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Better To Explore Our Ignorance Than Surrender To It
First it was video games, now it’s true crime. Too much real terror out there to focus our attention on katana-brandishing windmills.
When I was a kid, some parents worried that the video games we played were too violent.
I always found it strange that the focus was on video games. There were films being shown on TV at times that you would consider family friendly that had more hi-fi gore than any of the games we were playing in our 16-bit consoles. Of course, films had an age rating, but any parent who would have cared to touch a video game would have discovered that so did these. Shock after shock, epiphany after epiphany… I know.
However, every few years a story about some troubled teenager who had chopped his abusive parents to bits with a katana would make it to the news. And so the debate would be reignited. What are we going to do about these games? Are we doomed to live in an ever more violent society? Are these the hands our future is in? Hands that would rather brandish Japanese swords?
It was ironic that these debates would start with a news broadcast that would also contain images of famine, of dying infants in foreign lands, of mutilated bodies in war zones, of mine fields… News…