While we're at it, I've always found Risk to be an offensive game. What kind of message are we sending to our kids when we let them play a game in which thousand are slaughtered for their nations' imperial glory, and in which their own young hands send those poor plastic soldiers to their futile deaths? Perhaps we could teach them to subjugate some indigenous peoples while they’re at it? No wonder we invaded Iraq. And don't get me started on Axis and Allies, a game in which you can captain Germany to victory in World War II. It's basically telling our kids that Hitler wasn't really a bad guy after all, and it disrespects the war's 62 million dead!

It's more than a little silly to pick on a game in which you can casually murder unfortunate passers for 'endorsing' drunk driving, which, we are reminded, is not a game. (Are they implying that murder and carjacking are a game, or are MADD just trying not to step outside their sphere of expertise?) The ESRB has already rated the game as being inappropriate for children under 17; now it's retailers' and parents' jobs to ensure that it does not harm our nation's fragile, confused youths who, it must be said, really are teetering on a razor's edge between wholesome American boy/girlhood and a lifetime of sociopathology.

Video games are exactly what their name implies: elaborate games. They're not art (or at least not very good art); they're games. Grand Theft Auto in particular is just a game. Playing GTA has all the emotional impact of pushing little soldiers around on a map of the world or finally landing the thimble on Boardwalk. It's a sandbox in which you're allowed to do anything, and the game makes no attempt to convince you that it's anything different. The worlds are large, but they're not deep: the people that you can casually murder are little more than props; there are few immediate consequence for your actions and no long-term ones; everything is disposable, each car you wreck quickly replaceable; and there is never a 'Game Over'. Every action taken outside the context of the plot is essentially an experiment to see what the game engine will let you get away with. It has no purpose other than to allow the people to perpetrate absurd, madcap destruction on victims who are never seen by the player as anything other than digital props put there for their amusement.

For GTA to actually influence people of any age would require that it evince some connection between the player and the world in which the game takes place, and unless GTA IV represents a change of form for Rockstar, that's not likely to happen. Grand Theft Auto is a fairly mediocre series (one man's opinion, no point arguing this with me) that generates far more attention that it actually deserves. It simply does not warrant a moral panic.

I tolerate wrongheaded views like creationism by not going and burning their holders' houses down. The social contract doesn't ask anything further of me. I am not obliged to embrace it or to accommodate it in any way.

You ask why belief is different from skin color? I have a question of my own: Why are right-thinking, tolerant individuals repulsed by white supremacists? Surely those poor racists are just as oppressed by their own odious beliefs as brown-skinned people are by them! Beliefs can be demonstrably wrong, and moreover they can be harmful; skin color and other superficial human differences would be irrelevant but for the beliefs of people who erroneously attach importance to them. If sizable minority of people weren't getting their children the routine childhood vaccination schedule because their reading of the Great Sloth God's Book of Wisdom told them that disease was a curse from the Great Sloth and that to try to thwart the Great Sloth's will was blasphemy, would you be so understanding of their right to believe whatever the hell they wanted? Would a few yearly Mumps deaths be a reasonable cost to pay for tolerance?

As for science creating the kind of technological imbalances that brought about Imperialism, I would like to point out two things: Firstly, that while superiority does indeed breed conquest, it need not be scientific superiority. The imperial impulse was around long before the Western World gained a significant technological edge over everyone else and went on to build world-spanning empires. Secondly, it's amusing to listen to a man who makes his living disseminating his writing over the internet decry the imperial inequality created by insufficiently universal technological progress. That must not be a particularly uncomfortable hair shirt you're wearing, Sir.

Some beliefs should be ridiculed. Simple as that. There's no love or engagement in it.