The moral panic about video games is subsiding

Since gaming has become more mainstream, the proportion of violent games has fallen. According to vgchartz, a website that tracks games sales, the ten bestselling console games of 2010 included just three violent shooters. The rest were inoffensive sports and fitness titles. Still, many games require the player to dispose of great numbers of Nazis, gangsters, aliens and other bad guys. A few games serve up stylised violence for its own sake. And the critics say there is a crucial difference between films, plays or books, where the players are just passive onlookers, and video games, where they are active participants in the simulated slayings. But the evidence is hard to pin down. Read more here.