You can’t be better now if you were never flawed to begin with.

People, in general, don’t like to hear that they’ve made mistakes– obviously, because it’s not a good feeling to admit to oneself that one has.

But I tend to find that for my part, I’d much rather be told about a mistake than to continue making it. Yes, it hurts to be told, and I don’t like facing my own mistakes any better than the next person. It does hurt, and I hate it. But if I do something wrong, I would much rather know about it, because I want to at least try to correct it. Ultimately, I feel that I am hurt far worse by being allowed to continue making the same mistake than by having someone point it out, feel unhappiness and guilt for a bit, and then fix it and no longer be making that mistake.

If I had a dollar for every bad thing I’ve done, I would be living in a much nicer place and probably retiring early. If I had a dollar for every bad habit and perennial mistake that I’ve corrected in my life, I would at least not have trouble scraping together rent. I have something better than a dollar for those things, however; correcting bad habits and trying to work on my flaws is priceless, and I can’t do those things if I’m not aware of them. I’ve done terrible things (like everyone– I’m not putting myself down, here; I’m just being honest.) I don’t want to be those things. I want to be what I am now; I want to be my future, and the better person that I’m going to be.

It seems that a lot of people would rather refuse to face their mistakes, refuse to admit they’d made one, than correct them. I understand this; really I do. When I was young and immature, I did it a lot, because I wanted to be perfect, and if I’d made mistakes I would be less than perfect, and so I wanted to pretend I’d never made any. But I’d like to think I’m more mature than that now. I know that people don’t have to be their pasts. And furthermore, if I go denying that I made a mistake, I’m the only one who thinks I didn’t make that mistake; everyone else still thinks that I did– and that furthermore I’m still making it– and also I look even more foolish for trying to pretend that I didn’t. No, it’s far better that I face the thing, even if it’s painful, and get rid of it. I might have to get really dirty to clean my bathroom, but it will never be a clean place to live if I don’t suck it up and do it.

I can’t say that I’m perfect at this, and I’m sure sometimes I protest that I didn’t make a mistake when I did– because I don’t see yet why I’m mistaken. I don’t want to protest, however. In fact, I suppose I could say that refusing to face my own mistakes is exactly one of those mistakes that I want to stop making. I know I have gotten far better at it than I used to be; whether I’m good at it or not is not for me to say, since the thing about deceiving oneself is that one can’t easily assess whether one is doing it. In the end, however, I do think that if someone shows me that I made a mistake, I will at least consider that it’s possible that I did, whether or not I immediately react with understanding. And at least I no longer protest out of sheer crippling embarrassment, because of wanting to not have done it in the first place. What’s done is done; at least I can face it gracefully.

I value reality quite a lot. I value not being fake, and not pretending to be things that I’m not. I value saying genuine things and only when I really mean them, and I value communicating only what is true. The last thing I want is to deceive myself just to make myself look better to myself– not only is it childish and against my value of sincerity, but I’m sure that if I am really fooling myself, I will not be satisfied; deep down I will know the truth, and I will only ever be defensive and uncomfortable about that. Of course, if I honestly don’t know I’m making a mistake then that’s different from deceiving myself and I really might not be dissatisfied, but that does not mean that I prefer ignorance. I don’t. I prefer being a better person, and that means not just better in the ways that I perceive myself, for my own self-gratification, but better to others as well. I wouldn’t be a very good person if I were only concerned about making myself think I was a good person.

There seem to be some people out there who really only care about whether they can convince themselves that they are good. They think– insofar as one can say they think about it; these things aren’t necessarily conscious; deceiving oneself is more of a subconscious thing– that if they pretend they are right, then they are. It seems like conscious thought would fairly obviously reveal that it isn’t so, but they don’t let it get to the level of conscious thought. They just go right on convincing themselves that they are doing fine and therefore don’t need to question themselves. And because of that, they don’t correct their mistakes; indeed, if someone points out a mistake, they dig in their heels and find a way to justify what they did so that they can convince themselves (and others if possible) that they actually didn’t make a mistake. But these people are missing out on what happens if you do admit you made a mistake: they don’t get to correct the mistake and actually be better. They would rather live in dissonance and illusion; as long as nothing shatters that illusion they just keep it up and refuse to look at what they’re doing. And they patch any holes in it with more illusion. And I want never to be that way, not when I can help it at all. I’m sure that I’m not perfect about it, and I know for a fact that I acted like that sometimes when I was young, but I hope that it is mostly a trait of my immaturity that has passed and is behind me now. I hope that I am now a better person who doesn’t do that anymore.

I don’t like to judge others on what they’ve done in the past, and I wouldn’t want anyone to judge me on what I’ve done in the past. I don’t know which of these statements caused the other, if either did; perhaps they even developed independently. But I know that I would not like to be forever what I was in the past, as if I couldn’t ever shed my mistakes and begin anew; and I wouldn’t want to force anyone else to be chained forever to their past mistakes, either. I want to be able to say that I am a good person even if I wasn’t before. I would always like to be able to say that I am a better person today than I was yesterday. I think most people would like the opportunity to say that of themselves– but if they are too stuck on insisting that they were never a worse person to begin with, they can’t say it.

Are video games violent?

No. Video games are not any more violent than, say, books.

“But wait,” someone cries. “What about all that footage we’ve seen of horrible graphic video game violence? We know there are violent games. We’ve seen them.” And yes, it’s true; there are violent games. Completely aside from the question of whether violent games can be harmful– which is a different question entirely from what I’m addressing here– it is true that they exist.

But there is a difference between “violent games exist” and “all video games are violent”, one which many people don’t keep in mind. It is like saying “Books are violent” instead of saying “There exist some books that are violent, that glorify violence, that make children want to be aggressive like the characters in combat”– which is as true of books as it is of video games, but we don’t think of books, on the whole, as being violent things. To say that “video games” themselves are inherently violent, that they are dangerous and harmful, that those who play them are likely to become a menace to society, is to assume that all video games glorify violence– and that’s not true.

There are plenty of nonviolent games, and I’m not just talking about Tetris. To begin, with there are games like Mario Bros. where any violent act is extremely cartoonified and less graphic than your average Looney Toons episode, which we seem to think is perfectly suitable for the young. If jumping on the head of an animated turtle is too violent for our children, we probably shouldn’t have any classic cartoons either. And there are games like Katamari Damacy, where you basically roll a ball around the floor and collect objects, creating the stars and moon and planets; yes, you can roll up people, but this is treated as an opportunity for a grand vacation to the moon. There is Dance Dance Revolution, in which you jump on arrows on a floor mat in time to the music– a good aerobics workout, as well as being fun. And that’s before mentioning that some games have stories complex and thought-provoking enough to deserve a place in literature. RPGs in particular– the acronym stands for “role-playing game”, because the earliest video game RPGs were based on Dungeons and Dragons, although little resemblance remains– often have complex and thought-provoking stories these days. Imagine: you’re sent on a quest to arrest some bandits, and then you discover that things aren’t as they seem and that what you did was morally wrong. This is an experience you can’t quite have in a book, where you aren’t the guiding hand behind the characters’ actions. Far from being desensitizing, this kind of story is often sensitizing– highlighting the connection between what you helped the character do and the consequence of that choice. Instead of rewarding you for committing violence, some games show you why you would never want to.

Many people, especially those who didn’t grow up playing games, are unaware of the benefits that said games can bring. Typical examples are people who will tell you that games taught them new words– I definitely learned some words from games, words my mother didn’t even know, like “whelk“. I learned what a CPU is from a game; not from asking about the machine the game was played on, but because it was brought up in the game’s story. Some behaviourists suggest that games particularly help kids develop hand-eye coordination and reflexes, and even if kids could be getting that practice elsewhere, they might as well be learning it from games if that’s what they prefer to focus on. And special controllers, such as the aforementioned dance pad floor mats and Wii remotes and others, can net them a good workout. There’s also the social learning aspect: online PC game players tend to form clans or guilds that befriend each other and work together, cooperating and sometimes nurturing younger players, letting others try out different social roles in a virtual setting. And even violent games, as players often point out, are sometimes an outlet for stress relief to blow off steam; these people at least are getting the opposite effect. Implying that games make people violent is unfair to all the gentle pacifists who would never hurt a fly and also enjoy video games. (If you don’t believe that such people exist, I suggest googling for forums where debates on the subject take place; invariably the comments are full of model citizens who are avid gamers, speaking up for their oft-maligned hobby.)

For those who are still concerned about the existence of even one violent video game that children might potentially get their hands on, consider also that most other activities can involve violence as well. Some movies glorify violence as much as games ever did, by making it look cool rather than showing how horrible it is. There are plenty of books that glorify violence– full of horror, serial killers, spies, and worse, all looking glamourous and enticing– but that’s hardly a reason to stop children from reading. Art, classic art in museums, depicts gruesome scenes as well. In fact, any medium that imparts cultural understanding can equally impart a glorified view of violence. They are just as likely to see it in high culture as they are to see it in games. We want people to watch the news and stay informed, but the news is full of violence more shocking than a thousand zombie deaths. And what of sports– hunting, fishing, football? The former two involve literally harming living creatures, and the latter involves rough play in which people often really get hurt. We see these as suitable activities, not as something that might desensitize people or make children aggressive, but they are full of violence as well. Some people seem to think that these real, physical acts of violence are less desensitizing than ones committed in a game against animations that one knows full well is just a game and doesn’t really hurt anybody. I find that to be a very strange worldview indeed. People seem to think about activities that are traditional (and therefore “okay” and “good clean fun”) differently from how they think about activities that are new and are just beginning to be examined carefully by the generations who actually grew up experiencing them. But that is an illusion of thought; to a child born today, books and video games and sports are equally new, and deserve equal examination and equally careful judgment. And the child doesn’t know only about violent games in the news; the child more likely knows what all the other kids at school are playing, which is perfectly likely to be nonviolent, given the vast array of different games out there.

Even if you are a die-hard proponent of the idea that being exposed to violence causes people to be violent, it’s a huge error to assume that all games are violent. Many of them are not. To react adversely to the idea of video games themselves is to completely write off an extremely varied type of pursuit; some games might be the violent combat you imagine, but some of them are practically the opposite.