Another distraction from Mr. Hugo, but what would the world be without distractions?
In any event, Reuters picked up a story recently about a movement in Venezuelan parliament to ban violent video games, and can you take a guess why? Well they foster violent behavior, of course. Where the Venezuelan parliament intends to go with this is no doubt where Europe tried to go in 2007 and where the United States (including none other than the current Secretary of State) tried to go intermittently throughout the 1990s and even into the current decade.
As the Economist pointed out in an examination of the issue in 2005:
The opposition to gaming springs largely from the neophobia that has pitted the old against the entertainments of the young for centuries. Most gamers are under 40, and most critics are non-games-playing over-40s. But what of the specific complaints--that games foster addiction and encourage violence?
There's no good evidence for either. On addiction, if the worry is about a generally excessive use of screen-based entertainment, critics should surely concern themselves about television rather than games: American teenage boys play video games for around 13 hours a week (girls for only five hours), yet watch television for around 25 hours a week. As to the minority who seriously overdo it, research suggests that they display addictive behaviour in other ways too. The problem, in other words, is with them, not with the games.
This assessment begs a couple of questions in the Venezuelan context:
First, if television is the greater concern, what are we to make of President Chávez's weekly program "Aló Presidente", which features the man himself conversing to la nación for hours on end?
Second, coming back to this initiative of the Venezuelan Parliament:
Venezuelan lawmakers are moving to outlaw the sale of violent videogames and toys in an attempt to fight rampant crime in the country.
...
Opponents of President Hugo Chavez say 100,000 people have been murdered since he assumed office in February 1999. The government says its opponents and Venezuela's private media exaggerate the problem.
If anti-Chavistas and private media are exaggerating the problem, then why ban the games?
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