There has been a lot of talk lately about the alleged harmful nature of video games and the impact of violent video games on our nation’s youth. There have been arguments put out that video games aren’t an art form. That they are entertainment of the worst kind. That they have no substance.

I’ve been a “gamer” all my life. One of my earliest memories is playing Super Mario World with my father on an old Super Nintendo in the living room of the first house I ever lived in. I couldn’t have been older than four or five at the time. It was a bonding experience, and something I still look fondly back on all these years later.

As I grew up, so did my games. For Christmas, it must have been 2002, I received my first console that was all my own. A Sony PlayStation 2. Scooby Doo: Night of 100 Frights was the first game I ever played on my own. It was a little too difficult for me at the time, but I played it relentlessly. When I wasn’t playing it, I’d talk about it to the exhaustion of my mother’s patience.

My fascination with gaming quickly picked up steam. I had a Gameboy Color when I was younger, and the following Christmas my grandparents gave me a Gameboy SP. Then came the Gamecube (the first console I bought for myself), then a Nintendo DS, then an Xbox 360 as a teenager, then another Nintendo DS (because this was several years removed from the first and I finally had a job).

I was a very fortunate child to have the family I did, who were willing, when they could afford it, to buy these crazy technological marvels that they didn’t really understand but that I seemed to love.

Looking back, I chuckle to myself at the memory of my family gathered around my new Xbox on Christmas day nearly ten years ago as everyone watched on and exclaimed how it was just like watching a movie; it was just so real, so beautiful.

This is a very long way of saying gaming has been a huge part of my life. When I was bored or lonely as a kid, it gave me something to keep my mind busy and engaged me more than cartoons ever would. It was always a key rallying point for friends, as we’d clump together around James’ T.V. set on his birthday and play Halo free-for-alls round-robin style. Winner stays on, of course.

When my sister was just a toddler before she even really had a firm grasp on speaking, she’d sit next to me with an unplugged controller as I played 007: Nightfire and play along. She never knew that she wasn’t really playing, and she had a blast. We still joke about that to this day. Video games, in a weird way, has brought me closer to those around me and helped me to keep distant friends close.

They also made me want to tell stories for a living. It's hard for me to swallow the statement that games don’t have substance when I play games like Life Is Strange, which forces me to address the way I interact with people in the real world by forcing me to live with the worst-case results of my actions.

It is hard for me to see a lack of art in games like That Dragon Cancer, into which a grieving father poured out his heart to visually show us the pain of his journey with a terminally ill son, and the crushing weight of his loss.

I struggle to see their point of view when people say that games aren’t socially aware, when the end of Spec Ops: The Line, a first-person shooter, confronts me with all of my choices, shows me how easily I had been misled, and asks a very pointed question: Do you feel like a hero yet?

Like any art form, games can run the range of artistic sensibilities. While I’m not advertising GTA: V as a groundbreaking social commentary, I maintain that it’s dangerous to our democracy to begin dictating what artists can and can’t create. Films like Get Out are only able to be made because someone somewhere was allowed to make Texas Chainsaw Massacre (A film that helps popularize the horror genre off of which Get Out plays).

When you try to kill what you see as the root of a social problem through legislation of art and creativity, you kill all of the infinitely more beautiful things that were still to come.