Games are an evil military conspiracy, claims researchers

3:20 PM on 05.13.2009   |   Jim Sterling

46 comments

Hating videogames in Germany has always been popular, but it's become a downright fashion statement ever since Tim Kretschmer's school shooting. Busybodies have been rubbing their hands with glee and condemning the so-called "killer games" with a passion, but the recent claim that videogames are a sinister Pentagon conspiracy truly takes the cake.

"During the nineties the killing simulators, employed for hand-to-hand combat in the US army and police, were released by the Pentagon to be sold for private use on the public markets," claims German researchers Renate and Rudi Hänsel. "As a consequence the computer and video game industry that had co-operated with the Pentagon from the very beginning, boomed. Since then the so-called killer games have wreaked havoc among children and youths.

"The US army’s electronic training programs for killing people must be taken back to the US barracks, where they came from. They have to disappear from civil society altogether. They may be appropriate for the purpose of national defense or fight against crime; they have no place, however, in children’s rooms or in living rooms."

That is ... amazing. Simply amazing. The researchers want violent games banished from society because they believe that the videogame industry knowingly co-operates with the Pentagon to create havoc-wreaking killing simulators that are destroying the minds of children. That, my friends, is how you argue a case against games. 

I'm sure they'll be taken very seriously by the world.