[BOSTONGLOBE] Something didn't feel right to ÂAndrew and Tracey Hyams when they entered the rest stop in Charlton on the ÂMassachusetts Turnpike on Christmas Eve with their 12-year-old son and saw another boy absorbed in an arcade game.The youth was firing a machine gun replica at the screen, licking off simulated rounds with a rapid-fire rat-tat-tat that reverberated off the walls. "You could even hear it in the bathroom," Andrew Hyams, 58, of Newton, said in a telephone interview Thursday.
I've tagged this under "Tales of the Easily Offended," but I actually agree with the state action, probably for the "wrong" reasons. A highway rest stop is for going to the bathroom or taking a nap, maybe buying a cup of coffee or a snack. It's not for hanging around playing games, violent or otherwise. And I don't like violent video games because of 50 percent if everybody is below average, so is 50 percent of the violent games audience. I know lotsa people like to play them, but we have enough violence-fixated brats in this country.
Because the plaza is close to Newtown, Conn., Hyams said, a relative of one of the school shooting victims could have walked in and seen a player firing away, 10 days after the massacre that took the lives of 20 first-graders and six adults.
"People have the freedom to have whatever video games in their own homes that they want," Hyams said. "We were struck by walking into a [state-owned] rest stop within an hour's drive of Newtown and seeing and hearing a life-sized, mounted machine gun on a video game."
The couple felt that such games had no place in public rest stops, and the state DepartÂment of Transportation agreed. After receiving an Âe-mail from the Hyams, the Massachusetts agency removed nine violent games from service plazas in Charlton, Ludlow, Lee, and Beverly.