Earlier this week a a suicide bomber detonated their explosives in the crowded arrival terminal of Domodedovo airport in Moscow, an act that has been widely condemned as terrorism. The next day, I was alerted to this article in the New York Times.

That’s right. It’s blame video games time again, and Modern Warfare 2 has been chosen for scapegoating. Apparently the Russian media is pointing to a controversial mission in the game where your character, deep undercover with a terrorist group, takes part in a attack. Let’s look at the similarities:

• Both attacks happen at a Russian airport.

Whoops. That’s it. You might as well blame the Oklahoma City bombing on Die Hard because, you know, they both happened in buildings.  If terrorist groups need to copy video games to plot out attacks, they need to fire their idea guys, and we’ve already won. The Russian conclusion is a pretty weak leap in logic, and more likely to be an even weaker interference play against similarly dubious accusations that security ignored several warning signs. But that’s getting political.

We live in a great time where being a geek is cool and playing D&D isn’t a sign of social incompetence. Well, maybe for us it still is, but we don’t judge! For every anecdote about a loner kid who played Doom in his parent’s basement before shooting up his school, there are millions of perfectly normal, heck, better than normal gamers out there.  Really awesome gamers. Video games are a hobby and now more than ever, an art form only a few steps away from film in its scope and execution. It’s 2011, lets take them out of the equation like we did with stamp collecting when we look at the doings of bad people. Seriously, stamp collecting is bad news bears, but I don’t judge…

Maybe Roger Ebert thinks games will never be art, but we’ll see about that when he finally buckles and puts in his 54th hour playing Mass Effect 7. But when Patrick Stewart gets around to it? It’s all over. You’ll be crapping your pants on the other side of the screen, hearing him taunt you in his thespian tenor, “Your scrambling about has amused me. But it was futile in the end. You have my thanks!”

Some lighter news: I just learned from entomologist blogger, Bug Girl, that the NCSU Insect Museum is having its 4th Annual Hexapod Haiku Challenge. For those who don’t know, had I known better in high school, I probably would have become an entomologist or at least an entomological illustrator. I’ll be taking the Haiku Challenge as an excuse to draw more of the little creatures that fueled my naturalistic curiosity in my childhood. I mean seriously, I was really close to being a scientist. Ugh, youth is wasted on the young and clueless.

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