When 15 year-old Brandon Crisp started to skip school to play Call of Duty 4, his parents took away his Xbox as a punishment.  In retaliation, he ran away from home.  It all sounds fairly typical, after all many kids think about or threaten to run away from home in response to their parents' rules and punishments, myself included.  Sadly, by the time the authorities found Crisp--some 3 weeks later--he was dead.  An autopsy later showed the cause of death was a fall from a tree, but many in the media have laid the blame on his addiction to Call of Duty 4.

Here is one such report, a TV documentary called 'Top Gun: When video game addiction turns to tragedy'

As someone who both plays games and works in the industry, I find this kind of reporting troubling.  Surely Brandon ran away because he couldn't get his own way?  The argument that lead to his disappearance could have been about anything; too much TV, a girlfriend, a gang, his diet, whatever.

As a parent, I wonder why people allow their children to do things without investigating them properly first.  Call of Duty 4 is not a game for a 15 year-old boy.  A quick look at COD4 on Amazon.ca clearly shows it is M (for mature) rated. Amazon even provide a handy guide to this rating by clicking on the ESRB logo in the product description.  M is for 17 years and older, simple as that. Further more, his parents allowed him to storm out of the house in the first place.  Surely the sensible thing to do would have been to make him cool off in his room or on the back garden, somewhere safe?

And as usual, the two things critics of video gaming keep going back to is addiction and the act of virtual killing. Addiction is a tricky one. When they say 1 in 12 teenage boys are addicted to video games, I wonder what the ratio is for people who simply have addictive personalities. Sure, video games are what they're addicted to, but if it wasn't gaming, wouldn't it be something else? In Brandon Crisp's case, his father encouraged him to be competitive, a vital component to any game, so was the boy actually addicted to being the best?

What about “virtual murder simulation”? Well for me shooting or beating down an opponent in a game has never been about violence, only success. Yes, I like it when I get a head shot, but not because I enjoy shooting people in the head (I've seen the Zapruder footage, I know how devastating sniper shots to the head are), it's simply a quick and efficient method of scoring.

So in my opinion, the tragic case of Brandon Crisp is perhaps more common than we realise. It just happens to be version of the runaway child story that involved both video games and death, without the two things being directly related.

This year I bought Halo Legendary pack (if that's the right name), a load of stuff for Motorstorm and the new tables for Pinball FX.