Today’s Courant delivers the usual fear mongering headline to accompany the Joe Lieberman position on children and video games; Lieberman Defends Video-Game Money. The article goes on to describe all the donations that Lieberman received this past election cycle, and what a surprise to find not a single video game company listed! Instead David Lightman cites WWE, which is a promotion company based in Stamford that excels at selling the shock and awe of large wrestling personalities strutting in spandex. They package this spectacle in various media, including toys and the occasional video game. But to say the WWE is a video game company is like saying that The Courant is in the interactive media business since they manage to occasionally put out an interactive piece.

Liberman is not fan on video games, and has never been. The article summarizes his position accurately:

Lieberman remains a persistent watchdog and often a critic of industry efforts to market violent and sexually explicit games to children. “These games have become an assault on the value system and the structure of our society,” he said last year. “This is having a major effect on our children.”

But Lieberman is wrong, since he fails to account for some very basic human behaviors. Children are violent and have a long history of violent game past times that predate video games by a century or two. I submit; king of the mountain, dodge-ball, cops and robbers, cowboys and indians as the most common.

There is always someone trying to shove some fake ideal of morality by banning forms of escapist entertainment. American history is filled with pandering politicians with organizations with the word “decency” in them. Whether it’s movies, or television, or books or comic books, and now video games, they somehow think that limiting the creative freedom of artists is a victory. As a result, our entertainment is filled with people killing each other, but that’s okay because every victim and aggressor in the process of killing is fully clothed.

The reality is that with console video games costing $60, a ticket to a movie $10, cable or satellite television $60/month there is an easy way for parents to shield their children from whatever prurient debauchery they so desire, it’s called don’t buy it. This revolutionary concept doesn’t require anyone to tell creators what to produce. It simply puts the responsibility on the consumption of entertainment back where it belongs, with the parents.