I admit it, I chuckled at this.
That said, the more serious point about the lack of games without violence doesn't hold any real weight, because such things DO exist and in greater numbers that people might realize or give credit to. Driving games, simulations, puzzle games, hidden objects games, farming games, and similar all don't nessicarly involve much in the way of violence and death. Indeed it can be aregued that the games that spearheaded the current social/casual games movement like Farmville are entirely non-violence and based entirely around creation. I also notice that STEAM has a truely shocking number of expansions for this railroad simulator as they are quite prolific every year, and to me that seems to imply plenty of people do nothing with their computers except use them as glorified train sets.
All of his jokes aside, Yahtzee is not the first one to point out the amount of action and violence in video games, and bemoan the lack of anything else. In light of this point I've seen gamers scrabble to find counterpoints other than Tetris without much success, and really it never seemed like a valid point to me and it's taken some time but after a bit of thought I've found a LOT of counter-points that can be made.
Now granted, most gaming IS violent and action-based, but that can be said for entertainment in general. Action and horror being two of the most prolific forms of entertainment out there accross all platforms. What's more if you look at almost any form of media your going to run into the same problem as anylyzing games. I mean your even your Grandmother's mystery novels typically revolve around gruesome crimes and bringing the perpetrator to justice.
I think the problem is that we have too many touchy-feely moralists, mostly on the lefthand side of the political spectrum, that see humanity's violent nature as something to be ashamed of and overcome, totally oblivious to the simple fact that it's the only real reason we've acheived a civilization capable of such introspection. Indeed I think 90% of the problems we face today politically, socially, and societally, exist largely because of large portions of the most advanced civilizations having grown too introspective and entered into a state of semi-vegatative state of social paralysis brought on by denial and hand wringing.
Violence in the media is a non-issue, if anything we hold it back due to being in denial. Violent media itself is a method of expressing these tendencies within a society without destroying it allowing society to survive without it knocking itself down. That said I think we've tried to wean too much violence out of the civilized world, and that enviroment has lead to violent media being treated as far more of an aberration than it actually is.
This is getting a bit further afield than I intended, but the bottom line is that I think there are issues here, just not the issue usually being addressed. Rather than the media, like games, needing to be defended, those who take entirely non-violent attitudes or who have a problem here are the ones who need to be put into the hot seat.
To be honest I think one big problem with the US, UK, and many other nations is that we have created enviroments of such safety that people have grown complacent and forgotten what it means to be human, survive, or what getting to this point entailed. We are self-critical of our own crime rates, but rarely look beyond our back yards to the rest of the world or at the barbarians that are rallying at the gates. To someone who lives in an enviroment where violence is something that usually happens to someone else and is "common" because you see it on the news frequently, attacking things like the media seems reasonable, and honestly that's kind of the problem. I think it's possible to be too safe and complacent, and to someone that naive (yet ironically thinking themselves worldly) you can see why the media is under attack since it's really the only source of violence 99% of the people ever know. Ironically though I think on a fundemental level violent media is attacked by such people because humans need conflict and thrive on it, attacking the violent media is a way of engaging in conflict while still trying to hold to a high principle.
