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Dateline: Norway. A 12-year-old boy and his sister are walking through the woods populated by one or more flocks of Moosen, when suddenly one enraged Møøse attacks the pair. Thinking quickly, Hans Jørgen Olsen (the boy), screamed at the feral beast to distract it from his sister, then dropped to the ground and played dead.

 "Just like you learn at level 30 in World of Warcraft," quoth the young Norwegian.

You might say this is evidence of video games' positive effect on children, but we've received word that the Moose in question began his enraged spree of violence after playing twelve hours of GTA.

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According to this local news report, a southern Florida youth didn't take too kindly to his mother's insistence that he stop playing video games.

The name of the game he was playing is "Halo 3," which must be an independent title as I've never heard of it. The name of the game is in the headline and mentioned twice in the article so it must be important. I mean, it'd be ridiculous to just say, "Kid punches his mom because he's an unbalanced freak."

Anyway, from what I can make of this article, the kid's mother tells him to turn off the game and go to sleep. Kid says no. Mom turns off the Xbox 360. Kid turns it back on. Mom takes off the WiFi adapter (I'm guessing, at least. The article says the "air card" was removed. From the context, wifi adapter seems apt) and hides it so the kid can't play online anymore. Kid freaks out and rampages through the house to find the adapter and somewhere in the process decks his mom in the face.

Whether or not he yelled, "Boom! Headshot!" afterwards is unknown.

The kid then runs up to his room and locks the door. The parents call the police, who get into the bedroom via a spare key and try to arrest the kid. The kid fights back and pops one of the officers in the mouth before being subdued.

He was charged with battery, domestic violence and battery on a law-enforcement officer.

So what lessons can be taken from this? Don't take the wireless adapter out of your kid's Xbox? Don't punch your mom and then run to your bedroom like a ninny? For the love of God, don't hit a police officer?

No, the real lesson here is that nobody would have found this story if Halo 3 wasn't mentioned in the headline, yet Halo 3 has nothing to do with the story at all. Were he engaged in some other game, I doubt the headline would read "Donkey Konga player punches mother..." In all, a glorious triumph of sensationalism.

I hope this kid's lawyer knows how to effectively blame the video game.

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This article was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor.

On Monday, April 16th, the deadliest shooting in American history took place at Virginia Tech. In the handful of days since this tragedy, people across the nation and world are trying to make sense of it, to rationalize it, to recover from it, or to forget it. A few people, though, are missing no opportunity to exploit human suffering and death to increase their exposure or legitimize their own self-satisfying crusades.

Personally, since I heard about the shooting on Monday I've had my head between my legs in hopes that if I ignored the bad things in the world they'd go away. This was all going well enough, until a few voices rose above the blur of blame-this-blame-that talking heads and dragged me to the surface.

People have been blaming video games for the world's problems for years now, so it's become hard to care or even notice when the latest demagogue wiggles his way into the spotlight long enough to do so. This situation, however, is different. This shooting has affected almost everyone in the country in some way, and people are actually looking for answers; so when Jack Thompson and Phil McGraw spout off their ill-conceived garbage about video games being at blame for a psychopath's murder of over 30 students and faculty members, people might just listen.

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This article was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor.

On Wednesday, June 14, 2006, the Committee on Energy and Commerce, a subcommittee of the US House or Representatives, held a hearing titled (why do these things need titles?), "Violent and Explicit Video Games: Informing Parents and Protecting Children."

As you may have heard, the outcome of this event was not entirely in the best interest of gaming as a whole. The gist of their conclusion, after questioning the head of the ESA, the President of the ESRB, the Director of the FTC's Consumer Protection bureau, Wal-Mart's VP of merchandising, and three game/health experts, was that violent videogames are akin to pornography in their harm for children and that the ESRB is at fault for letting something like Hot Coffee (which was a terribly isolated incident that would be nearly impossible to reproduce) defile our children.

I watched most of the hearing live, before the video feed suddenly cut out once things started getting good, and throughout the whole hour and a half of viewing I was consistently flabbergasted by the ignorance and misinformation that the Senators conducting the hearing were dealing with.

It is extremely apparent that these people, the ones wielding the power of the entire Legislative branch of our government, have little to no experience in the actual "world" of game playing. Every bit of evidence or material they used in their favor was misrepresentative, illogical, or flat-out wrong.
Congressman Stearns

Take, for example, the video clips that the Senators showed after each of the attending introduced themselves. Congressman Cliff Stearns (R. Florida) prefaced the video with something to the tune of, "this should give you an example of the type of material found videogames today." A series of clips then played, mostly from various Grand Theft Auto games, one from San Andreas where the player flew a plane into a building, another from the same game where the player stood on a street corner and shot civilians from a distance with a sniper rifle (even, gasp, police officers), and then a cutscene from Vice City where the main characters complete a drug transaction in a comically farcical way.

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This article was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. It was written by Evan Lahti.

Late last month, Texas politician and gubernatorial candidate Star Locke proposed a $10,000 per-abortion tax on medical clinics and a 50 percent tax on soda that "contains added glucose, fructose, and sucrose." Likewise, Locke suggested a 50 percent "grease tax" on "all food prepared by deep-frying or cooking in any form of oil or grease for human consumption." Locke justified his radical tariffs, stating to the Amarillo Globe: "I take the position that the founding fathers took: that the power to tax is the power to destroy."

One can only imagine the ensuing riots at speculation of a $9 quarter-pounder, but though Locke's levies are illogical (if not unconstitutional), one final suggestion topped the cake: to pass a 100 percent sales tax on violent videogames into law.

While gamers shouldn't fret about paying $100 for the next Halo or Grand Theft Auto update, they should worry that Locke's "solution" is indicative of a growing trend in American politics - more than ever, legislators are pushing for laws that illegalize the sale of violent and mature videogames to minors.

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