proanim, don’t get drawn into his circular logic. As with religion, he has already made up his mind and you will never get your point across.
He is the type of person who believes the Bible is true because the Bible itself says it is true.

You can point out 10 obvious flaws in his logic and you will only get met with 10 ridiculous excuses. Excuses tailored towards letting him believe the last 10 years of his life (the approximate amount of time it takes for one to begin an idea and then solidly believe in it) were not the waste that they were.

I am only going to point out the most obvious among them: How his point-of-view defeats itself.

Hi, I am L. Spiro, and I played violent video games as a child. I grew up with Mortal Kombat and I put more of my life into Killer Instinct than I will openly admit.
I have only met my father a few times and I never really saw my mother much as I grew up. I was raised by video games. Violent video games.

And here I am today, traveling the world making video games. In fact I have just gone through my worst days in recent times, as the person I intended to marry for the last 2 years just got married. And not to me.
I am going through the normal grieving process through which everyone else goes. I have been consumed by tears for the last few days.

But did I do a 12-hit combo on that person? Did I take up guns and start shooting people?
In fact I didn’t even post about it on Facebook, and if you have seen my GameDev.net posts during the last 3 days you would not have a clue that this kind of drama was happening in the background.


It has nothing to do with how I was raised. Nothing to do with the games I played.
Nothing to do with my parents.
The only factor at play is my frontal lobe. If life deals you a good one you can grow up to be a great person no matter what hardships you face as a child.
If life deals you a bad one you really don’t have much of a chance. Whether it be games or something else, you only gain satisfaction from the bad experiences.
That is how his point-of-view defeats itself. Your frontal lobe can get just as much good out of games—and everything else—as it can bad. Games are an easy target so these kinds of people target them, unable to muster anything more. But ultimately:
#1: Once games are eliminated and you see the same rate of crime, what will your next target be?
#2: Why acknowledge only the bad that people gain from games? Why never acknowledge the good? Someone seems biased!

Instead of telling developers what to do why don’t you tell kids to get better frontal lobes? Frontal lobes will chew on any experience and magnify either the good or the bad.

Bad people will be bad without video games.

Good people will be good even with bad video games.

Deal with this reality check instead dragging your drama into our forums.

L. Spiro

What I have noticed about the recent mass shootings is that the people responsible, regardless of age, had mental issues that were either known and ignored or not known at the time. Most of the children who have committed these acts were tormented by other children in school. The fact that most played violent video games or watched violent movies is irrelevant. They had issues that were not being addressed and snapped.

I am ever amazed at how we are so willing to point fingers at something else when the actual issue is too difficult to address. "Violent media is the issue! NO, guns are the issue! No, guns and violent media are both equally the issue. Ad nauseam."

The actual issue is that parents are no longer closely monitoring the well being of their children. Children are allowed to live their lives in secret. Parents often know little about the personal lives of their children. Bullying is practically ignored and responding to a bully will typically get the child that is bullied in more trouble than the bully. The end result is a situation where a bullied child has no choice but to repress the hurt and anger. This is terribly unhealthy. When mental issues get involved, all the worse. Mental health is of virtually no importance in today's society. People are walking the streets criminally insane because no one is willing to do anything about it. We don't want to force them to take medications. We don't want to institutionalize until they commit a crime. We let them slip through the cracks.

The people that commit these acts are going to commit these acts regardless if we stop violent media and destroy all guns.