Washington, D.C. — As word spreads of the adventures of quirky, charming, non-violent adventurers using puzzle-solving and exploration to cope with their problems, parents are growing more and more concerned that today’s children are learning that non-violence is an option.

“Look at our cities today,” one horrified parent said during a protest at the nation’s capitol. “Full of gun-toting thugs, monsters, zombies, aliens, and super-villains. Meanwhile, my teenage son was going on and on about some charming little bird-man he heard about, who lived in a peaceful realm where he ate blueberries and collected over-sized pencils and apples.”

“I checked out this blueberry-filled garden he was telling me about,” she continued. “It was serene, peaceful, with gentle piano music playing in the background. Piano music? How is my child going to learn to lock and load or run and gun, listening to anything other than pulse-pounding, teeth-rattling electronica?”

She went on to express her fears that the lessons in non-violence from these quirky, gentle adventurers will leave children vulnerable in a harsh, unforgiving world full of explosions and monsters.

“He’s going to be woefully unprepared for the realities of our violent world,” she said, as a burning helicopter slammed into a building behind her and several cars hurtled by, spitting gunfire. “A crowd of gangsters will ambush him in an alley, or zombie hordes will swarm all over him, and all he’ll know how to do is make a tower out of giant dice and wedges of cheese.”

“It’s fine for adults to occasionally put down their machine guns and flamethrowers and do a little puzzle-solving,” said Tom Jackson, a lawyer for the activist group Violence Alliance, which promotes teaching children to solve their problems with hand grenades and laser weapons. “But kids are so impressionable. They may think that solving puzzles or exploring quirky, artistic landscapes is fun and worthwhile. It’s disgusting. These environments are just puzzle-simulators. They’re teaching our children it’s better to think than to shoot.”

Another concerned parent spoke of his son, who had heard about a robot named Josef living in the city of Machinarium.

Is this robot teaching our children not to kill?

“I guess this robot carefully and cleverly disguised himself as security bot in order to bypass a checkpoint,” the parent explained, “by putting a traffic cone on his head and topping it off with a light-bulb. That’s a terrible lesson for our children, when simply shooting the security bot with a sniper rifle or taking him out with a pulse grenade would have done the trick in far less time.”

The child, meanwhile, wants to visit Machinarium someday to solve puzzles of his own.

“Not gonna happen,” said the boy’s father. “No son of mine is going to wind up wearing a traffic cone on his head on some delightfully quirky and charming environment. I’m enrolling him in Bullworth Academy in New England, and then he’s enlisting in the Space Marines.”

“You think a traffic cone is gonna impress the Cacodemons and Hellknights? Huh?” he yelled at his son, who was quietly tying a length of string to a magnet in an effort to fish a metallic object out of a puddle.

“See? See what they’re teaching him?” the father said, dragging his son away by the arm. “After a couple tours on Phobos, he’s gonna learn that non-violence is not the answer.”