Yeah, it's also terrible that nobody archived any of the 2000 Olympics stuff...

Different societies have different value systems, and so different countries regulate different media in different ways.

What's important is that games get treated fairly against other media and regulated for what they are, not what scared, ignorant people worry they might be. The problem is that governments and legislators don't yet "get" games, and so fear and ignorance reign supreme.

As an example, in Australia, the government has a Classification Board that rates books, TV, movies and games. The Board is supposed to represent the values of the community and it generally does a pretty good job. Very few movies are refused classification (eg: banned).

Not so with video games. Games are regularly refused classification in Australia, largely because the highest classification for games is MA15+ - so if a game is considered only suitable for adults, then it can't be classified.

Yes, this is ludicrous and there's been a huge response from the local industry and a lot of local gamers. You can read more about it here if you are interested.

The point I'm trying to make, though, is that games are not treated on the same level as other forms of media in Australia, because they're poorly understood by government as a medium - mainly because the people in government didn't grow up playing games. I'd bet there are similar issues to varying degrees in other countries.

Give it a decade or so and things will be different. Until then, we're going to have to keep putting up with emotive comments and costly ineffective legislation from politicians looking for cheap popularity amongst their ignorant and fearful dull-eyed constituents.

The Americans have elected a courageous, intelligent man who really knows the value of freedom and democracy. He has shown that anyone really can still be president in the USA. Kudos to everyone who voted for Obama and showed the world that those narrow-minded rednecks and neocons are just a stereotype. Welcome back, USA. We missed you.

Not entirely unlike human genomic research :)

At only 10 meters (c. 30ft) beneath water you're exposed to twice the pressure you experience at sea level. It then increases by about 1 atmosphere per 10 meters. So, at one hundred meters it's an order of magnitude higher. You don't even need to go a few thousand feet under the sea to experience significantly higher pressure.

Agreed. Where I live there are large flocks of cockatoos. They are very social and can get to great ages. I've often seen them playing with street lights where they pull the rubber seal out so it dangles and they can muck about. I've seen them sit in two groups on either end of a pond and mercilessly chase ducks from one end to the other. The most startling thing I ever saw was a cockatoo that was in the middle of the road. I was coming one way at 90kph and another car was coming the other way at around the same speed. The bird saw us coming too late. Under these circumstances most animals bolt, with predictably messy consequences. This cockatoo stood its ground, moved right to the centre of the road and stood still while we passed. After we passed it carried on. This was not seem like an animal freezing in fear. My impression was that it was a carefully calculated strategy.

I know I'm posting late, but you can find the paper that was published in Pediatrics here:

http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/faculty/caa/abstracts/2005-2009/08ASGISYNK.pdf

The researcher is Dr Craig A. Anderson from Iowa State University.

Have a look at the paper. You don't need to be an expert in behavioural psychology to see some significant problems. Here's four of them:

1. The study's sample is small, and so not generalisable. It's also not clear from the report how the sample was selected.
2. The way game playing and violent behaviour was assessed differed in each sample, and so they are not comparable
3. The derivation of the score used to denote violent games is suspect
   (in the largest group of some 1,000 Japanese students aged 13-18, students were asked what 'types' (ie: genres) of games were their favorites, and what were the three next most favorite. They were given a score between 0 and 5 based on how many genres they selected were deemed violent. Behavioural scientists define violence more broadly than most people would. The Sims contains violence, for example, because people can have brawls. This 0-5 score was then moderated by the number of hours each player spent playing video games. This was the base value that was used to define how much violent material each player was exposed to.
4. 4) The measure of violent behavior is debatable
   To determine violent behaviour in the largest sample, students were asked to fill out a survey based on the Buss-Perry scale, which you can find an example of here: http://www.yorku.ca/rokada/psyctest/aggress.pdf This told the researchers how aggressive/violent the student 'actually' was.

Now, I have serious concerns about behavioural psychology research at the best of times, but this study isn't even a good example of it.

I'd say the study's methods (and thus its results) are dubious at best. Do games or other media cause violence? Maybe. We just can't answer the question through studies like this. I would point out however that since the early 1990s violent crime in the United States has been declining:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States

So, if games do in fact make people more aggressive or violent, it doesn't seem (yet) to have translated into actual physical violence.

We can add this study to the heap of dodgy behavioural psych research on media effects which lazy journalists or ideologues can wheel out whenever they want to make a statement like "xxxx causes violence, and there's a lot of research to support it".

Yeah, there is a lot of research out there - bad research. But a pile of shit doesn't smell any better just because there's a lot of it. Problem is, if you're preaching to the converted, your audience will all agree they're smelling roses, and if you say it with enough confidence and can slap a PhD on the end of your name, a lot of people will assume their noses are wrong.

Too bad more people aren't educated in the basic art of critically assessing what they see, hear and read.