Video games great for growing boys

Turns out Violence is actually pretty great after all!

You've all heard about it in magazines, newspapers, radio, television - people have even probably said it to you - that violence is A Bad Thing™ for youth, and especially for young males.

A brand new book, The Trouble with Boys by Peg Tyre, is an in-depth look at how violence is both important to educate young males about but also just as important to give them an outlet for it.

Tyre believes that in recent years the media and parental hysteria (both being powerful forces) have taken a firm grip on the violent tendencies of children, essentially strangling their want and need for violence.

Think back to your childhood days in the playground - branding and even wrestling were popular between males as a way of testing limits and expressing it in a relatively safe way.

Now parents almost die of heart attacks every time a child gets a grazed knee, or poked with a feather, and this overbearing overprotectiveness is negatively affecting male performance in schools.

The answer, Tyre reckons, is violent video games. Let the children explore the concept of violence, right and wrong in the form of a video game where no physical harm can come to them, but they can still fulfil their need to find out what their fantasies contain (after all, who hasn't imagined getting into some kind of prickly situation every now and then?).

The Trouble with Boys is a very interesting argument for violent video games, and it's definitely something we approve of at Atomic - the more blood and gore, the better.

Head to her site to read more on the book.