Reagan was a gamer^{TM
(Now in T-Shirt form!)} 

I thought I’d contribute to Maki’s argument from Friday with a comic of my own.

Video games don’t cause violence, they package the dopamine release of real world violence into a form that can be consumed and enhanced without guilt. Just like books, plays, movies, comics and television before them. We enjoy and crave violence. You don’t have to like the idea but from an evolutionary point of view it’s neither difficult to believe nor hard to understand. Back in the day it would have been pretty useful while trying to chase off a potential mating rival or protecting your clan, and guess who’s passing on their genes: the ape with a bashed in head or the one making sweet love to the furry spoils? One thing to keep in mind however is that through the aid of our cerebral cortex, high brain functions, ability for abstract thought and our reasoning faculties we live broken free from the clutches of natural selection. We are no longer the impulsive slaves we once were. We might not desire offspring (nor need the snots) but we still want to have sex, so we use contraception. We don’t need extra calories but we still crave cheesecake, so we use artificial sweeteners. We don’t live in small clans with reciprocal altruism but still have the desire to help each other, so we do charity work. So maybe, because we get to engage in it, video games are Violence-Condoms, or Rage-Dildos (though I hasten to differentiate this idea from catharsis and the hydraulic model of the brain, neither of which I subscribe to. But that’s also a whole other post).

I play video games all the time, and I haven’t killed anyone.

Yet.

This post was brought to you by Erbium (Er).

Extra internet points to anyone who noticed that the sprite I referenced in the comic is Small-Mario and would not, in fact, be able to break bricks. Ugh, my balls just undropped.