Games get the blame...again.

Britain has been rocked in the last few days by the scenes of rioting and looting in and around the city of London. Originally sparked by the shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, violence has spread through the capital like a cancer, fed by young thugs with seemingly nothing better to do than throw street furniture at the police and set fire to hard working peoples businesses. Young men and women walk the streets in broad daylight, no effort made to hide their identities as they loot Footlocker, Ladbrokes and Sainsbury's.

Unfortunately, certain parts of the media have decided once again, and in the most predictable of moves, to blame Video games for all of this. Yesterdays edition of the Evening Standard printed a story in which they were at great pains to link Video games to the riots, even quoting an unnamed police officer who laid the blame for all of these events firmly at the feet of Rockstar Games.

"These are bad people who did this. Kids out of control. When I was young it was all Pacman and board games. Now they're playing Grand Theft Auto and want to live it for themselves."

There's no doubt in my mind that these are bad people that are doing this, and even less doubt in my mind that some of them have played GTA, but to claim that it is a major contributing factor to the riots that initially started in Tottenham is a massive stretch.

Unsurprisingly the Evening standard has since changed the content of the story so that a passage that read "Children as young as ten, inspired by video game, among the looters." is nowhere to be seen. Sensationalism from a newspaper to sell copy? probably. A complete lack of understanding as to how Video games actually affect people? Certainly.

Let's not forget that twenty odd years ago the Video Nasty controversy was in full effect, Films like Childsplay were blamed for many violent crimes much in the same way that Video games are today. Just take a second to think about this though, have any of the Saw movies been blamed for violent crimes or murders in the last decade? I don't think so.

Video games are the big bad bogeyman that parents like to blame for their children's' bad behaviour, just like VHS tapes of bad horror films were the scapegoats all those years ago. Video games can definitely give people ideas. Games can emotionally affect people in good or bad ways, Shadow of the Colossus is a great example of that, But if you want to blame GTA for little Timmy turning into a baseball bat wielding hoody, you're just plain wrong.

Little Timmy turned into that horrible little man because of his surroundings, his peers, his parents, and because he's more than a little bit screwed up in his head. If someone wants to go out and take part in the riots they'll do it no matter if they played GTA or not, they'll do it because their head is wired wrong.

We talked about shoddy games journalism on this weeks show, it seems to me that journalism in general is in a state at the moment...