GameCrave: Extreme Sports and Wacky Politics

It’s pretty eerie that Skate 2 (Xbox 360 and PS3) and Stoked (Xbox 360) are being released during the same week. Aside from the obvious similarities between skateboarding and snowboarding , the video games themselves offer some shared features, like open worlds to explore and trick systems that rely on analog sticks instead of buttons. It’s not all the same though; Stoked is a newcomer to the snowboarding game genre, while Skate 2 is the unsung hero, forever stuck in Tony Hawk’s enormous shadow.

Speaking of being stuck, last week, California Congressman Joe Baca joined the legions of politicians who’ve taken up video games as their personal punching bag. Baca wants violent titles to carry warning labels, reading that “exposure to violent video games and other violent media has been linked to aggressive behavior.” What’s the harm in such a bill? Imagine if an artistically wonderful but utterly violent game like Fallout 3 was tagged with a sticker that made it sound like cigarettes, but a Tarantino flick was not. In reality, neither one deserves it, and that’s why these attacks never hold water.