Everybody is talking about it, why shouldn't I?

This whole GTA thing reminds me a LOT of the whole Mortal Kombat thing.

I remember Mortal Kombat throwing everybody up in arms. People thought that Mortal Kombat would hurt kids, make them violent. Oh my god, so much blood!

Well, I'm going to chime in here. And granted, I might be one of a very small percentage of people, but that's probably a larger percentage than the amount of people who were inspired by video games to be violent.

Mortal Kombat turned me into who I am today. A good taxpayer who gives back to society.

I had a really rough childhood. My father was an ex-convict who spent most of his life in a maximum security prison with murders and rapists (over stealing guns and escaping county jail). My mother was a single mother who had me when she was 20 and couldn't make ends meet. Actually, my father refers to my stepfather, as my biological father abandoned us when I was three, and eventually went to jail for a very bad thing.

Growing up was no picnic. We lived everywhere from the slums of Harrisburg, to trailer parks, to the most remote countryside of Conneautville, PA. We were always on and off of welfare, my dad would work under the table and constantly get screwed by his employers. He was an ex-con with a 7th grade education, not much of a job market there. My mom would bust her ass to make ends meet and still take care of all the house maintenance stuff, cooking, cleaning, washing clothes etc. We would always have trouble with the law, because of my dad's reputation. Sometimes the frustration of life was taken out on me, because I wasn't his real kid. Almost constantly, members of our extended family were commiting crimes, going to jail, dropping out of school, the works.

Now, if I stuck with the sort of life that I had, I am almost 100% sure that I would currently be working at McDonald's, selling drugs on the side, and probably beat my wife and kids. I probably would have a criminal record, doing petty crimes like breaking and entering, etc. That's the type of life I came from.

But one day, counselors at school found out I was "gifted". They put me in all the "smart" classes, I even did this thing called Enrichment, where one day out of the week I would go to a special room and do projects like Odyssey of the Mind. There were 5 of us out of the whole grade.

You'd think this would be a good thing, but not in my neck of the woods. All the sudden I was further alienated from my family and the kids in the neighborhood. I was the "smart kid" full of "book learning." I was ridiculed, called a nerd, called stupid, told I was selfish and lacked any common sense, and that my life would be a disappointment. I was told I could never go to college because we were too poor, and if I didn't go to college, I would never amount to anything but poor white trash.

I was put in the gifted program when I was 10. Can you imagine how hard it was to be told these things? You just want to fit in. Here are the people that you are heavily influenced by, friends and family, and they're filling your head full of lies. Part of it is jealousy, part of it is because they don't want you to be hurt when you're let down the way they were let down.

My grades started dropping, i started getting into fights at school, started stealing, all that stuff. Until when I got to 7th grade, they put me in this program called Project Enhance. Every other Tuesday we would go to a nearby college and take classes like art and acting and stuff.

First day, I stopped by the campus arcade, and there it was.

Mortal Kombat 2.

and in that moment, my life changed forever.

from that moment, I knew, KNEW that I wanted to make video games. Everything about me, my proficiency with machines, my love of drawing, my passion for writing stories, my dream of making movies, EVERYTHING came together in one instant in a moment of clarity. Hell, I barely played the game, I would just stand there, part of the circle formed around it, and gawk at what I saw on the screen. I saw video games before, played Atari, had friends who had Nintendo, but THIS, THIS was where games were at. They HIT the big time now baby!

And in that moment, I developed a burning desire. A passion for creating games. It infused itself into the very core of my being. I saw it as a way out. Here was something that if I just focused, if I just thought hard enough, I could create. WITH MY MIND. It became my refuge, along with my comics, from all the bullshit in my childhood.

So if someone asks, do violent games affect children? Well, maybe they do. But maybe, just maybe, they help turn these kids into what they turned me into. They brought me out of poverty, gave me the strength to earn two degrees and be the first in my family to graduate college, made my family proud, and brought inspiration to my brother to not drop out of school and even look into going to college. It's made me a good taxpaying citizen, and I'm giving back to my community through volunteer work.