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Xiao Feng, 23, is pretty good at his favourite online video game, so he was surprised when he suddenly started getting killed again and again like a rookie. Turns out the high-level characters that kept taking him out were actually hitmen hired by his father.

The first juvenile mass-murder happened for the FIRST TIME in recorded human history in the late 1970s, in California. In 500 years of gun-powder combat, not once had a juvenile committed multiple homicide. We had a couple in the 1980s, and now it's out of control. So what happened? It's Pavlog Dog, said Lt. Col. Lt. Col. Grossman: our youth is being conditioned from childhood by videogames to be "First-Person Shooters, (FPS) and to associate killing, human death and suffering with reward and pleasure. Videogames are not "games"; they are mass-murder simulators, Grossman says. Our kids are being wired...

A Connecticut town thirty miles from Sandy Hook will give people $25 to incinerate their violent video games. Southington, Connecticut is encouraging owners of violent video games to deposit them in a local dumpster near a drive-in movie theater, so that the games can be collected and destroyed. In return, the local Chamber of Commerce will give participants $25 gift cards to be used toward purchases of non-violent entertainment. The Violent Video Game Return Program has the backing of a diverse coalition of groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, YMCA, fire department, board of education, as well as town officials...

A few days ago, going through some memorabilia of my mother's, I found the original promotional material for this syndicated column, launched in 1993. I was billed as "A New Conservative Voice for Young Women!" More than 17 years ago, I set out to explain how a Yale-educated young woman from a secular Oregon family could become a social conservative: Every life is precious. It is better to care for your children than to kill them. Divorce hurts children; it also breaks apart life's most precious commitment -- a family. Men and women are different. A society that pretends otherwise...

"Those that give up an essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty not safety" - Ben Franklin IÂ’ve waited to comment on the Sandy Hook atrocity for quite a few days because I have been doing some serious soul searching and thinking. IÂ’ve tried to wait for all the facts to come out, for all the pundits to get their BS out, for all the politicians to declare their holy crusades and for every dimwit lobbyist to voice their opinion. Now itÂ’s my turn. WeÂ’ve heard every manner of excuse in the last week. Guns kill people!...

THE loner responsible for the sickening massacre was mentally ill, aggressive and had an unhealthy obsession for violent computer games, it emerged last night. Cowardly Adam Lanza, 20, was driven to carry out the bloody killings after his parents split up and his friends alienated him, reports emerging from America revealed. Chillingly, his favourite video game was said to be a shockingly violent fantasy war game called Dynasty Warriors which is thought to have given him inspiration to act on his darkest thoughts. His easy access to a deadly arsenal – he learned how to shoot after his mother took...

Adam Lanza, the shooter who massacred 20 children and six adults last Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary School, spent hours in the windowless basement of his home playing violent video games like "Call of Duty" and obsessing over "guns and military equipment." Peter Wlasuk, a plumber who worked at the Lanza home, told The Sun that Lanza "lived in the basement" and he found it "strange." "He had a proper set up down there — computers, a bathroom, bed and desk and a TV," Wlasuk said. "There were no windows.” Wlasuk said he went down to the basement on numerous...

In the wake of past mass shootings, when the "national conversation" has focused exclusively on guns, I have argued that our appallingly inadequate mental health system was a better subject of reform. At least half of the shooters in the rampage killings that are ripping our hearts out are young men with serious mental illnesses, and our system has neither the legal nor the financial resources to get them the treatment and/or restraint that they, and we, desperately need. This time, mental health reform has received passing mention, along with the usual pleas for gun control, better security at schools,...

Remember the Virginia tech shooting? Video games. The Beltway sniper attacks? Video games. And now the Clackamas mall shooting? Also video games, according to nationally recognized former attorney and anti-video game crusader Jack Thompson. On Tuesday afternoon, shooter Jacob Tyler Roberts, 22, armed himself with a semi-automatic AR-15 and went on a rampage at the Clackamas Town Center in Portland, Oregon. He killed two and wounded another before committing suicide. Thompson said in an interview that “Given this guy's method, his age group and the randomness of it, it's more likely than not that he rehearsed for this on games.”...

A new study suggests a dose-response relationship among playing violent video games and aggressive and hostile behavior, with negative effects accumulating over time. Investigators discovered people who played a violent video game for three consecutive days showed increases in aggressive behavior and hostile expectations each day they played. They also found that those who played nonviolent games showed no meaningful changes in aggression or hostile expectations over that period. Although other experimental studies have shown that a single session of playing a violent video game increased short-term aggression, this is the first study to show long-term effects from playing violent...

His mother taught him the way of the gun. Adam Lanza, the troubled nerd who turned a Connecticut school into a slaughterhouse, learned how to shoot under the watchful eye of his demanding mom Nancy. “She said she would often go target shooting with her kids,” landscaper Dan Holmes said. Nancy Lanza wound up being the first of her son’s 27 victims when he used one of her guns to shoot her dead. Holmes, who often mowed the grass at the Lanza’s sprawling Newtown home, told Reuters the doomed mom was proud of her arsenal and once showed him a...

It's been a week of bad news in the gaming world, so lets get through this together. Zynga laid off 5% of their staff this week in an attempt to shore up their bottom line. They closed a Boston office, reduced staff in Austin and have proposed shutting down shops in the UK and Japan. They're sunsetting 13 games and cutting down investment in their title The Ville (a game that is the subject of legal action from EA who claims it copies EA's The Sims Social). I'm not a fan of Zynga's practice of cloning successful games but it's...

President Obama wants gamers in battleground states to vote early while they’re playing Madden football. According to Ad Week, the Obama campaign had teamed up with Electronic Arts again to run ads on their video games in hotly-contested states leading up to Election Day. The campaign first did this in 2008. “It was made clear in the last election that reaching consumers through video games makes a significant impact, so it’s no surprise to see this tactic used once again in such a competitive election,” Dave Madden, EA’s senior vice president of global media solutions, told ad week.

Two game developers visiting Greece have been arrested on suspicion of spying. The two men, who work for developer Bohemia Interactive, were arrested outside a military base on the island of Limnos. A Bohemia spokesman said the pair had simply been on holiday on Limnos. The Prague-based game maker has clashed with the authorities on Limnos before, over its use of detailed maps of the island. In a statement published on its website, Bohemia said the two men had travelled there "with the sole purpose of experiencing the island's beautiful surroundings". Bohemia said it was doing all it could to...

In HBO's new show "Girls," creator Lena Dunham conjures up an image of young men so inundated with online porn that they almost unwittingly try to reenact it in their own boudoir escapades. The show is fictional, but Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo believes there's a lot of reality to it. In a new e-book, "The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Struggle and What We Can Do About It," written with Nikita Duncan, Zimbardo theorizes that all those hours spent in front of a screen — not just watching porn but playing video games too — is leaving men in...

What usually is a treasured opportunity for cross generational chit-chat became a silent car ride as a luminescent glow eerily lighted his facial features in the back seat. My grandson has mastered a hand-held electronic thinga-ma-jig which muted what had previously been a casual forum for conversations about life-in-the-now and even life-everlasting. No knock-knock jokes. No “Hey, look, a horse trailer and it has horses inside!” No seemingly insignificant queries such as, “Justin says there is no God. Is that true?” Where once we easily conversed about hurt feelings, roadside beggars, birthdays, bullies and the like, this day the unilateral...

What usually is a treasured opportunity for cross generational chit-chat became a silent car ride as a luminescent glow eerily lighted his facial features in the back seat. My grandson has mastered a hand-held electronic thinga-ma-jig which muted what had previously been a casual forum for conversations about life-in-the-now and even life-everlasting. No knock-knock jokes. No “Hey, look, a horse trailer and it has horses inside!” No seemingly insignificant queries such as, “Justin says there is no God. Is that true?” Where once we easily conversed about hurt feelings, roadside beggars, birthdays, bullies and the like, this day the unilateral...

New York-When gamers take the wraps off the new "BioShock" video game next year, they should not be surprised if parts of the game remind them of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Ken Levine, the creative director of the Boston-based development studio Irrational Games visited the protests in Boston this month to do research for the next game in the best-selling "BioShock" series, which will be out in 2012. The game "BioShock Infinite," is set in 1912, in a floating U.S. city in the sky called Columbia, where two fictional political factions, the left-wing group called the Vox Populi and...

My son spends more time at his friends than at home because of his love for video gaming. We would like to see more of him and wonder what freepers think. So lets have a Free Republic X Box versus Playstation smackdown. What are you suggestions?

Liberals often tout themselves as the epitome of tolerance, which makes the production of a video game entitled “Tea Party Zombies Must Die,” by StarvingEyes Advergaming, all the more confusing. In the new game, players are encouraged to shoot such Tea Party favorites as Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and many others, some of which do not exactly fit the criteria of the Tea Party movement but who appear in the game nonetheless. The Blaze reports: In a new online game created by liberals titled “Tea Party Zombies Must Die” players can live out your most vicious fantasy by...