Film Fatale

Do violent videogames desensitize kids to death and destruction?

As Wired magazine's Tom Standage slyly points out in the April 2006 issue, Grand Theft Auto and its ilk aren't the first forms of entertainments to attract the ire of moralizing politicians, preachers and parents.

"Young people embrace an activity. Adults condemn it. The kids grow up, no better or worse than their elders, and the moral panic subsides. Then the whole cycle starts over."

Read about parental and political freakouts over sensational novels, the waltz, the telephone and other now-tame crazes that failed to eradicate our grandparents and great-grandparents' generations.

My favorite condemnation:

"This new form of entertainment has gone far to blast maidenhood...Depraved adults with candies and pennies beguile children with the inevitable result...God alone knows how many are leading dissolute lives begun at the 'moving pictures.'"

-from the Annual Report of the New York Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 1909

Consider yourself warned.