My View on Video Games and Violence

Disclaimer: I don’t care if anyone’s offended by this article, I really don’t. I’m offended that a game I’ve always enjoyed is being blamed for violence so, suck on that!

GTA 5 (or ‘V’ if you understand roman numerals, which I do not) was released on the 17th and of course the PC brigade have been bleating ever since about GTA encouraging violence. These are the kind of people my Dad would call papoose wearers (if you don’t know what a papoose wearer is, it’s someone who carries their baby in what looks like a backpack but on their front..well actually I think you can have them on your front or your back depending on your preference). We were at a zoo once looking into a cage of owls who’d just been fed. One of the owls was contentedly scoffing down its dinner, you know those limp, lifeless yellow chicks that they feed them, when one man who might as well have had three papooses and a pair of Hush Puppies under cord trousers and a frumpy plaid shirt exclaimed ‘Oh my god, it’s eating its own chicks! Should I find someone and tell them?!’. That’s the kind of person we’re dealing with here. House husbands with very little masculinity left. Come on, stop getting offended, you know it’s true.

When a kid killed his grandmother, it was GTA at fault. Not the obvious undiagnosed mental illnesses that his parents neglected to get checked, nor the fact that he was able to get his little mitts on a weapon capable of murdering a fully grown human. No, none of that was at fault. Just the game. That nasty, horrible, violent game that’s rated 18+ and shouldn’t be given to children anyway. I say this as someone who practically grew up on GTA, I was playing it on the PC when I wasn’t even in double digits, using all the cheats and flying around on a jet pack wearing a gimp suit laughing at all the prostitutes waving dildos from the ground below, and I’ve never murdered anyone. My parents are great parents, I think I turned out pretty well and funnily enough the worst, most nasty individuals I’ve encountered weren’t the ones playing violent games and watching horror movies but were the ones with the jobless parents on benefits that smoked over their pushchairs and started drinking at 7am each morning, not to mention their parents were probably on partner number 5 by the time the kid reached 10.

Video games DO cause violence. It’s naive to believe that they are the root cause of violence but it’s equally naive to adamantly argue that they have no impact at all. In the instance of kids playing the game and then reenacting what they’ve seen on screen on their grandmother, there’s something deeply wrong with the child already. The game may trigger something or give them ideas but to play GTA and then assume it’s OK to do it in real life is a sign of a seriously troubled kid. As someone that played these games as a kid I can safely say that you’re an idiot if you think every child that plays it will become a murderer; I didn’t, nor did my brother who’s two years younger than me. The same thing stands with adults, sure games and films can trigger things or give them ideas, and yeah GTA might be the reason why they went out and shot five people but there’s always some deeper reason too. If there wasn’t something wrong with the person and it really was just GTA’s fault then everyone that played GTA would be banged up in jail. The difference is, responsible people that don’t have undiagnosed mental issues can tell the difference between what’s acceptable in a game and what’s acceptable in real life.

If the majority of the population can play violent games and watch horror movies and refrain from reenacting the violence in the real world, then there’s no excuse for the minority of nutters that do. Why are we always so preoccupied with placing the blame when really we all need to just grow up and accept that sometimes horrible things do happen and some people in this world are just out and out horrible. Those kids that killed baby James Bulger in 1993 didn’t do it because they watched video nasties they did it because they were vile little scrotes with some kind of severe mental illness. Alas I guess it was just easier to blame Chucky rather than come to terms with the idea that there are people, kids included, in this world that are just plain vile.

I bought my brother GTA 5 for his 18th birthday, which is today. He’s been glued to the Xbox all day and as yet I haven’t had a phone call from the police to say my parents have been stabbed. Let’s all just stop placing the blame, because placing blame on a video game or movie detracts out attention from the vile, inhuman piece of shit that murdered -insert name here- and instead forces our anger in Rockstar games’ direction. We need to get our priorities straight and be angry at the people that murder, rape and abuse rather than get angry at what may or may not have caused them to do it. 

And here’s the news story of the 8 year old killing his grandmother by the way. Which also points out my issue with the whole thing; that the most talked about part of the story is the video game and not the fact that an 8 year old MURDERED HIS GRANDMOTHER! 

Oh yeah and he shot her ‘in his trailer park home’…just about sums it up. Oh and also, they’re blaming GTA V (because this happened a month or so before its release) but the kid actually was playing GTA IV so it’s not even GTA V that’s to blame for that one.