Videogames Blamed for Deadly Car Crash
With that headline, you would think the people in the cars were playing a videogame inside the car, or that they were racing somewhere because of a game, etc. right? Actually, that’s not the case at all, here’s the story.
Computer games and cavalier attitudes are being seen as the reason youths are dying on the roads.
Three Auckland teenagers were killed when the vehicle they were in crashed off the Northwestern Motorway in Auckland during a high-speed police pursuit on Christmas Eve.
National’s transport spokesman Maurice Williamson says today’s young people think they are bullet-proof. He blames Playstations and X-boxes for making teens think they can drive stupidly and just push the reset button if anything goes wrong.
Mr Williamson believes 15 is far too young to be behind the wheel of a car.
Using this mind-set, videogames can be to blame for every single evil in the world. I suppose Maurice Williamson would say the Iraq war is because of videogames, since there were games about war before 2003. I suppose that every violent crime and every reckless driver is somehow being influenced by games, and are making them have a “cavalier” attitude right?
Since we’re never going to blame the actual people that are the problem and actually have some personal responsibility, let’s look at some other possibilities as to why these kids may have driven the way they did. Maybe it’s because the media (and thus sadly a large portion of the country) worships celebrities who are seen weekly slamming their car into a wall (or another car) and/or being pulled over drunk ten times in a year and not getting a day in jail?
I suppose the new Madden game is to blame for Michael Vick organizing dog fighting as well? We’re already being told that the Internet is training new terrorists every day, so how long will it be until we start hearing that videogames are training terrorists and thus are an even bigger threat to society than they already supposedly are? Since I run a site promoting gaming, does that mean I somehow contributed to this car crash?
Even though the article above is ridiculous, it is nice to see that the mainstream idiots are now aware of the Xbox, and don’t just refer to every game as, “a PlayStation”.