Since the Indie’s knackered hard drive ruined The Man On The Street’s last attempt at conducting exciting audience research, this month let’s have another go. Answer your reporter this philosophical poser, my retailing pals: Are we scum?

The reason for asking is a collection of things which have been steadily nagging at your correspondent’s conscience, building up to a head that seems to to point like a pointy head at one inescapable conclusion - namely that the videogames industry is the most morally-bankrupt area of culture in our green and pleasant land.

Heavens, that’s a dramatic claim. So let’s see what shoddy half-nuggets of misinformation your column-writing comrade’s cobbled together to back up his flagrantly gratuitous rabble-rousing this month. The thing that shoved your reporter over the action line was the court case recently filed in America with regard to Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto 3. Now, we won’t bother going into the well-worn whys and wherefores of whether the game really did cause a couple of teenagers to go out onto the freeway and start shooting at cars, resulting in the death of one innocent motorist and the narrow avoidance of a catastrophic pile-up.

What concerns The Man On The Street rather more is the industry’s kneejerk “nothing to do with us” reaction, as drawn attention to by a splendid column in games magazine Edge. Because while the link between games and real-life violence is yet to be proven, what’s in little to no doubt is that the industry pursues a hypocritical policy of claiming that games like GTA3 are solely for adults, yet actively advertises and promotes them in magazines aimed at and bought almost exclusively by minors. Noting this simple fact brought down a landslide on the heads of the unfortunate Edge staff, but the point remains an unarguable one – the publishing and magazine industries collude in the promotion of these games to minors, and release them at a time of year when the majority of games are being bought for or by children. (And The Man On The Street is sure he doesn’t have to remind Indie readers of the retail industry’s dismally poor record when tested by anonymous juvenile shoppers trying to purchase games rated for adults only, though by anecdotal accounts things are at least improving in that area.)

But GTA3 isn’t even the most morally-dubious game on the shelves. This very column has already discussed last year’s Christmas blockbuster The Getaway, in which the player is invited to identify with a character who slaughters hundreds, even thousands of innocents in a bloodily-unnecessary attempt to rescue his kidnapped son. (Though bizarrely, the only major outcry about the game came from British Telecom, who objected to a small percentage of the character’s brutal murders being conducted while disguised as a BT workman.) And this year, children are being invited to pester Santa Claus for a game – the elegantly-titled “WWE SmacKDown Here Comes The Pain!” – for which the primary selling point is the addition of a “Bra and Panties” match, in which female wrestlers have their clothes forcibly torn off in front of a baying, leering mob of onlookers to determine the winner.

Still, aiming such a tasteless mimicry of sexual violence directly at children seems almost harmless when you consider some of the games industry’s previous ring-based activity, most contemptibly Codemasters’ lining of the pockets of convicted violent rapist Mike Tyson a couple of years back for a series of boxing games which deservedly followed Tyson’s own career trajectory. (With the arrest of Jody Morris coincidentally following so hard on the heels of the release of Leeds United Club Football from the same company, and allegations about an incident in a London hotel still ongoing, the publisher could well end up with quite a roster of rapists on its payroll, albeit partly unwittingly.)

The defence in the case of Smackdown, of course, would presumably be that it’s a tongue-in-cheek sort of game, that WWE is basically just a big pantomime. But isn’t the audience usually encouraged to take part in pantomimes? At the end of the day, isn’t watching women be forcibly stripped and humiliated for entertainment a rather suspect thing to be teaching your kids to cheer at - and, in the medium of gaming, to actively participate in? The Man On The Street can’t be the only one with a bad taste in his mouth on this one, can he?

The games industry has for many years enjoyed escaping the attentions of the censors, because the outside world tends not to regard gaming as a serious cultural business, and hence doesn’t pay that much notice to what goes on in our little world. But as the business grows and their gaze turns ever more towards us, maybe we ought to take a look at what they’re going to see.