Gamers as peaceniks

Ok, so the pac-man quote was one of those arguments that disproves itself (is there some Latinate rhetorical term for this? I'd love to know it). But I just ran across another bit that unselfconsciously seems to mitigate a games-are-ruining-society panic (at least from my perspective).

I don't play first-person shooters for several reasons:
1. they're a bit after my time (I think Doom came out the year after I graduated college, so it's not in my golden-age set like Crystal Castle would be. Or Centipede).
2. I tend toward the addictive and have heard of far too many people who can't get offline once the killing starts
3. they scare me: the realism smudges any line that might otherwise be there between entertainment and training.
4. I don't have a gaming-oriented computer or fast internet connection.

So I confess being susceptible to a kind of left-conservatism (or at least pacifist-) about violent gaming. I can see how people expect it to produce nihilists, desensitized to the real effects of violence.

But after reading a fascinating student paper about Quake 2 gaming clans (which, by the way, come across in the paper as a stark example of Foucault's notion of disciplines), I checked out the Online Gaming League website (ogl.org). Here's a little nugget of a poll that got me thinking:

Should we go to war in Iraq?
No: 41%
Yes: 38%
Don't give a crap: 21%
105 responses

Interesting.... Wonder when it was taken.