First! The point of Benj's peice was that video games are making us into cold unfeeling people. Theater and art does not do that. This means that the government will have to be be forced to step in and do something about it. Also you can not back-up a soul for goodness sakes.

What is a soul?
If you don't believe any of that superstitious mumbo-jumbo (and what reasonable person would), it's just the product of a load of chemical and electrical interactions. If you could get a snapshot of the electrochemical status, and record it, you've got a backup. Doing a restore from a backup might be a bit tricky...

@config - the soul is where your true self abides and is eternal. As a spiritual person who is also studying science I would like to point out that the soul transcends our current understanding of biochemistry (like the sphericalness of the planet transcended the people around gallalaio - including the Catholic Pope). We've really got to catch up. Anyway, the Gama peice made my worry about if the goverment is already looking into how to bring laws against harm to virtual creations and robots. They are not dumb, the goverment that is. We should be worried about this as in the future it will be about how we fight wars to defend ourselves and the right to belief in the truths that we hold dear. Viva Gama and Benji says I sirs!

Yes it does. If you want to go down that road, anything does. How many times have you seen a horror film? After seeing it three times, can you sit down and watch Natural Born Killers and say you're as horrified/excited with the violence in the film as you were the first time? And damn, once you've seen anything by that dirty bint Tracey Emin I swear you'll never be surprised by a lot of artwork again.

That editorial is doing nothing but feeding more 'sick filth' propaganda to the Daily Mail-ites with no real substance at all. Yeah, so you kill some guys in a make-believe fashion in COD. We may as well ban Quasar then, because that's essentially a training ground for murderers too.

The only 'debate' this op-ed (the one on Gama, that is) will spark is how far we go in banning all forms of entertainment and activity whatsoever. There's nothing thought-provoking in saying we may all be killers for capping a guy in Halo.

@Svend_Joscelyne - did you even read the Gama piece. I guess you didn't. It was future-relevant and took onboard a bunch of really insightful ideas that people like Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke would also have made. It's about time that we all started to actually take this stuff seriously. A while ago we didn't even think that black folks were people and should have rights and we are now in the same situation - potentially a legal mindfield as Gama says - with virtual people. If we do get the point where we lose our feelings and empathies for killing due to being alienated from the people (virtual or otherwise) that we are killing then we can look back to now and facepalm at our own laziness in not taking it all seriously. The writer of this peice misses the point by a long, long chalk and should go back to his bedroom and games and leave the grown-ups to talk about grown-up stuff.