{"id":172,"date":"2008-02-20T23:53:04","date_gmt":"2008-02-21T03:53:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wildbluesky.com\/?p=172"},"modified":"2008-02-20T23:53:04","modified_gmt":"2008-02-21T03:53:04","slug":"playing-the-blame-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wildbluesky.com\/?p=172","title":{"rendered":"Playing the Blame Game"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m assuming that at least two out of the three people that read this website know that I’m slightly<\/em> into video games. Just a little. For the third… well… there’s actually a category here called “Games” and I talk about them a lot – try to keep up. As for the rest of you, I’ll just assume you stumbled onto this site by googling ‘balki’ or ‘broken leg’ (seriously, those are my top two search results referring people to this site)<\/p>\n

I do have a point here, I’m just high on gun powder. (No really, I was at the gun range tonight)<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.msnbc.msn.com\/id\/23204875\/<\/a> Finally! Someone gets it. Ok, so the end of the article strays a little from video games and goes onto blaming McDonalds for your kid being fat but the gist of it is pretty dead on. Jack Thompson is a media whore and video games are not destroying our children. If your child does something stupid, asinine, destructive, disrespectful, and\/or illegal – take a good hard look in the mirror before you start looking for something to blame. I played more than my fair share of Doom, Duke Nukem, and Quake in my younger days – I never once thought about shooting up my school.<\/p>\n

Not-so-funnily enough, while Thompson’s misinfomation-laced pronouncements claim that the shooter \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Seung-Hui Cho \u00e2\u20ac\u201d had a passion for violent video games, a governor-ordered review<\/a> of that horrific incident found no connection whatsoever with games. Instead, what the review panel found was a young man with a long history of psychiatric illness and a student who fell through the cracks of a deeply flawed mental health system. In fact, according to the the extensive 260-page report, it’s unclear if Cho \u00e2\u20ac\u201d who was passionate about books (gasp<\/em>!) and not video games \u00e2\u20ac\u201d ever played anything more aggressive than the kid-friendly “Sonic the Hedgehog.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When did everyone stop taking responsibility for themselves (or their children) and start looking for crap to blame?!\u00c2\u00a0 I first starting to notice it when “D&D” was responsible for anything bad that happened.\u00c2\u00a0 Anyone remember that?\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe we should blame 9\/11 on Microsoft’s Flight Simulator.<\/p>\n

“Why did I run from the cops?\u00c2\u00a0 Well, I watched too much Dukes of Hazzard<\/em> when I was a kid, and thought I could jump a bridge and hide my car behind a tree”\u00c2\u00a0 And G.I. Joe taught me that I could just do cart-wheels and no bullets would touch me.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m assuming that at least two out of the three people that read this website know that I’m slightly into video games. Just a little. For the third… well… there’s actually a category here called “Games” and I talk about … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wildbluesky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wildbluesky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wildbluesky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wildbluesky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wildbluesky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wildbluesky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wildbluesky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wildbluesky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wildbluesky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}