geekosystem

The United States' misinformed and eye roll-inducing war on violent video games marches ever onward in yet another show of using them as a scapegoat for violent tragedies. The Massachusetts Department of Transportation has recently pulled particular arcade game titles deemed offensive from various rest stops along the Massachusetts Turnpike in light of the horrific Sandy Hook Elementary Shooting. Well never forget the lives lost in that tragic event, but the nation's insatiable habit of holding easy targets culpable instead of identifying the real problem is getting tediously grating at this point.

A study by psychologists at the University of Illinois suggests that measuring brainwave oscillation could predict how quickly someone will get good at a video game. The study, published today in the journal Psychophysiology, is simultaneously heartening to people like myself who are bad at video games. On the one hand, there's nothing we can do about it, and it doesn't mean we appreciate the medium any less. We're just not wired that way, which is a very freeing thing. On the other hand, we're bad at a fun thing because our brains our broken, which is a hard statement to paint in a flattering light.

Pretty much from the start of video gaming, but particularly since games like Doom, there's been a big hubub about violence in video games. Critics seem to believe violent video games are sure to cause aggression in children who play them and -- despite the fact that video games, like movies, are not all made for children -- that video games should be subject to additional taxes or covered with fallacious warnings as a result. A new study from researchers at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, however, suggests even the most violent of video games actually promote cooperation and encourage gamers to control their aggression.

Not too long ago, Oklahoma House Representative William Fourkiller proposed a bill that would add a 1% violence tax to all video games rated Teen and above, whether or not the games themselves were violent. Luckily, it didn't go very far. Now, Representatives Joe Baca and Frank Wolf -- a California Democrat and a Virginia Republican respectively -- have taken the opportunity not to learn from Fourkiller's over-simplification at all. Their new "Violence in Video Games Labeling Act" aims to slap violence warnings on all video games not rated "Early Childhood." If that wasn't enough, the warning itself relies heavily on fallacious logic to get its point across.

Oklahoma House Representative William Fourkiller has put forth an interesting proposition: Why don't we add a 1% tax to all "violent" video games? Well, mainly because that would be unconstitutional, but nonetheless the bill exists. Fourkiller's reasoning behind pushing the tax is that -- get this -- violent video games promote violence and on top of that, obesity. In his defense, the proposal dictates that the extra 1% would go to youth obesity and anti-bullying organizations, but at the cost of further sullying the already sufficiently sullied reputation of violence-based video games that are not for kids anyway.

We don't have any expert Supreme Court watchers on staff, so we can't definitively weigh in on whether the U.S. Supreme Court's battery of questions as they heard Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Assn, California's attempt to ban the sale of violent video games to minors, marks the legislation as doomed.

Chief Justice John Roberts, anyway, seemed sympathetic to the claim that the government needs to "protect children from" Postal 2-like depravity. But other justices weren't so sure, and we learned that at least one Supreme Court justice knows what Mortal Kombat is:

Leonardo DiCaprio should have done some serious gaming in preparation for his role in the upcoming dream-infiltration flick Inception. According to a recent study be Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada, people who play video games on a regular basis are more likely to achieve lucidity in dreams. But the gamer can only control as much as he or she could control in an actual game. Gackenbach found that gamers could for the most part only take control of themselves, guiding themselves through a world they had no conscious role in constructing. A later study then found that gamers were also less intimidated by nightmares, and would often fight back against the fear.