PARENTS need to ask a lot more questions about the effects of violent video games and shouldn't be cowed into silence, writes David Penberthy.

THERE was a moment this week - on one of those US current affairs shows in which guests shout over the top of each other - that summarised the cultural problems concerning the question of gun control in the US.

With a straight face, the panellists argued that in the wake of the Connecticut school massacre, we shouldn't ban assault weapons but violent video games.

Even by the abysmal logic standards of the gun lobby, it was a new intellectual low, the absurd concept that it's more important to crack down on games that simulate violence and desensitise young people to its impact, rather than the actual weapons which, in the US, are freely available to the type of psychopath who killed 20 children and six adults at a tiny primary school.

The question of gun control is a domestic issue for the US.

Happily, Australia took action after the Port Arthur killings to make it pretty much impossible for people to get their hands on semi-automatic and automatic weapons.

But despite the flaw in the logic of those American TV panellists, in trying to remove the obvious and fundamental question of gun ownership from the gun control debate, I would still argue that they were on to something when they raised the issue of video games.

It's kind of uncool and grumpy to criticise video games in this country, or even to speculate about their psychological and behavioural impact on those who play them.

Gaming is a massive culture, too big to call it a subculture. It has its own TV show on the ABC, which I regard as one of the most unfathomable things on the idiot box, its presenters twitching about as if they have been up all night (which they probably have), talking a language I don't understand.

When Santa arrives tomorrow night there are probably about a million kids who will get some kind of computer game, be it an innocuous Mario Kart or a cooking game on a DS, or something more bloodthirsty, such as those games set on the streets of Los Angeles where you get points for stealing cars, running people over and murdering a prostitute.

A couple of generations ago, parents used to debate whether it was appropriate to give toy guns to their sons. Toy guns weren't banned in my house but they weren't encouraged either. I can remember a few raised eyebrows when one of the rellies gave me a black plastic sub-machine gun as a gift one Christmas.

Two generations on and the nature of imagined or simulated violence is so much more sophisticated than simply running around the backyard shouting "bang" while holding a cheap Taiwanese toy. The violence is so much more graphic, and the number of young people exposed to it is off the Richter scale. Many, if not most, of the video games on the market have some kind of shooting or killing component, and the level of addiction they engender in kids has been well documented.

During the first Gulf War, American journalist P.J. O'Rourke wrote a typically excellent piece for Rolling Stone magazine in which he described that conflict as the first war fought by the Nintendo generation.

It was also the first war that received saturation news coverage and many of the images we saw had a video game quality. There was no footage of hand-to-hand combat, not even soldiers shooting at each other on the streets, but rather clinical airstrikes in which soldiers remotely used computer technology to take out missile silos and military installations. It was like watching a modern version of an old Atari game, except it involved actually killing people and blowing up real things.

This is the thing that makes me uneasy about video games. They have the effect of dulling the senses to the real impact of violence.

Possibly more pernicious and troubling is that they encourage isolation. I know gamers would argue that they serve a social role - bringing people together to compete - but all of those games are also played in a solitary fashion by individuals, and for hours at a time.

If there is a personality trait shared by the type of people who would open fire on kids and teachers, it is that they are almost always loners who have lived in an isolated and un-socialised way, and gaming goes hand in hand with a miserable, attic-based existence.

I am equally uneasy about the hamfisted option of simply banning them, as doing so would constitute a form of censorship, which I instinctively find troubling.

Rather, I would wonder whether the classifications are tough enough, and more so, whether parents could be a little less ambivalent about letting their kids live a protracted and unsupervised virtual existence.

Computer games obviously play a handy child-minding role. But at their worst they are one hell of a baby sitter, and not one you would normally let in the house.

Rather than being cowed into silence for fear of being labelled spoilsports or wowsers, I reckon parents should become much more vocal in asking questions about the effects of these games.

Anyway, thank you for reading. I enjoy writing these pieces and always like hearing from readers, be it for brickbats or bouquets. Apologies to those of you who did not receive a reply on account of the volume of correspondence. Merry Christmas to you all and have a happy new year.

penberthyd@thepunch.com.au