Evening Reading

On Monday a bombing at Moscow's busiest airport took 35 lives and injured 110 more sending shockwaves through the international community. Listening to BBC World Services on the ride to work this morning I heard Russian President Dmitry Medvedev blasting security at the airport as "chaos" and blaming the tragedy on that.

But as proof I guess of how westernized Russia has become, the government financed Russia Today has pointed the finger at video games (seen on The New York Times). If you played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 you probably know where this is headed. In it, the infamous 'No Russian' level depicted terrorists walking through an airport terminal wantonly gunning down everyone in sight.

Forget the fact that it's fiction and the implication blaming this particular sort of fiction would create for the six seasons of 24 alone. The part that disturbs me the most is how these tragic, gut-wrenching events get sensationalized like this for the sake of generating news. It essentially turns the awful events into entertainment as if they were nothing more than the plot of a TV show, movie, or game. But they aren't. Real people lost their lives; real families were torn apart.

We're long past the grace period for pulling this sort of nonsense. Stop exploiting these situations to create news drama. Much as we might want to rationalize things and have them fit into our perceptions of what makes sense, the raw truth of it has to be faced. Bad people did bad things. And they didn't train with video games. They trained with real guns and bombs.

And now, highlights from today's video game news on the Shack:

• Bulletstorm and Crysis 2 Demos Out

• Mass Layoffs Rumored at Disney Interactive

• New CoD: Black Ops 'First Strike' DLC Trailer

• Video Games of 2011 We Can't Wait to Play: Jeff

• First Three Blizzard-designed StarCraft 2 Custom Games Go Live