Though it's probably a stunner to hear from the makers of Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake and all other iterations of the first-person shooter forerunners, id Software decided that it was high time they laid down their side of the gaming violence controversy, oft opposed by one crusading Florida lawyer.

I think that the wider videogame market doesn't understand that [the violent games are] not just for kids, they're for adults too. That's where paranoia and lack of rationality comes into it. You wouldn't go and get a Quentin Tarantino movie and go, 'Oh my God! I can't believe someone was shot in that film!' because you know there's Disney for kids and there's Quentin Tarantino for adults, or there's Spielberg for everybody.

One of the things that I see with my kids - I have a ten-year-old - is that they love to play online games and get together, and when they play these games, their world shrinks. They're solving problems and playing against each other or with each other, amongst all these different cultures and people throughout the world, and I believe that when our kids get older and become the politicians of the future, it will probably be a more peaceful world because they have grown up knowing that they can just play with people from China or Russia and everyone's the same and everyone solves problems together. So I actually have a brighter outlook on the future based on the social interaction, the social connectivity that we have in videogames in our youth.