Goddamnit Blago! GET THE FUCK OVER IT!
By Sam Bakken in News on Sep 20, 2005 2:53AM
Here is our favorite quote from Blago's letter:
"Our society already restricts children’s access to things like tobacco, alcohol and pornography because we know they pose a serious risk to child health and development. We should do the same for what is one of the fastest-growing threats to children in this modern age: violent and sexually explicit video games."
With each passing day, Blagojevich sounds more like a fundamentalist preacher. Ever since Blago started talking about video games and their horrible side effects, we thought his condemnation wrong-headed. But then he wouldn't fucking stop and we started to wonder if video games really could incite youth riots and orgies. But then we read an article discussing the video game debate in an August issue of The Economist.
We're in love with the article's second-to-last paragraph and will quote it in full after the jump.
"Another analogy can be made between games and music—specifically, with the emergence of rock and roll in the 1950s. Like games today, it was a new art form that was condemned for encouraging bad behaviour among young people. Some records were banned from the radio, and others had their lyrics changed. Politicians called for laws banning the sending of offending records by post. But now the post-war generation has grown up, rock and roll is considered to be harmless. Rap music, or gaming, is under attack instead. 'There's always this pattern,' says Mr Williams of the University of Illinois. 'Old stuff is respected, and new stuff is junk.' Novels, he points out, were once considered too lowbrow to be studied at university. Eventually the professors who believed this retired. Novels are now regarded as literature. 'Once a generation has its perception, it is pretty much set,' says Mr Williams. 'What happens is that they die.'"