Violent video games

According to mass media, violent video games teach and encourage the players -- typically children -- to engage in horrific virtual violence. Examples include:

• Postal 2: Apocalypse Weekend (M-rated) -- The ads for this game boast that new weapons will enable you "to hack your enemies to meaty bits!" It involves a game character who commits violent acts against unarmed civilians. Other features in the Postal series include: urinating on people to make them vomit in disgust, using cats as shotgun silencers, and playing fetch with dogs using human heads.

• The Punisher (M-rated) -- Game player is able to jam knives into victims' sternums and pull up to increase the damage, cut off heads, ram a character's open mouth onto a curb, run a character over with a forklift, rip a character's arms off with an industrial hook, and set a character on fire in an electric chair.

• Resident Evil: 4(M-rated) -- Game player uses a special blood-splattered chainsaw controller designed for playing the game, which includes chainsaw decapitations and impalements, and characters ripping off other character's throats and biting off their heads.

• Manhunt(M-rated) -- Game player's character is James Earl Cash, a convicted serial killer facing execution. The execution is ordered to be faked so that a character named "The Director" can use Cash as a star in a series of snuff films. As the Cash character kills other characters, by suffocating them with a plastic bag, slicing them up with a chainsaw, shooting them point blank with a nail gun, stabbing them in the eyeballs with a glass shard, or beheading them with a cleaver, The Director makes sexually vulgar comments. The game has two difficulty settings: fetish and hardcore.

• God of War(M-rated) -- Game features disembowelment, mouth-stabbing, eye-gouging, severed limbs, and human sacrifice.

However, studies have shown time and again that violent games tend to relax the players and cause less violent tendencies (As opposed to more mainstream and less controversial activities, such as football). Nevertheless, video games, like comics and other new forms of entertainment before (and surely after), are constantly under attack by the uninformed masses.

The Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit declared this to be free speech and struck down a Minnesota law that prohibited minors from purchasing or renting video games bearing a "Mature" or "Adult Only" rating. However, all major chains refuse to carry AO-rated games and enforce the checking of IDs for M-rated games.

Sources

• Violent video games free speech?
• Flagship study says violent games make people relaxed