Let’s All Blame Video Games For Society’s Ills!
As an American born at the end of the Satanic Panic who attended high school during the Columbine shooting, I’ve spent pretty much my entire stupid life hearing that games were a huge driver of society’s ills. I’d say ‘video games’ but my mom seemed to believe that if I played Dungeons & Dragons, I would become a Satan worshipper.
Which is weird because, one, I’m not that cool, and two, I barely had enough friends to get a D&D game going, let alone be invited to a theoretical sex cult. I wasn’t even cool enough for older kids to push drugs on me. You think people wearing hooded cloaks and carrying zig-zaggy knives are sending me invites? Cuz they ain’t.
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Unfortunately, as an American, I’ve also become used to terrible shit being conveniently blamed on the wrong things. It’s baked into our national character. Guns don’t cause gun deaths, mental health does. But our mental healthcare system is too expensive to fix, so it can’t be that either - it’s gotta be the rap music and video games. Because most of our politicians were born before the Germans surrendered in World War 2, the discourse around violence in this country is mostly done by old men who would get shot out of an easy chair by rock ’n’ roll.
Every shooting we have is fucking tragic. All of them. If you don’t live in the US, it probably seems weird that our response to any shooting is to name another American city that had a shooting and go, “See? It’s clearly not a problem in this country because it is a problem elsewhere in this country!” Of course, this sibling-road-trip back-seat-fighting “she started it!” shit always points to a different culture - whether that be economic, sexual,
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