When legislation becomes catharsis

Finally, there might be some cathartic or educational benefits associated with many video games. From the Bible to Beowulf to Batman, depictions of violence have been used not only to teach lessons, but also to allow people - including children - to engage in a sort of escapism that can have a therapeutic effect on the human psyche.

Adam Thierer missed one of the best explanations for why people advocate the regulation of video game content. It is a form of escapism in and of itself for many, typically older, Americans. They are escaping the reality that violent people are that way by nature, and that nurture has very little impact on changing an aggressive nature.

Healthy societies throughout the history of human civilization have recognized the propensity of young men to engage in armed struggle and regarded it as a useful tool for safety and stability. It is the weakened, failing, emasculated civilizations that have always come to fear this aspect of young men. A society that seeks to stifle it, rather than release it in constructive and harmless ways, is a society that has grown afraid of the very tendencies in young men that make them able to fight wars for the defense of the civilization.

Like many young men, I have a tendency toward aggression, not pacifism. I like my video games violent and mildly sexual. I enjoy video games where the objective is to go to war, kill people in horrific ways (chainsaw or rocket launcher is the usual method) and I like seeing things blow up. Ironically, most young men share this exact same attitude toward video games. Why else would Halo, Quake, Unreal, * Wolfenstein and other first person shooters be so popular?

The ones you have to be worried about are not the ones like us that get giddy over seeing another player get blown up by a missile, but the ones who cannot get giddy over that because they are the ones who are not finding any constructive outlet for their male aggression. There's a very simple rule to follow for diagnosing these types. Those that cannot laugh or cheer at fantasy are the ones who typically have a hard time understanding subconsciously that it is in fact fantasy.