Anyone who knows me is aware of my affinity for guts, gore and fantasy. Whether you're pushing music, film, comics or video games, simply add a battle axe or cannon-inflicted dismemberment and you'll be mercilessly tickling my fancy like some sort of bloodthirsty tickle-monster gone mad. Maybe it was my mother's gift of Warcraft 2 for my ninth birthday, or maybe it was my week in the hospital post-kidney surgery (constant blood tests, kidney draining . catheters), but something along the road turned me on to the realm of the extreme, and it's been my cup of severed limbs ever since. Yet despite being immersed for nearly half my existence in veritable pools of gore, the collection of experiences has yet to manifest itself in any negative way. I haven't in my adult life committed a school shooting, gone on a murderous joyride, deliberately stabbed someone or worn leather gloves and eyeliner. Nor do I have any bizarre or offensive sexual preferences. In fact, I'd say most of my friends (that's right, I have friends, too) consider me one of the most peaceful and calm beings in existence (the donut incident at Sunday's staff meeting notwithstanding).

"How can this be?" you ask. Well, quite frankly, I think it's simply because I, like most people with similar tastes, have the ability to intelligently distinguish fantasy from reality. I've always considered my preference for extreme media a kind of escape from the real world, a healthy and harmless expenditure of my aggression through art and imagination. Masturbation, not murder. That's my motto.

Violent music and video games have long been blamed for everything from the Columbine shootings to teen depression. That argument's been smacked around more than my wife (for the record, I don't have a wife . and probably never will now), but I'm going to take it a step further and turn it back on those same conservative naysayers.

What people need to be wary of isn't forms of media that present themselves honestly as pure detachment and fantasy but ones that earnestly attempt to simulate reality and influence the way we behave. While people complain about the damage that games like Doom did to our youth, they ignore the possibility that the real evil came in the guise of more "educational" games.

When SimCity was introduced in 1989, parents must have been overjoyed. If their children were going to spend all day on the Atari, at least they were going to be learning about economics and city-building. The game has been popular with kids ever since and remains the preferred time-waster for parents with e-addicted children.

But while parents looked on with encouragement from their rocking chairs, something nefarious was occurring on the computer screen. SimCity instilled in its players a staunchly conservative economic model for city building, one that punished players for raising taxes (your citizens would riot) and discouraged the creation of mixed-use development. (MUD zones encourage public transit. Public transit hurts the auto industry. And whom do we know that loves the auto industry?) SimCity's creator, Will Wright, has long been a strong Republican supporter, and his conservative economic ethos was a key component of the game's design. American youths raised on SimCity have been entering the workforce for a few years now, and look where they've gotten us.

Wright's other games, such as the massively successful Sims series and the create-your-own-species extravaganza Spore, have been equally scrutinized for their supposed subliminal messages. The Sims, in which the player controls the life of a virtual human, was based on a system that promoted social advancement almost exclusively through material gain, and extreme intelligent design supporters are already calling for Spore to be used as an educational tool for young children. True, these are still just video games, but it's far easier for developing young minds to draw parallels to reality with The Sims than they ever will while caving in an orc's face with a war hammer.