Political, Social, and Moral Ideology vs. the Video Game Industry and Community

From top-left to bottom right: Jack Thompson , Leland Yee, Ronnie Lamb, Anita Sarkeesian, and  Joseph Lieberman 

I'll start off by saying I am completely open to diversity in video games. Depending on the quality, I'm willing to play any game made in North America, Japan, Europe, and even Africa. During my years as a gamer, I have enjoyed playing a number of genres, including First-Person Shooters (FPS), Role Playing Games (RPGs), Beat'em-Ups, fighting games, hack-and-slash action, survival horror, platformers, turn-based strategies, real-time strategies, and the occasional point-and-click adventure. In those games, I've played the role of a variety of characters ranging from cyber-enhanced supersoldiers and supernaturally augmented demon hunters to medieval knights and ordinary people in bizarre circumstances. Overall, I've had a blast with them regardless of their gender, race, creed, and nationality. And I'm willing to spend my hard-earned money on more diverse games as long as they are well-made, well-designed, and deemed to be overall fun. In all the time I've spent playing video games, I have never developed any thoughts of committing suicide, sexual assaults, or public shooting sprees in any way; for that matter, my sense of reality and morality has never diminished and never will. Yet, this is exactly what's been implied by over-protective parents, politicians, social scientists, and pop culture critics when they bring video games into the mass media spotlight and propose various forms of legal restrictions, content regulation, and implementing their agenda in the development and production process based mainly on misinformation and cultural bias.

Video Games + American Cartoons = Bad Adoptations

In early 1990s America, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was at the height of its popularity, the Super NES and Sega Genesis were right around the corner, and arcades have experienced a revolution led by Capcom's Street Fighter II and Midway's Mortal Kombat. The rapidly growing popularity of video games made the game companies want to cash in by expanding their franchises into other products such as toys, comic books, novels, movies, and animated shows. In regard to animated shows, Japanese anime adaptations of popular video games made in Japan such as Capcom's Street Fighter and Darkstalkers have come to be regarded as the most faithful to the source material. On the other hand, American cartoon adaptations of popular video games have been reviled by fans as not only unfaithful to the source material but insulting to everything they cherish about their favorite games by using cheap (read poor quality) animations, degrading popular game characters in the day as what the contracted American studios deemed "tasteful" and "acceptable in the eyes of parents," and writing in cheap morality lessons/public service announcements that were in all likelihood ineffective. At their best, they were inferior knockoffs of the more well-known and better cartoons that were aired at the time. At their worst, they were canceled after only a few months, or even less than a week, of the first season.