by J. Andrew Carmody

Created on: April 30, 2008   Last Updated: March 24, 2011

I'm sure that every gamer on this site is concerned about the whole issue of using video games as a scapegoat for pretty much everything that goes wrong in America. Kids shooting up schools? Must be Doom's fault. A couple of block-headed kids randomly firing Dad's shotgun and hitting the driver of a car? GTA. A horrible massacre at a southern college? That's all down to Counter-Strike, even though the shooter never played it, CT is still to blame since it's a video game and therefore a horrid pit of depravity and violence. Increases in spousal abuse and other forms of domestic violence? Must be Cooking Mama's fault. We've all seen more people railing about the evils of video games than I'm sure we'd care to count. From Jack Thompson on down to that crazy woman that lives on your block who tells you every time you play Postal, God kills a baby seal with a pipe wrench. The sad part of it is that almost this exact thing has happened before, and if human nature is any indication, it will happen again.

I'm getting close to the end of the book The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America by David Hajdu. It's an interesting read, but time and time again while reading about something in history I didn't know much about, but am interested in as a geek, I was struck by the parallels to the current flap over games. They had everything then that we have now; hysterical parents and parents' groups, politicians going on a blizzard of law-passing sprees, some of which were later struck down as unconstitutional, constant claims that comics are a leading cause of juvenile delinquency and the labeling of those that enjoy the medium as either children or idiots. Hell, they even had a media-whoring "expert" that was taken far too seriously by many people who made outrageous arguments that he backed up with pseudo-science, half-truths and scare tactics. Does all this sound familiar? Yeah, I thought so too. Let's just hope that this time, the whole debate doesn't end with the industry backing down and imposing crippling and puritanical self-censorship on its own product, leading to hundreds of people losing their jobs and never being able to work in their chosen field again. I'd like to think that won't happen, but there are times when I have my doubts.

It's been said again and again that those that don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Well, reading The Ten Cent Plague, it's obvious that we haven't learned a single, solitary thing. Like

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