10 Idiotic Moral Panics Caused By Awesome Video Games

By Reggie Fells / May 5, 2013

Video games are a form of media that has rapidly expanded within the last two decades. We've gone from grainy 8 and 16-bit displays of Mario jumping on yet another tur- err, I mean Koopa, to the 64-bit Cloud drifting around through Final Fantasy VII , to the vast, chilly expanses of Skyrim in the latest iteration of The Elder Scrolls. Like all forms of media, controversy eventually rears its ugly head somewhere - movies, television, magazines, and websites all are frequently the target of criticism regarding a subject that went too far, was expressed in a crude manner, etc. Sometimes, this isn't entirely misplaced, as video games can be fairly naughty when they want to be. BUT... there are plenty of cases where people made an epic mountain out of a insignificant (or misinterpreted) mole hill, and these are ten of those very cases...

10. Modern Warfare 2: "No Russian"

In the beginning to the AWESOME sequel to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, you take on the role of an undercover agent named PFC Allen, who is in a squad of heavily armed Russian terrorists. It is a major plot point that the leader, Vladimir Makarov, is going to incite war between America and Russia. How does he do it? You get off an elevator in a Russian airport, crowded with civilians, and open fire. This entire prologue sees your character march through the airport with these brutal men, mowing down civilians with an M240-B (picutre a rather large American machine gun), until the level's climatic end... where you get shot, revealing that Makarov was aware of the betrayal, and with a dead American conveniently there, Makarov succeeds and war soon follows. Critics were quick to jump on Infinity Ward, saying that the brutality in the opening level was exactly what desensitized kids to violence, and that setting a precedent for such trigger-happy events would definitely turn gamers into violent degenerates. Now, I'm not necessarily for merciless gunning down of any group of people, but A: neither me nor anybody I know nor anybody from my clan has turned into genocidal psychopaths, and I doubt anybody is going to play this level, just to immediately acquire a gun to go re-enact the scene. Games don't work that way. It's been said before: do you see Pac-Man players eating little pill-like dots and then running around dark areas full of colored lights!? ... oh, wait....