OneMetal.com ARTICLE:
Alan Titchmarsh Explains How Video Games Are Evil. Very Badly.

Alan Titchmarsh might be best known for lovely shows about lovely gardens in which lovely people plant lovely flowers, but you’d be a fool, and a brazen one at that, for thinking that was the only string to his bow. Not only is he the most successful romantic novelist who looks like the unholy spawn of Gerard Depardieu and Bilbo Baggins (an admittedly narrow field), but he also hosts his own chat show. Being on ITV, conversation is interchangable with moral crusade. And while you or I might think giving a glorified groundsman a national platform makes as much sense as replacing all the toys in a creche with a dangerously frayed hessian sack full of rabid, hungry stoats, someone out there commissioned him, and he’s spouting off.

To cover the videogame BAFTA’s, in which the massive ingenuity, creativity and contribution of one of the country’s most lucrative industries is celebrated, Alan decided to get on former Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie and occasional actress and self-proclaimed sex expert Julie Peasgood to verbally abuse CVG writer Tim Ingham for ever having touched one of the dreadful things. You can see the whole affair below:

It should be clear to even the casual observer that this was never intended to be a reasonable discussion, and the CVG writer deserves plaudits for keeping his cool under a bombardment of ignorance and bullshit. From Titchmarsh’s opening, in which he gets the title of every game wrong before messing up the website address for his first guest’s introduction, to the frothing lunacy bubbling out of Peasgood’s unceasingly flapping mouth, this was a hit job pure and simple. Every fact is ignored (Tim was obviously extremely well-prepared, but little details like age ratings seem lost on the host and guests), and the same old tired and disproven arguments are trotted out for an audience that already knows what it thinks, but wants to hear it from that lovely man on the telly.

Kelvin McKenzie, who next to Julie Peasgood seems reasonable, in the same way that losing one leg seems reasonable next to losing two and being made to eat them, decided that games were responsible for the murder of Jamie Bulger. This claim is pretty bizarre, especially given that the tabloid press had already decided that viewing the movie Child’s Play would be enough of an explanation as to why two children would murder another (a complicated and replicable mix of social factors, such as negligent parenting and unrelenting poverty being too difficult to understand or ban), and like most of the claims made in the segment, utterly unsubstantiated.

After a spot of digging, CVG discovered the Peasgood had done some voice acting in the violent horror (no word on racism or sexism) game Martian Gothic: Unification, making her furious attack on the whole industry seem hypocritical as well as staggeringly dumb. Of course, none of this is new. Anyone who follows videogame news will be used to new ‘controversies’ erupting every few months, so in honour of Alan’s et al‘s staggering insight, may we present:

The Onemetal.com Guide to Videogame Controversy.

1982: Custer’s Revenge

This charming title on the Atari 2600 sees the defeated, distressingly nude, and powerfully tumescent General Custer dodge arrows as he crosses the screen in a bid to rape a Native American woman tied to a post. The designers claimed the woman was a ‘willing participant’, though even by the admittedly slight plots of 80′s games, it wouldn’t have taken too much to explain that if they’d wanted to. Ostensibly aimed at adults, the game’s manual claims that “if the kids catch you and should ask, tell them Custer and the maiden are just dancing.” Unlike the other games on this list, Custer’s Revenge is utterly indefensible, and the worst sort of exploitative tripe.

From 1997 Until the Heat Death of the Universe: Grand Theft Auto

Probably the most hated series in the history of gaming, at least in newspapers with red banners and monosyllabic writing, every GTA has been dragged over the coals, often by mentally-unsound former lawyer Jack Thompson, a man who could warrant a whole article by himself. Violent and profane, opponents rarely see the satire in the GTA games, which have been skewering contemporary life pretty successfully since they first moved into 3D. GTA: San Andreas saw the Hot Coffee scandal, where it was found that, through hacking the game with an Action Replay (or normally on a PC), you could view some unfinished minigames in which fully-clothed characters had sex. The media went into meltdown, Hilary Clinton rushed to scream “Somebody think of the children!”, and a class-action suit was launched against the game’s publisher, which has ended today with cheques for $5 being mailed out to anyone who claims to have been traumatised be seeing two crudely-animated characters jiggling at one another in a game they hacked for precisely that reason.

2003 -- Manhunt

It’s a game about murdering people to make snuff films -- lets get that out of the way right now. It’s also not very good, and sold extremely poorly, at least until it hit the headlines. The murder of teenager Stefan Pakeerah was linked to the game by the press, at least those elements of it that weren’t overly concerned with things like truth and accuracy. That the entire furore sprang from this quote (emphasis mine):

“I think that I heard some of Warren’s friends say that he was obsessed by this game. If he was obsessed by it, it could well be that the boundaries for him became quite hazy.”

You would expect any reputable newspaper to follow this up with some research, perhaps even investigation, but this is the Daily Mail we’re talking about. They got two paper-shifting headlines out of the whole affair, even after it became common knowledge that the victim, not the killer, was the one who owned the game.

The police ruled out any connection, and the presiding judge placed full responsibility upon the shoulders of the killer, Warren Leblanc, the Daily Mail followed up with the article Teenager gets life for ‘Manhunt murder’. The game went on to sell far more than it had at its initial release, and no correction was ever issued. I doubt the publishers minded all that much.

2007 -- Mass Effect, Fox News, and ‘Is that a nipple?’

Mass Effect, a game sold and marketed to adults, features romance between characters. Sometimes, when a mummy and blue-skinned tentacled psychic love each other very much they, er, well they… Yeah. Mass Effect has sex in. Offscreen. Implied. You can kind of see two characters kiss if they squint. Fox News went crazy over it, with the usual ‘corrupting the kids’ approach, failing to note that any child would have to play through at least 17 hours of pretty violent content before hitting a glimpse of flesh (violence is of course good, sex bad). They also failed to notice that most kids know what Google is, and can presumably type “Porn! And Plenty of it!” without too much effort.

This is of course a very, very incomplete list. Just like comic books and ‘video nasties’, videogames will continue to be blamed for everything under the sun until some sort of magical futuristic distraction comes along to replace them in kids’ affection. And when it does, we’ll be old and cranky enough to complain about it and try to get it banned. It’s a beautiful world.