Vid games: violence? Nah -characters are overcompensates

There's a lot of moral panic and other sillinesses about video games. This article does a nice job of examining what some of the bigger-picture issues are rather than the shallow-knee-jerkers.
For example, a bit of truth-telling, getting past the cultural mythology:

games are inherently wussy. The stereotype of the bespectacled dweeby gamer is an inaccurate cliche, but there's no denying games are far from a beefy pursuit. Which is why shooty-fighty games go out of their way to disguise that. Every pixel of Modern Warfare 3 oozes machismo. It's all chunky gunmetal, booming explosions and stubbly men blasting each other's legs off. Yet consider what genteel skills the game itself requires. To succeed, you need to be adept at aiming a notional cursor and timing a series of button-pushes. It's about precision and nimble fingers. Just like darning a sock in a hurry. Or creating tapestry against the clock.

Okay, so some of the comments can be a bit catty; but I guess that's part of trying to puncture the bubble of myth, but it makes a good point:

Behind the military manoeuvrings, the human story revolves around people backstabbing, bitching, making catty asides, breaking off friendships and betraying one another. Ignore the gunfire and it's like a soap opera set in a ballet school.

The disappointment is that this is about as far as the critique goes. That last quote seemed to promise a further consideration of the kinds of relating and assumptions that are being modelled and fostered. And then it would be a mere hop and a skip to noting that the metanarrative hooks into the myth of redemptive violence and considering how bad that is as a model for interpersonal relationships ...
Ah well, it looks like I may have done it after all.

Charlie Brooker: The trouble with video games isn't the violence. It's that most of the characters are dicks | Comment is free | The Guardian