I’ve never heard of M.I.A before, but this story makes her sound like a silly person. She’s some singer/political activist and she believes that violent videogames are teaching children to be violent and preparing them to go to war. She even said that, having seen real violence herself in Sri Lanka, she doesn’t know whether her experiences are worse than these videogames or not. Seriously.
“I don’t know which is worse. The fact that I saw it in my life has maybe given me lots of issues, but there’s a whole generation of American kids seeing violence on their computer screens and then getting shipped off to Afghanistan,” she claims. “They feel like they know the violence when they don’t. Not having a proper understanding of violence, especially what it’s like on the receiving end of it, just makes you interpret it wrong and makes inflicting violence easier.”
Funny that she mentioned Afghanistan. By all accounts, there are some pretty violent bastards out in the Middle East, many of them very young males, and something tells me they didn’t get their tendencies from videogames. I should think somebody claiming to have firsthand experience of violence would have the maturity to realize that videogames have never been needed to encourage inhumanity, and that it’s something unfortunately hardwired into our basic evolutionary nature. Of course, it’s just quicker to say that videogames are doing it, isn’t it?
Blaming a media source for violence is an easy ticket. It’s intellectually lazy to do so, and you’d think we could expect more from a political activist who has had traumatic experiences herself. Apparently this M.I.A character would rather keep that easy ticket though. Shame.
