Father Raymond DeSouza has his own entry on Wikipedia, so perhaps he is more important than me and I have no right to complain here. However, there’s a difference between stupid commentary and intolerable commentary, and this crap falls into the latter like a baseball player cleanly sliding across home plate. In his column for Canada’s conservative National Post, he writes:
I learned the truth about video games the hard way, and so this is the lesson I offer for free: Don’t play video games. Don’t own them. And for the sake of all that is good and holy, don’t buy them for your children…
Since [deleting Tetris] I have never played another video game. It’s too dangerous. Video games take what is most precious — time and thought. And they are making kids fat.
Video games are like a black hole into which time disappears…They are the crack cocaine of the electronic world…
Did I mention that far too many video games celebrate graphic violence, multifarious delinquency and borderline pornography? I don’t have to. Tetris had none of that, and it was deadly enough.
You’re wrong, Ray. Wrong. The reasons why abound, but the most glaring one is that you’ve never played a game since Tetris. There is something about the religious extreme that seems to encourage judgement without proper experience to base one’s opinion on, and this is no exception. Also — Tetris is “deadly?” How? Did the red blocks remind you too much of the blood of Christ?
This is unacceptable for a greater reason, however, and it will be the one least discussed in response to this tripe: Video games have saved a lot of lives. For me, it turned me from a lonely kid into a happy one, helping me through times in my life that other wise would have been dark were it not for the friends I made both in games and because of them. Likely, I’m one of hundreds of thousands that will tell you that story.
Lesson to take away, kids: Closed mindedness increases the chances that people will pray for you to die in a fire.
[Via GamePolitics — Thanks Justin!]
