour of the amygdale in the same percentage of test subjects. Now a logical conclusion is harder to draw.
But what exactly is the crux of this controversy? Most of the arguments placed against violent videogames rely on the fact that young people, who are more impressionable than adults, are playing such games, and as such are being affected in negative ways; and ergo, these games should be withdrawn from public reach. However, from my research I have found very little stating that these 18-certificate or M rated games that are causing the biggest uproars are not supposed to be played by young people, that is the whole reason we have age classifications on games. Rather, they work under the assumption that there is no way to stop young people playing these games. This isn’t true; my mother confiscated Mortal Kombat when I was young because she felt it was too violent. She did it with relative ease.
The enforcement of these ratings has been strengthened by retailers due to the fuss kicked up; and that is nothing but a good thing. If a child gets a hold on Super Ultra Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000, then it is the fault of the retailer who sold it or the person who bought it for them, not the videogame industry. If parents were to just pay more attention to what their child is playing and maybe spend some time enjoying games with them, hopefully that would result in a better understanding of the medium and stop them playing games that they shouldn’t be playing. Maybe then we can stop the fruitless studies into the supposed links between videogames and violence, the failsafe scapegoat and gross hyperbole of media spinning and concentrate on the reason videogames were made in the first place; to have fun.