I guess I should start this column out slowly and work to a point, but that would require me to have foresight and plan things. Seeing as I lack both those skills, I give you the first column of many to come!!

I guess a good place to really fire up is the topic of parents that don’t understand the ESRB.

In the last few years a good majority of what I call ‘home bodies with nothing better to do than ruin good games’ have come out saying that video games are destroying the moral fabric of society. To this I laugh, quite a bit actually.

Yes, games are violent, bloody, filled with curse words, even nudity, but so is real life. A video game is essentially just a collection of coding on a disc. Last time I checked a cd can’t force kids to go out and steal cars like in Grand Theft Auto. What it really boils down to isn’t the programmers, even the company that produces the game. It’s those parents that will go out buying their 13 year old GTA and expect nothing will go wrong.

As anyone may guess, I play a lot of games and I’d like to think they haven’t had any nasty side effects on me. The big reason behind it was that growing up my Dad sat and would watch my brothers and I play our games.If it was a violent game he would casually turn off the game until he’d explained why Mario can do all those things and I couldn’t.

If you parents out there want to do something about it instead of trying to get games banned, maybe talking to the kid is a better idea?

Now let’s all sit back and imagine the case of a game. See in the bottom corner there’s a weird looking white thing? That would be the content rating that really important people put there so you don’t buy Silent Hill for a 13 year old. There’s even a site on the net that will explain it nice and neatly for the parent, so we avoid the protest outside the local game stores.

Like I said, games aren’t a source of supreme evil that exists solely to destroy mankind. If anything video games are a great release. Where else can you sit down after a long day at work and take out all the frustration on a few waves of zombies?

-In gaming I trust