Guns don't kill people, kids who play video games kill people.
Man if I wouldn't get yelled at for it I'd leave my post just at that and see how many people take me seriously. I'm quoting the tshirt I'm wearing atm. >_>;;;
Seriously though, video games helped me a lot as a child.... it's easier to distinguish the fantasy world of a video game vs the real world than it is the fantasy world of television vs the real world, but the FCC, whatever the group of the mothers against video games thing is... that Jack Thompson guy, and other like organizations don't try very hard to censor or restrict television... damnit another tangent.
The way video games helped me growing up was in the respects to understanding a deeper meaning behind things, learning organizational skills by playing RPGs, learning to read, learning proper sentence structure and grammar, learning punctuation, spelling. Video games helped me develop faster, mentally, than I would have without them. Of course... I was playing them since age 3, so take it or leave it.
In the end it all comes down to the parents. My parents let me play violent video games as a child (what few were around 18 and fewer years ago) and I didn't turn out to kill someone, or ever have a violent tendency brought on by something I saw in a video game.
Edit: I was 6 years old when I first played Final Fantasy IV (II to me) and at age 4 I was playing other RPG type games with huge walls of text alongside my dad. at 4 and 5 I was playing some game based off the Gulf War where you were a helicopter pilot, and your job was to blow up enemy bunkers and rescue MIAs behind enemy lines... a few years later they released a spinoff based off the Vietnam war in which you had the same missions.
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