Somewhere in the world, I’m sure there is a group of people that makes a profit from research and studies into whether or not video games, television, movies, music, the Internet, and the media have detrimental effects on one’s physical and mental health.

There’s got to be a cult or something with a base in the Himalayas that profit from making people unsure of whether anything they participate in is good for them.

There’s rarely a devoted gamer who is willing to pose the question of whether or not playing video games is a good thing for them. It’s obviously fun; otherwise the gamer wouldn’t be playing to the point where it’d be a potential problem. There are a hundred angles to this issue and the criticism has been noted since video games first saw the light of day. However, I’ve never really examined the question: is “the vidya” bad for you?

My immediate answer is that video games are no more physically damaging to a person than Avril Lavigne’s music, if not less so. Whereas her voice can give you brain damage, the most discomfort I’ve heard of that was directly attributed to video gaming either involved eye strain, muscle tension in the forearms or carpel tunnel, and those are quite rare. I’m sure just reading her name made you flinch in agony.

There have been positive correlations in the past between the vidya and obesity, but as my Psychology teacher does so well to remind my class, correlation does not mean causation; that is, just because they’re related in some cases doesn’t mean that one causes the other.

My mother has played some of the online games at her job before, and she’s admitted that they are quite fun and it’s easy to lose track of time. Her inability to moderate how long she plays a game probably has something to do with the fact that her eyes hurt after a while.

Since I’ve been doing it for a good number of years, I know to stay a distance away from the screen especially when I intend to play for a long time, but my 61-year-old mother has been playing online games for less than six months and I doubt she has that sense just yet. Therefore, I’m not surprised her eyes hurt after playing.

I would like to be able to say that playing video games doesn’t damage a normal person psychologically. Unfortunately, it seems that every week on gaming blog website Kotaku, there’s an article about how some idiot decided to kill someone that somehow related to video games.

I’m willing to recognize that competitive gaming with one’s violent friends is not very recommended, but I’ve yet to see a fighting game that told the player to murder the person sitting next to them when they lose.

Oscar Wilde once wrote that there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book, and that books are either well written or badly written and that’s all there is to it. The same holds true for video games: there are none that I’m aware of that tell people to kill your friends, or to rob the elderly, or to run away from home. The game is either entertaining or boring. What people do with it and make of it is entirely on their shoulders.

My (somewhat controversial) case in point is a young Canadian lad named Brandon Crisp. This 15-year-old gamer played a lot of Call of Duty 4 online, and when his parents took away his Xbox 360 as a disciplinary measure, he ran away from home. He was missing for a good while before he was found dead at the base of a tree, frozen and covered in bruises.

An autopsy report and further investigation revealed that Crisp had not taken a jacket with him when he left home, climbed high into a tree for some shelter from the elements, and fallen out of it. The bruises were caused by tree branches on his way down where he froze to death. There was no foul play involved.

Needless to say, this was a huge incident for the gaming community. Blame for hundreds of incidents just like this is continually pointed at a hobby that, at least for the majority of the populace, does not cause people to lose their rationality.

It is every gamer’s responsibility to know when to put the controller down, because playing video games (like anything fun) can be habit forming. It may not be directly detrimental to your health, but too much gaming (like spending days on end playing World of Warcraft) can make you stop caring about other things in your life.

It is people like Crisp who take it a bit too far and ruin their lives over something stupid. Whether or not video games are bad for a person is entirely on that person’s shoulders. If they have any common sense, it shouldn’t be bad for them, but if they’re immature, insane or just idiots, then I suggest regulation of the game time.

In the end, the vidya might be a horrible tool of the Devil that turns nice people into misguided murderers and suicide victims. It’s much more likely, however, that these cases reflect individual instances that can’t be used to target the entire community.

If my mom decides to throw bricks at me after playing a vigorous round of Tetris, I’ll be quite worried. But, I’m not holding my breath.