Video games: This Generation's Art Era

"Games are really quite an artform," says Catherin Bennett, writer for the British Guardian. An article written by Bennett entitled, 'I'm game for Grand Theft Auto You should be too,' Bennett criticizes current politicians for blaming video games for ever little moral flaw within today's society without experiencing them and suggests that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown might benefit from a session on the game. "Had Hillary Clinton, for instance, subjected herself to Grand Theft Auto before she fingered it, in 2005, as a 'major' moral threat to Americans?" simply writes Bennett. "Had [Obama] ever played a video game [after his comments last week]? No, gamers suspect, given his obsolete references, any more than David Cameron had last year, when his party attacked their 'extreme, casual and callous violence in a context of social indifference and social ambiguity'." Bennett continues her pro-gaming parade throughout the entirety of the article and highlights one of the most common problems with both parents and politicians getting first-hand experience for themselves. "With a violent and nasty movie, or corrupting literature, the thing is simple," Bennett writes. "You merely have to buy a ticket for, say, No Country for Old Men, or There Will be Blood, and watch it, with a keen eye for anything that might be violent or nasty. How different for the mature student of Grand Theft Auto IV, who discovers that acquisition of the game, an Xbox 360 and a working television will not be nearly enough to expose the sickening extent of its moral bankruptcy. For that, you need time, skill, dedication and, I suspect, youth." With a final comment, Bennett focuses on the beauty of modern time games , "Gamers beware. If there is one thing worse than the middle-aged gaming ignoramus, it will shortly be the middle-aged gaming know-it-all, who's discovered that, misogyny aside, they're really quite an art form."