For as long as we can remember, people seem to think that video games teach kids violence. We can understand a teacher, priest, or politician making these crazy claims, but when an entertainer opens their mouth on the subject, it seems a bit confusing.
Look no further than the enigmatic-pop artist M.I.A., who recently gave her opinion on the subject. If you aren’t familiar with M.I.A., she had that song in the movie Slumdog Millionaire, Paper Planes, which features the sounds of gun fire as a repeating hook.
Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam, M.I.A.’s real name, grew up in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and told Connect magazine that she saw violence all the time. Now she understands her young son will grow up seeing violence, as well, just in a different form.
She said, “My kid’s gonna see it, but he’s gonna see it in computer games.”
She went on to say, “I don’t know which is worse. The fact that I saw it in my life has maybe given me lots of issues, but there’s a whole generation of American kids seeing violence on their computer screens and then getting shipped off to Afghanistan.
"They feel like they know the violence when they don’t. Not having a proper understanding of violence, especially what it’s like on the receiving end of it, just makes you interpret it wrong and makes inflicting violence easier."