Father Raymond DeSouzahas his own entry on Wikipedia, so perhaps he is more important than me and I have no right to complain here. However, there’s a difference between stupid commentary and intolerable commentary, and this crap falls into the latter like a baseball player cleanly sliding across home plate. In his column forCanada’s conservative National Post, he writes:
I learned the truth about video games the hard way, and so this is the lesson I offer for free: Don’t play video games. Don’t own them. And for the sake of all that is good and holy, don’t buy them for your children…
Since [deleting Tetris] I have never played another video game. It’s too dangerous. Video games take what is most precious — time and thought. And they are making kids fat.
Video games are like a black hole into which time disappears…They are the crack cocaine of the electronic world…
Did I mention that far too many video games celebrate graphic violence, multifarious delinquency and borderline pornography? I don’t have to. Tetris had none of that, and it was deadly enough.
You’re wrong, Ray. Wrong. The reasons why abound, but the most glaring one is thatyou’ve never played a game sinceTetris. There is something about the religious extreme that seems to encourage judgement without proper experience to base one’s opinion on, and this is no exception. Also —Tetrisis “deadly?” How? Did the red blocks remind you too much of the blood of Christ?
This is unacceptable for a greater reason, however, and it will be the one least discussed in response to this tripe: Video games have saved a lot of lives. For me, it turned me from a lonely kid into a happy one, helping me through times in my life that other wise would have been dark were it not for the friends I made both in games and because of them. Likely, I’m one of hundreds of thousands that will tell you that story.
Lesson to take away, kids: Closed mindedness increases the chances that people will pray for you to die in a fire.
