A black car pulls up to an intersection, it's around four thirty in the afternoon, and the streets are fairly busy. Without waiting the car tears through the intersection at high speed, hitting another vehicle in its path, but just continues on. It passes police cars, which quickly take notice and begin to follow the speeding car. The driver then makes a screeching stop, jumps out of the car, and pulls out what seams to be a projectile rocket launcher. Just as the officers take notice, it is already too late. The rocket accelerates towards the cars and they meet in an explosive head on collision. This isn't a scene from "The Worlds Scariest Police Chases", or the most recent big budget action movie. It's a game, called Grand Theft Auto: Vice City made by Rockstar Games. For years, parents concerned with what might corrupt their children, have banded together to try and put a stop to what they deemed unacceptable. They have now set their sights on a new target. It's not television, or movies, not even rock music, the new problem child, is video games. But is all the uproar justified, is it really the video games fault?.
The video game industry has come a very long way from its roots in the arcade and early computer era. In the early days it only took a single programmer a couple months of his own time to make a game. Many sold independently through computer shops in plastic sandwich bags with Xeroxed instructions. The technology could only take the games so far; many doomed to live in flat 2D environments. Today's games however come remarkably close to the real world. Computer animation technology has grown tremendously, and players can now explore large 3D worlds, with people across the word simultaneously. Many games now have budgets rivaling the movie industry's biggest blockbuster with years of production time. "The increasingly realistic and exciting nature of electronic games has helped to make them enormously popular with children and youth.