I’m good, I’ve been stupidly busy and often retreating to the world of Guild Wars once home to relax, neglecting the site as you can see!

How you doing SiD?

Today I was awoken by 2 Jehovah’s Witnesses which didn’t bother me, infact I have never met a bad mannered or inconsiderate one yet. I did open the door wearing nothing more than Khaki pants (which were pulled on whilst bouncing down the stairs on one foot, which gave them a shock.

They began asking what I did for a living, which I told them was based around video games design, needless to say we came on to the topic of Videogames.

They brought up the matters of both Resistance and Manhunt 2, to which I said both were nothing more than fairytales made up by media running amok. It seems true that the media are very negative, very rarely are they ever positive about something, not just video games. We’ve had Mobile Phones giving you tumours. Freerunning a disrespect to the environment. Downloading services resulting in porn for kids (think PSP). Movies creating unstable people and obviously video games turning people into maniacal murderers.

Needless to say it’s the media making a mountain from a molehill, using buzzwords and none-factual ‘evidence’ to stake a claim that ‘x’ is bad for you. I remember the media, as you pointed out, claiming false evidence for the murder of Stefan Pakeerah over the killer being motivated by Manhunt, when it was infact Stefan Pakeerah who owned the game and not the murderer. We have also had the washington snipers trained by Halo and America’s Army being used to de-sensitize soldiers before going into war.

As I pointed out to the Witnesses, video games are a mode of escapism, they do not turn average people into killers, anybody who is willing to kill needlessly already has something wrong with them, it’s just an ideal excuse for the media to blame *something* for the murders to the uneducated, uninformed public out there who don’t know any better than to believe every single word a negative and bias media tells them.