Some time ago I took the boys to their older brother’s place in Sydney for some sibling bonding. They love his computer set-up with its wide screen and booming surround sound, it's just perfect for gaming.

There they were in adoration mode, while I read ‘Ad Busters’, a magazine I found just lying about which, with its anti global capitalism exposés, was almost convincing me that generation ‘whatever’ might be OK after all. I read for a bit and then wandered over to see what all the excitement was about at nerd central.

Of course big brother had introduced my innocent young fellas to Grand Theft Auto, a game so spectacularly violent that if you merely pull passing motorists from the driver’s seat and steal their cars, you are playing like a hippy peace freak. My boys fell in love with it on sight.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but soon we had our own copy of the game at home. It was a case of anything for a peaceful life.

It wasn’t long before they’d emerge from the cyber bunker with gems like, “Hey guess what? I’ve got a five-star wanted level and the police, the FBI and the army are all trying to waste me. Cool ay?”.

All I could do was counter lamely with, “Have you cleaned your room yet?”. Then we could agree that our conversation was mutually incomprehensible and talk about something else.

The question here I suppose is whether this is worse than the cowboys and Indians of the fifties and sixties era? I was brought up with the Cisco Kid (Oh Pancho … Oh Cisco), the Lone Ranger (Hi-yo Silver) and other totally wholesome characters whose lives centred round shooting people.

These were the days of expendable henchmen, mostly baddies, who died cleanly after copping a slug or two. Never did they lie pathetically and painfully wounded, crying for their loved ones, no siree, they just fell clean down dead, out of one plot into another.

Thanks to the wondrous new television set, we watched any number of shows where the heroes all packed iron, as did most of the male townsfolk; where most of the action occurred in the pub (OK, the saloon) and where it was lawful to shoot anyone so long as they drew their gun first.

The gunslinger could walk into any situation and hurl a challenge like, “So what areya? Tell you what yar. A lily-livered, yellow-bellied skunk who daint give a hootin tarnation if he acts like a coward in fronta his free-ends is wurt.”

The poor goaded sucker goes for his gun and Blam! Blam! Blam! He gets wasted (as the kids of today would say) by the gunslinger. A bit like what we’re doing in Iraq if you get my drift.

Meanwhile down at the junction, Casey Jones was oiling up his old steam locomotive ready for the next time he had to clickety-clack along the ribbons of steel, thwarting bank robbers or saving maidens. Steam engines were once the symbols of technological achievement and power as they thundered through the landscape showering soot and ash over everyone’s washing.

Like the glorified Wild West, the age of steam is over, with cleaner and vastly more efficient diesel and electric motors now doing all the work. There is one exception. The last hurrah for gunslinger behaviour and dirty, inefficient steam engines is in the production of electricity. But these technological dinosaurs will not die until we get our politicians out of the coal lobby’s pocket.

And that’s another story.