Normally I'd let Kevin have the last word on conservative columnist Katherine Kersten's latest rant; I'd be too busy kicking prostitutes in the teeth to get my underdoodles in a twist over the ravings of one more mentally deficient sermonizer. But it's reportedly several months before a PC version of GTA IV comes out (if ever), so I have tons of free time.

Also, I'm armed with a new copy of Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do (By Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson, and hereafter referred to as Kutner & Olson). It's a great book, one that any gamer should read (and one I'll likely quote many times here in the future). It discusses the violent-media studies of the past and details a new set of studies performed by the authors, a pair of academics with no previous game experience or ties to the games industry. And I need to justify expensing the book, so let's get ready to rumble.

ROUND 1

Ms. Kersten attests:

Adolescents who play violent video games tend to be more hostile, to argue more with teachers, to get into more physical fights, and to do more poorly in school, one national study reports.

Not surprisingly, Kutner & Olson's studies back that statement completely. But like 99% of mass-media blowhards, Ms. Kersten was too busy reading her Bible to pay attention during Intro to Statistics, so she totally missed that lecture on correlation not implying causation. She should've known it's just as likely that previously troubled kids are drawn to video games for the same reason previously troubled kids are drawn to ICP and setting cats on fire. These things are expressions of their problems, not causes.

And the role of video games in the life of troubled youth is not a subject Kutner & Olson ignore; in fact, they deal with the problem head-on, debunking the myth of video game addiction. To loosely paraphrase the book: if your kid is playing 10 hours a day, it's probably a sign of clinical depression (likely caused by your terrible parenting) and he's drowning that depression in video games. Maybe you should look into getting him a therapist instead of throwing out his Xbox and locking him in the basement.

ROUND 2

Ms. Kersten soldiers on:

Research confirms that violent media increase young people's aggressive thoughts and behavior and decrease their self-control and the inclination to help others.

The studies Ms. Kersten is implying she's read purport to measure "aggression," a term that can be applied to behaviors from asking your boss for a raise to killing babies for fun and profit. Saying video games increase "aggression" is pretty meaningless, because aggression can be appropriate or inappropriate, healthy or unhealthy.

Many of these studies, according to Kutner & Olson, use abstractions, like noise blasts leveled by the test subject against an unseen victim, in order to test aggression. Some of these show a tendency towards using longer or louder noise blasts in subjects who've recently experienced violent media. The problem is there's no indication of what this actually means for real-world behaviors; there's also no indication that the "effect" lasts more than a few minutes.

Other studies the pair examine involved observing playground dynamics and measuring increases in aggression. But here again, Kutner & Olson say nothing definitive has been found: increased aggression in playing tag isn't necessarily a bad thing. Any increased "aggression" could just as easily be a simple increase in competitiveness rather than a roiling seed of mental disorder planted by the cancerous claw of the games industry.

FINISH HER

Katherine Kersten likes to extol the virtues of religion, unless the religion in question is Islam--which is why this last bit made me giggle like a fifth-grader with a dirty magazine. Kutner & Olson quote a study where subjects were given the text of a God-commanded genocide from the book of Judges (19-21). Here's a sample quote:

And the congregation sent thither twelve thousand men of the valiantest, and commanded them, saying, Go and smite the inhabitants of Jabeshgilead with the edge of the sword, with the women and the children. And this is the thing that ye shall do, Ye shall utterly destroy every male, and every woman that hath lain by man.

And another, just cuz:

And I took my concubine, and cut her in pieces, and sent her throughout all the country of the inheritance of Israel: for they have committed lewdness and folly in Israel.

I get it, I get it. Throwing a hand-grenade into a crowd of pedestrians is just so horrifying--but murdering women and children is totally cool, when it's in the Bible. Running over a hooker is a shocking affront to the American character, but butchering your sex slave just to prove a point is saintly, when it's in the Bible.

As you might've guessed by now, regardless of their religious inclination, test subjects who read the passage demonstrated the same sort of increased aggression (measured with the same noise-blast test) as in other violent-media studies. The sad truth is that for sheer senseless violence, GTA IV can't hold a candle to Ms. Kersten's beloved Old Testament.