So you buy a brand new video game with Skyrim style graphics.(meaning highly detailed/realistic.) As you are playing this game you come upon a house and choose enter it. When you enter the house you see the following – a three to six year old boy standing on a box breast feeding from a twenty eight year old woman.

No legitimate developer, big company, or indie would ever put something like that in their games. And of course no other entertainment or information source would ever do that. Not even the porn industry would not be so brazen as to do such a thing. None of them, not in a million, million years would attempt something so dumb. . .right?. . . RIGHT?!

Except it did happen and TIME magazine is the one who did it for the cover of their print magazine just week ago or so.

“Woah, back up a little bit Graey. What does this have to do with video games?” you may be thinking.

“Everything!” is my reply. Ever since Pac-Man and perhaps even Pong, the Mainstream Media(MSM) have had a major hatred toward video-games and probably their precursors the pinball machine.

For those old enough to remember about twenty some years ago or so games like DOOM, Mortal Kombat, Time Killers, and few others came out that frankly caused MSM to have a giant conniption fit. In having their acts of righteous indignation they wailed about how the youth will be corrupted and society would turn into a giant bloodbath yet violent TV shows and movies were no big deal. They whined and complained that video game characters like Lara Croft were ‘sexist and unrealistic’ never mind the comic book industry was doing it long before Tomb Raider.

The only good thing to come out of that situation was the ESRB(and that is still debatable to many) which prevents a lot of censorship. However the ESRB with the rating system still is not enough to stop the attacks against clearly M Rated games. Game like Conkers Bad Fur Day and the original Resident Evil had MSM and certain members of government having fits of righteous indignation.

Then there were tragedies like Columbine and according to MSM, it was video games, Final Fantasy VII to be exact, were said to be the cause. Never mind the cause was a couple of psychotic punks who stole guns in order to commit their murder spree.

Every so often a video game will cause a scandal because its too violent, too sexual, too whatever and to blazes with the rating system. Whenever the MSM brings out one of these stories in some way the question is ‘why do they do it?’ What exactly is it about video games that the MSM and certain TV shows like Law&Order SVU, which used violent video games as an excuse for the criminal’s actions, have against video games?

The answer is in the ratings or rather the lack thereof. For every hour a person is blowing up demons in DOOM or playing a criminal in a Grand Theft Auto game is a hour not watching some show on TV or watching some news station like CNN or reading magazines like TIME or Newsweek. Unlike video games which are dependent on sales, the MSM and TV stations have to survive by the number of people watching. Those number of people watching translate into advertisers who pay big bucks for advertising space on the stations. Even TIME which while dependent on sales like video games also depend on advertising to keep them going.

There is the usual hypocrisy from the MSM and various aspects of the entertainment industry. Yes games can be violent and sexual. However TV shows have gotten worse over the past decade. Crime shows are getting more daring and graphic with how the crimes are done and do I need to mention the Saw Series. However to these aspects of entertainment and information, video games will always be the greatest offender in terms of violence and sexual content.

The worst thing of all is that while video games can only do digital violence and sex it is nothing compared to what TIME did on their cover with an all too real boy who did not know any better and the lack of outcry from the rest of the MSM and related industries. And in the long run that lack of concern by the rest of the MSM is more shocking than any act of graphic violence or sex found in any video game past.