Game Charged as Accomplice

Two 18 year old douchebags were racing their parents' luxury cars last night when one of them hit a cab and instantly killed the driver. Both guys were arrested and will be charged with some serious offences. I think their lives are pretty much over at this point, since they'll spend most of the next 10-15 years going to court and sitting in jail, and all the time after that regretting what they did.

The older I get, the more I subscribe to the belief that people are completely incapable of making rational choices until after the age of 22 (and sometimes never).

The illusion of invulnerability is likely responsible for more deaths in the 16-22 age range than any disease. I personally think it's due to permissive parenting and not enough exposure to the real world. This is a disease of affluent living in the 'burbs, where the worst thing that happens is getting caught smoking weed in the park late at night. In this case, though, a car racing videogame was found in one of the cars and will very likely be blamed for the disconnect from reality that these guys suffered (and are surely cured of by now).

It's really kind of funny to see the reporters holding up a copy of the game and talking about how it involves illegal street racing and encourages reckless behavior. They are charging the game with being an accomplice to a crime, or maybe even positioning it as the perp, with the teens being just naive followers of every command given to them by a box. I think "people" (and by that I mean everyone over a certain age that doesn't have a clue) are just scared of a relatively new art form. Mind you, video games have been around for over 30 years, but they've only recently evolved from things that we could easily separate ourselves from (moving rectangles on the screen) to completely real looking simulations of things that we might see or (psychopathically) do in real life.

It seems perfectly natural to blame a street racing game on the real life enactment of the things depicted in it, but really it's no worse than watching a movie featuring the exact same things (The Fast and The Furious).

I think the problem is not in the content of video games, but in the value players place on their own lives. There are no 1-UP's in real life; you only get one go of it. Young people tend to forget this and end up fucking things up before they even get to the interesting part of the game (where they face off against the boss/spouse character). Parents should strive to keep their youngens grounded by not spoiling, sheltering, or (God forbid!) boring them.