BT has forced Sony to re-edit its blockbuster video game The Getaway - which has stunning photographic reproductions of London streets - because it features a man dressed as a BT engineer. Normally companies would die to get "product placement" like this, especially in a game which sold 250,000 within days of its release. Not this time, though, because the anti-hero of the game steals a BT van and overalls while Rambo-ing his way around London on a murderous rampage. BT has joined the chorus of disapproval of the way computer games - which now gross more than films - are becoming increasingly violent. The launch of The Getaway in December followed an even bigger controversy over the global best-seller Grand Theft Auto Vice (which, like The Getaway, was developed in Britain), since it enables gamers to steal cars and kill prostitutes or police as part of the action.

In the US, the National Football League has met the developer of NFL Blitz, a video football game, to discuss the gratuitous violence it projects on the screen. The Democratic senator Joe Lieberman has said he will hold more hearings on the effects of violent video games and yesterday the European commission said that it would start film-style classifications for video games in April.

Clearly a lot more research is needed to alleviate the fears of parents about what their offspring are getting up to in the back room. Children have always been subjected to a fair degree of violence in their entertainment (Punch and Judy and Mickey Mouse are not exactly paradigms of peaceful behaviour). On the face of it, escapist video games are less worrying than the bloodstained realism of so many gangster films, but that is not saying much. Until we have more evidence of the effects on gamers, maybe we should be guided by the New York policeman who observed that he would far rather see kids shooting cops on their screens than out on the streets.