See what I did there? I turned a clearly exaggerated statement into a shocking headline just by adding a question mark, like in this Fox News article headlined, "Is Bulletstorm the Worst Video Game in the World?" But seriously, the Fox News article is disheartening, to say the least. It's sad to see video games still being positioned as a corrupting influence on today's youth.

On the one hand I expected us to be past this by now. The industry has been around long enough to have seen multiple generations of gamers grow to adulthood and beyond without causing the downfall of society. On the other hand, I get that dire stories about all the evils of the world and how they could ruin your children makes for eye catching, snappy news. They're even more eye-catching when peppered with gross generalizations and completely unsubstantiated "facts."

For example, the Fox News article quotes Emmy-award winning psychiatrist Carole Lieberman as saying "The increase in rapes can be attributed in large part to the playing out of [sexual] scenes in videogames." Putting aside the vanishingly small number of games that allow you to play out sexual scenes, it's worth noting that the "increase in rapes" Lieberman references doesn't seem to exist. According to Bureau of Justice estimates, there were 126,000 rapes and sexual assaults in the US in 2009 (the most recent year available), less than half the 2006 total of 272,000. In fact, the number of rapes and sexual assaults has been trending downward for decades. The Bureau estimates there were 607,000 incidents of rape or sexual assault in 1992. Coincidentally, that was the year Mortal Kombat debuted in arcades and touched off a previous round of hand-wringing about violence in games.

The sad reality is video games are still something of an unknown for a lot of people, including parents, so it's very easy to paint them as horrible things that you are powerless to stop from doing something insidious to your child's moral fiber. It's exasperating for me to see because, as one of those aforementioned kids who grew into adulthood while playing games, I've seen this play out before. The games have changed--back in my day it was Night Trap and Mortal Kombat--but the root fear is the same. The concern, even then, was that seeing violence or sex depicted in games was going to warp kids' view of reality and somehow lead to us all committing horrible acts. Anecdotally, I can tell you that this did not happen to me or any of my acquaintances or theirs.

In the end we're the product of "nurture" as well as nature. Our upbringing shapes us and informs the way we process the world. Regardless of how games or technology or new media change the specifics, parents will always have a responsibility to raise their children to be respectful, intelligent members of society. If they can manage that, a child will have the common sense to understand the difference between acceptable and unacceptable behavior, and use good judgment regardless of what unsavory content they come across while gaming, surfing the Internet, or hanging out with friends. And incidentally, BulletStorm isn't even intended for small children and is clearly marked as such--it carries a rating of "M" for "Mature."

I understood, even as a kid, that games were a form of entertainment. In my world then, and honestly for my generation now, games are right up there with movies, music and television, and we have always seen them as such. And just as with those media, parents have a responsibility to monitor which games their children are playing and exposed to. The video game industry has done its part to help out. There's an easy-to-understand ratings system in place that's plastered on boxes, tagged onto commercials, and readily accessible online. There are parental lockout controls on every major console and all the latest handhelds. Whether or not they choose to use them, parents already have these tools at their disposal.

So is Fox News the worst news outlet in the world? I think people's opinions will vary, wildly, on that matter. As for Bulletstorm, is it a deplorable celebration of the most puerile experiences gaming has to offer, entirely devoid of merit? Possibly. Is it something that should be kept from impressionable children? Well duh, it's rated "M". Is it the latest scapegoat in a decades-long discussion dominated by unnecessary hand-wringing and fear mongering? Definitely.