When people say that video games are evil, I am curious. It is true that they take a lot of time. It is true that they keep you sitting down a lot. And it is true they are associated with the evil television. BUT--

They are just another medium. The feeling is reminiscent of the days when comic books caused corruption in our kids' minds, when movies were for the uneducated masses. Now, video games cause brains to rot and younguns to become violent. Nope. I just don't buy it. Any medium can have intelligence; any medium can become art. And just because video games are a young medium, doesn't mean they won't grow into that or have none of that in them already.

A specific video game can be bad or good--but video games are not inherently bad or good. Either viewpoint seems narrow-minded to me.

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Dude, have you ever heard evil laughter? I'm not talking about the Vincent Price Mu-ha-ha-ha-haaaa; that kind isn't actually scary. I'm talking about maniacal, evil laughter that you expect to hear from pitchfork demons and crazed killers. It's always like a person's amused to their life's end, breathless and a little shrieky--more like WOO-HOO-HOO-ha-ha-ha! Hyena-like in essence. Man, I don't hear it often, but when I do, it freaks me out.

(It's embarassing to mention), but one time, in my psychotropic days, I had a Really Bad Trip. It was just bad, and the voices were bad. It was like this: if the scope of our normal emotional-mental experience goes from 5 to -5, then I went from 50 to -50 in the space of three hours--and the good part came first. I seriously thought I had gone paranoid-schizophrenic; I was wondering how to tell my parents. I felt like I was still on shaky mental ground for the following week or two. Suffice it to say, I heard a lot of that laughter in the Bad Hours. It kind of made me want to die. And sometimes, in 'real' life, there is a person who laughs that way. I have never seen that person; but they Live In My Neighborhood. And every once in a while--like now, for example--I am guessing they get drunk, because they laugh maniacally and horribly every five minutes or so for about forty-five minutes. Maybe more, I don't know. It feels like forever. And I just want to go out and sock em. Or like, go outside and just see, with my own eyes, actual people who laugh like this and have friends. It grates on me like nothing in this world.

11:30 p.m. 2004-05-15�