Mike Hatch (D): defended Minnesota's latest video game bill in court and lost, but not before calling video games "worthless, disgusting speech of low societal value."

Hillary Clinton (D): sponcer of the Family Entertainment Protection act.

Rick Santorum (R): backs Hillary's game initiatives.

Mike McGavick (R): believes the gaming industry will not regulate itself and requires legislative solutions.

Fred Upton (R): sponcer of the "Video Game Decency Act."

Cliff Stearns (R): sponser of the "Truth in Video Game Ratings Act."

Joe Baca (D): sponcer of the "Safe Rating Act."

Ed Perlmutter (D): promises video game legislation.

Jennifer Granholm (D): led her state's failed attempt to legislate video game content.

Rod Blagojevich (D): led his state's failed attempt to legislate video game content.

Eliot Spitzer (D): promises video game legislation.

Chris Bell (D): promises video game legislation.

Mark Taylor (D): promises video game legislation.

Kathleen Sebelius (D): backed a video game bill which failed in Kansas state legislature.

Jeff Johnson (R): co-sponser of Minnesota's video game law.

Leland Yee (D): sponser of California's video game legislation.

Julia Boseman (D): sponser of North Carolina's failed video game legislation.

Tom Thull (D): promises video game legislation.

Arnold Schwareznegger (R): signed California's video game bill into law.

Raunchy, blood-soaked video games, unleashing "a silent epidemic of media desensitization," are "stealing the innocence of our children," Hilary Clinton would tell you. That's why she and and fellow senators Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh have introduced legislation to regulate the gaming industry, codifying its voluntary rating system and making it a federal crime for retailers to sell or rent inappropriate games to minors.

No other form of entertainment has ever recieved this much attention and opposition from politicians. Even the latest edition of Dr. Benjamin Spock's famous guide to to childrearing deems gaming as a "colossal waste of time" at best and anger-stoking at worst. And why? All because a few bad apples ruined the whole pie by killing a bunch of people and blaming it on the Grand Theft Auto games. 

This kind of hysteria isn't surprising, though. New forms of media have always been met with suspicion and fear. A "neophobic" tendancy is incured and people find their new scapegoat on which to blame the negative actions of certain people thereafter. Yet the critics of video games are not only conjuring up a threat where none exists; they're ignoring the positive moral lessons and cognitive benifits that many of todays sophisticated games offer.

Just watch a kid play a video game. The last thing they do is read the manual. Instead, they just pick up the controller and start mashing buttons to see what happens. This isn't a random process; it's the essence of the scientific method. Through trial and error, players build a model of the underlying game based on empirical evidence collected through play. As the players refine this model, they begin to master the game. It's a rapid cycle of hypothesis, experiment, and analysis. Like the toys of our youth, video games rely on the player's active involvement. We're invited to create and interact with elaborately simulated worlds, characters, and stories. Games aren't just fantasy worlds to explore; they actually amplify our powers of imagination.

A growing number of innovators recognize the intellectual benefits of gaming and seek to use video games for educational and therapeutic purposes. The Serious Games Initiative got its start in 2002, when the U.S. Army released America's Army, a free online shooter that allows players to "live the Army." More than five million people have registered to play. Venture capital and philanthropic dollars are now pouring into Serious Games projects in health care, math, and government and corporate training. One encouraging early result is "Free Dive," a game that distracts children suffering from chronic pain or undergoing painful operations, with a calming underwater virtual reality.

Games have the potential to subsume almost all other forms of entertainment media. They can tell us stories, offer music, give us challenges, allow us to communicate and interact with others, encourage us to make things, connect us to new communities, and let us play. Unlike most other forms of media, games are inherently malleable. Player mods are just the first step down this path.

Most video games aren't violent or racy. A recent survey from the Progress and Freedom Foundation found that more than 80% of the top-selling titles for the past five years were rated "Everyone" or "Teen," meaning that parents can assume reasonably inoffensive content. Ironically, only 15% of 2005's games recieved "Mature" or "Adults Only" ratings considering that 65% of gamers are 18 to 34-year-olds.

But even if your 13-year-old is spending a lot of time killing enemies thrown at him in the latest shooter, there's no hard evidence that he'll take on violent tendancies because of it. If anything, it offers him an outlet for taking out any aggression he may have. Playing violent video games may be cathartic, channeling pre-existing violent impulses into virtual reality, where they can do no harm.

The most comprehensive study yet on the social effects of violent games, conducted by researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of Michigan, found that prolonged playing of Asheron's Call 2 didn't make study participants belligerent.

It's also worth mentioning that the emergence of video games as a major youth enthusiasm has occured at the same time as striking drop in juvenile violence. Maybe Senator Clinton should be encouraging more gaming instead of calling for a federal crackdown on it.

With the next generation of consoles on the market, gamers will have even richer, more complex virtual environments, many of them nonlinear, to explore. Working through these worlds alone, with friends or, in the ever more popular massively multiplayer online games with thousands of people is far from a "colossal waste of time" as Dr. Spock so eloquently put it. Video games are popular culture at its best. Its critics would do better to drop their unfounded hysterical laments and pick up a controller.