By Thomas L. McDonald

Personal and parental responsibility is a semi-ongoing theme of this column, and I’ve read so many attacks on games by half-assed politicians looking to score cheap political points that I’ve spent all my outrage. Well, almost all of it.

The latest idiocy to pop across my screen was an article from Seattle headlined “Bill Would Hold Game Makers Accountable for Players' Actions.” I saw this only minutes after a Drudge headline that read “Microsoft Robots to Watch Kids,” leading me to wonder if Bill Gates was deploying his killbots to monitor groups of game-playing kids and weed out the campers and spawn killers. If only.

The article was about a Washington state House bill that would “hold the makers and sellers of violent video games liable if someone under 17 years old commits a crime, due in any part, to playing the game.” (KOMO 1000 News, 3/1/05, emphasis added) Bill Hanson of the Washington Police and Sheriff's Association thinks this is a swell idea: “If you sit up and watch this and play these games over and over again... it seems that this is alright to walk up and hit a police officer over the head with a bat.”

Seems all right to whom? This has never, and will never, happen. Ever. And the person who claims it did happen is looking for a cheap excuse and a free pass from the core requirement of being a human being: personal responsibility. Games are pretty flimsy things to bear the weight of responsibility for civilization’s collapse.
Look, conservatives will continue flog the issue to score points with their base, but they know the bottom line is decided by the marketplace. Liberals will hitch up their First Amendment diapers and continue to oppose these half-hearted gestures, thus scoring points with their base. Editorial writers will continue to weigh in on both sides of the issue, thus maintaining job security.

I’ve already spent my time fretting about the latest cryptofascist boogeyman of the liberal imagination, whether his current name is Ed Meese or Pat Robertson or Joe Lieberman. Political poseurs come and go, but porn and M-rated games endure, with a shocking paucity of baseball-bat attacks to their credit. To be honest, the notion that games induce crime is much less important to me than the far more immediate concern I have for spawn campers, so let’s hope the MSKillbots are deployed sooner rather than later.

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