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Five years ago, that kind of content should have provoked some kind of response from the public. It should have lit a touchpaper, creating a rolling news story which gathered momentum as it went forward - one piece of coverage leading on to the next, with pundits, politicians and the occasional beleaguered defender of the industry all weighing in to keep the story moving forward.

This is how the news works in the era of 24 hour news channels, of the web, of daily newspapers with more pages than ever to fill and fewer staff than ever to do the filling. Controversies are meant to snowball, filling plenty of space as they do so, giving you an opportunity to cheaply and easily fill column inches or airtime by turning the story around to report on the growing controversy rather than on the original issue itself.

Five years ago, Modern Warfare 2 would have created such a controversy. Ten years ago, it would have been a fireball, burning brightly enough to hit the major news bulletins, parliamentary debates, newspaper letter pages, popular chat shows - the whole nine yards. It would have become a meme, in due course, with people who don't know the first thing about videogames sagely quoting the phrase "No Russian" just as today they cite GTA's prostitute murders as definitive proof of the medium's debased nature.

Twelve months ago, nothing of the sort occurred. For all that we were frustrated and annoyed by the media's handling of Modern Warfare 2, the reality is that the controversy they hoped to spark sputtered and died. The hottest debate over the No Russian scene came in the specialist press, not the mainstream media, where the reality was that despite the best efforts of various writers and commissioning editors, the story earned little more than some ill-researched fiery tabloid newspaper pieces and a couple of extremely dull and one-sided "debates" on non-primetime radio or television chat shows.

It was, frankly, hardly the firestorm of outrage for which the news media might have hoped, and it was defused even further by the fact that large swathes of the media turned their nose up at the story entirely, choosing either to ignore it and simply report Modern Warfare 2's success, or to run pieces supporting videogames' right to explore adult themes.

It's in this light that we must view last year's controversy - not as a blow to videogames, but rather as a sucker punch to the idea that videogame violence makes for a cheap and easy controversy for the lazy tabloid hack or rolling news channel editor. In this light, is it any wonder that nobody seems particularly keen to root out controversy over Black Ops? So loathe are the tabloid press to waste their time this time out, in fact, that even Cuba's rather odd condemnation of the game has been reported in a joking, "well fancy that!" tone instead of with the fire and brimstone that would have accompanied such a story a few scant years ago.

The progress of California's violent videogames bill to the US Supreme Court suggests that the debate over the content of videogames is not entirely over, but the tame, placid response of the media to history's biggest entertainment loss being a game with a bodycount to rival Rambo's worst wartime flashbacks reveals the truth. There's still mopping up to be done, but unlike Call of Duty's never-ending conflicts, the "war" over violent videogames is over. We won.