Last Thursday in Venezuela, a new law criminalizing "violent" video games and toys was approved by the National Assembly...

Last year, on a trip to the US, I was able to buy a Nintendo DS for my brother, and a puzzle game that deals with using weapons to defend the fish stock of penguins in Antarctica, Defendin' de Penguin. Early next year, when the law kicks in, bring such a game could land me in jail for 3 to 5 years..

The law is... a pitiful attempt to blame video games and toys for the widespread lethal violence in our country, instead of a defective judicial structure, systemic corruption and governmental (purposeful?) ineptitude to deal with the problem.

When American politicians use social wedge issues as a foil to draw attention away from their inability to address real problems people here are easily fooled because the solutions to our problems seem intractable to us, and so the foil does not seem so unreasonable.

When the same actions are seen through the prism of a foreign culture their true nature becomes more apparent. Obviously, Venezuela is more violent than most western countries and has less video games, so the idea that video games are at the heart of Venezuela's problems is silly. But they are going after video games, with prejudice.

Perhaps someone will take the position that violent video games are too heady for a culture that already places a low value on human life, that they exacerbate a problem that already exists and eliminating them is justified.

I think its a straw man. Banning video games is something the government knows how to do, so banning video games is what you get. But violent video games are not the same thing as actual violence, and banning them will not reduce the amount of actual violence in your society. It feels like progress, but in fact it has no effect on the underlying problem, for which there are no simple solutions.

There are ways to make a culture less violent but the road is long and the path is counterintuitive.

Venezuela bans violent video games: a first-person guest essay - Boing Boing