Homer Simpson runs down the street, kicks a few kids to the ground, swears, grabs a car from its driver, runs over an old woman at a level crossing. A scene from The Simpsons Movie? Er, no. A scene from the PlayStation 2 game The Simpsons: Hit & Run, amazingly rated at age 7-plus and bought by me last week. Yes, I had misgivings over the title, but the cover looked innocuous enough – Bart and Lisa smiling as they drove through a wheel of fire and Matt Groening’s loveable Homer running past a doughnut shop, tongue lolling.

When we finally relented to our ten-year-old son’s pester power last week and bought him a PlayStation 2, I had no idea how soon my blood would boil. Like so many mothers, I have read the surveys about PlayStation’s addictive sway over small minds, of young kids playing Grand Theft Auto unsupervised in their bedrooms at night, and was primed to control the content.

Initially, I was pleasantly surprised. Together we played Fifa 03, mother and son bonding over a football game lost to his expert childish thumbs jabbing x buttons to pass and o buttons to shoot. But when the new Fifa 07 game was unwrapped – a modern version rated at an unbelievable 3-plus (what mother is going to let a toddler go from Teletubbies to PlayStation?) I was shocked. In a matter of a couple of years, there were new aggressive gestures to the referee, nasty pushing and shoving between footballers after fouls, close-ups of angry grimaces at the ref’s decision. The unacceptable face of football.

Shock gave way to disbelief with The Simpsons: Hit & Run. After all the fuss over The Simpsons Movie, with Bart showing his cartoon weiner, surely this game would uphold family values. In a cartoon re-run of Grand Theft Auto, I gasped as my son took Homer on a mission around suburban Springfield, snatching cars and hurtling towards pedestrians, running over small children on crossings without so much as a backward glance. To get money to finish the mission, Homer kicked in drinks machines until coins came out – the more he kicked, the more coins flew out until finally under the weight of the assault the machine blew up. Funny? Not really. Pointless, mindless, violence creep. My younger son watched transfixed, begging to play.

This morning I woke up and decided the game was going back to the shop. The fate of 11-year-old Rhys Jones still weighed on my mind. There were tears at the breakfast table from my ten-year-old, who shouted: “Why can’t you be more like other mothers? Nobody else minds.” After exchanging the game, I took my younger son into Clark’s to buy wellingtons. As I fished for my wallet, the shop assistant said: “Could you please stop your son doing that, madam.” I turned round. He was kicking the shoe stands. Hard.

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