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Games - The Jury Is Out And Confused
Thanks to Blue's News for pointing to a New York Times article entitled 'On Video Games, the Jury Is Out and Confused' (registration required). It talks about the mixed messages being given to parents about video gaming, especially with regard to violent content, and its effect on their children: "In the face of contradictory, inconclusive or just plain confusing evidence, some parents... agonize over what limits to set." One concerned mother even has to keep her spouse in check as well: "My husband is a little hard to control. Sometimes he lets them rent games with little figures on top of buildings trying to shoot each other off." What limits do you or your relatives put on their children's gaming, and why?
The best guideline of any is to play *with* your children. Gaming can be a social event, if parents participate in it with their children. There's no need to let small children sit by their consoles/computers all day unsupervised.
As kids grow older, they need less supervising. If a parent judges their child to be mature enough, there's no need for any supervision. Now, the problem is that most people let the TV or the computer raise their kids instead of doing it themselves. Newsflash: Entertainment can never be a substitute for interaction.
Our solution to the problem is simple. We don't have any children and get to keep all the gaming for ourselves. We can play all the Virtua Fighter and Mortal Kombat we want without worrying about corrupting little minds.
How about parents actually act like parents and take some responsibility for their kids?
Which do you think would be more like a responsible parent:
a) Reviewing the games/movies/etc your child wants, and deciding if that's the kind of thing you want him/her to have.
or
b) Letting a bunch of people you don't (and probably never will) know tell you wht they think your child should be exposed to?
=Smidge=
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The article mentions a mother fearing that her sons will become socially isolated if they play video games, I think this is totally wrong. I just graduated high school and the majority of the guys all had atleast one gaming system and played them regularly. Those who didn't play video games were normally the kids that were in either the church group, or the alcoholic jocks.
It's great that video games improve your visual skills, but if you shelter your children then they'll never learn.
Another thing, I don't think there should be any laws deciding what I can and can not buy in terms of video games. On more than one occasion my mother has went out and bought the game for me because I wasn't allowed to. If you don't want your kids playing a game, then it should be your respondsibility to make sure they don't, not the governments/corperations. I feel the same way about movies, I was able to buy rated R tickets when I was 14 but for the last two years I couldn't. Thank you very much Tipper Gore.
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
...little figures on top of buildings trying to shoot each other off
reminds me of that old qbasic game where gorillas calculated tragectories and tried to blow each other up with bananas. occasionally my middleschool math teacher let us play that game during class. i never heard any stories about students throwing banana pipe bombs at eachother, though.
this whole thing of blaming violent activities on games is just part of an endemic problem with passing the buck. little murdurers just need to be made to face the music and be responsible for their own actions. no virtual finger pulled the trigger.
the truth may be that violent and disturbed people are drawn to violent and disturbing games. most people people who play the games have a clear grasp of what is fantasy and what is reality, but there are some who are already messed up in the head and warped games just add to the problem.
They can play any game that they can't beat me at. :-)
Every time you prohibit a child of committing virtual violence you're somehow assuming that that's real somehow. Video game violence is _not_ violence, and if you put it in the head of the child that doing that is wrong, you're completely blurring the notion of what's real and what's not.
I think it's OK for parents to limit the amount of video game a child plays, but it shouldn't have anything to do with morals. Its more of health issue. Kids should be out and playing more...
How about you spend time with your kids and teach them what's wrong and what's right, teach them the difference between real and fiction, talk to them about what they might see instead of always jumping on limiting their imagination. Not all parents drop their kids in front of the TV as day care, but I've seen this happen so many times it makes me sick. I played video games when I was young, even at an early age I knew that what I saw on the TV was not real, whether I was controlling it or not. Sure video games influence children, but good parenting influences them a hell of a lot more. I'm not sure what bothers me more, that there are children that are growing up raised by the television, or that there are parents that find this so acceptable that they want someone else to set a guideline of what's ok for their children. Video games are fine for children, not teaching them to discern between fact and fiction is just deplorable. If your kid is going to go out and act out a sniper scene in a game at 14 years old, you either took a horribly wrong turn as a parent or your kid is in need of specialized help that the ESRB can't give you. Stop shifting the blame, accept some responsibility, if you're not willing to do that: don't have kids.
As I recently wrote in an essay, the problem lies with the generation that made these video games, not with the children who play them.
As the video game making generation obviously weren't fucked up by video games, we have to assume it was something else that did.
I think we should focus on this rather than assuming that these video games have an adverse effect at all.
They made me pay for anything related to games (though occassionally I got a big xmas present of a new console, or one birthday game). No limit on what type of game.
When you make a kid work for the $50 each time instead of buying it for him/her, they keep a firm foot in reality.
One concerned mother even has to keep her spouse in check as well: "My husband is a little hard to control."
And as all you married men out there know, it's ALL about control.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Video game violence and its affect on children will be forever a popular topic on Slashdot. Why do we focus on, like the earlier article where Mom Blames Video Games. Let's face it, if video games have a psychological impact on teenagers, then we must conclude they have a psychological impact on adults. Do adults ever get to blame movies, books, and videogames for their crimes? Ummm, no. They may try, but no.
So we should focus on where we're held responsible. Does it really matter if an outside influence affects our judgement? If it results in breaking the law, absolutely not! Do I think the games affect people's moods, personalities, and actions? Probably. Does it matter? Nope.
We should teach our kids and adults more about penalties for misdeeds. I think the proper fear of consequences can go a lot further than trying to remove a "bad influence." We also need to balance that with proper teaching and modeling of good behavior for children and adults.
Or, you could let them play one of the myriad of games that are both entertaining and not particularly violent.
..unless they won't allow the kids to watch football on TV, in which case I'd be out of ideas.
Do these parents not know about the 598092834 sports games that were released last year?
I only let my son play Hentai Games if he's finished all his homework.
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I support spreading santorum
I'm a good example of why you should be informed to what your kids play. My parents didn't really mind what I playing, and look how I turned out!
*twitch**spasm*
Polaroid. See what develops!!
For boys at least, 13 is the age when they start getting more competitive and agressive. I think that videogame violence helps them deal with those agressive tendencies in a positive way. Up until about 5000 years ago, if you didn't kill your food with your own hands, you didn't eat. Violence has been programmed into us, and we need to find a way to release it or bad shit start to happen.
I would argue that videogames are just as good as sports when it comes to relieving agressive tendencies. When playing online or with friends, gaming can not only be a social event, it can sometimes be an intellectual one as well (Civ III, for example).
So unless there's sadstic or explicitly sexual content, I think a little fragging will do your teenager good.
OK, so with the violence deal, the folks who blame violence on video games should take the fire hydrant out of their ass that's holding their head in. These fuctards who think video games cause violence aren't mature enough to figure out the difference between reality and a video game themselves. They are also people who don't really seem interested in raising their kids. "It takes a village", Bullshit! It takes time, your time, spend it with your kid and help them grow up right
I pay close attention to the games my son plays. I check them out with him, I help him play through the hard spots, and I don't let him play adult games.
Things will change as he gets older, and what I let him play will be determined by his level of maturity. I have friends and relatives who don't game who look to me for advice about the games their kids are exposed to. My cousin bought her third grader GTA Vice City, I could have smacked her when I found out, but she already knew at that point. That just isn't appropriate for kids in grade school. No, I don't think the one time he played it is going to make him go out and run someone over, but you don't give a little kid a game that they don't have the mature thought processes to handle, that's why it's rated M, mature, don't give it to your fucking grade school kids.
But there you go, she bought her kid a game that wasn't appropriate, but she sat down with him on Christmas day as he played it for the first time, and said "oh shit."
Another example, "War of the Monsters" It's a T rated game, but I let my four year old play it. I let him play it because we only play in two player, and we just run around and break up buildings. Good clean fun. He gets mad at me if I throw his monster around, and he doesn't like the normal single player mode because the other monsters are mean to him.
Gaming may have used to be a solo activity, but as it heads more and more into the mainstream, it's becoming a group activity. More importantly, it's becoming a point of reference among people, where people can share experiences, and find a common frame of reference.
Catharsis is one of the unspoken powers in this world..one we don't talk about much.
As to the violence...eh...most kids watch some sort of violent movie or what-so. No different. I think what really warps kids minds is when the violence becomes real. Filter your kids news, not their games.
How the hell is this off-topic?! I wish metamod wasn't random.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I am a gaming parent, I have a 12 year old son. Before the age of 5 I didnt let the boy have a console. We played PC games. I did let him play wolfenstein, haha it was free and was funny to watch a 3 year old running around a maze of nazis shooting.
"Parents need to think about what is being displaced when kids play video games, and balance any possible improvement in visual attention with that," said Jeanne Funk, a professor of psychology at the University of Toledo who has conducted several studies on the effects of video game violence.
What is being displaced? Watching TV? Learning to Smoke? Finding alchohol and drugs? Basically my son and his freinds DO go outside, they do, have fun and ride bikes and skateboard, but when they skateboard they are Tony Hawk. When they play they are Shinobi or Ryo. How does this differ from I as a child playing I was Batman? His freinds are all bright interesting geeky boys.
I believe the only thing being displaced by games are things that are best pointless and at worst abhorrent. Gaming brings our family together. when you sit and game with your child you share an expierence not unlike visiting an amusement park or playing softball. You compete and you co-operate. The most important thing is you spend time with your child sharing an activity they do and can enjoy the rest of their life.
I am curious whether these parents who restrict their children's video game diet do the same for thier children's comic books. Some comic books are almost as bad as most violent video games. Beyond that, though, comic books usually promote some character to hero status, then show him kicking the living daylights out of other characters. At least in Doom you are just some lowly Marine.
Kids below a certain maturity level (which comes around 13 for many kids) shouldn't be playing games with real violence, as they have a hard time distancing themselves from the action rationally. The ESRB ratings do a fairly good job of making this distinction with the E rating. However, the ESRB ratings are in my opinion mostly useless otherwise. The rating system really should be able to distinguish between games like Serious Sam (which I would quite possibly feel ok about letting a 13-yr-old play) and games like Vice City (which I definitely wouldn't feel comfortable playing myself).
"Bang bang! You're dead!"
That's right, all the generations of kids who played these horrendous, violent "street games" turned out to be monstrous asocial killers in real life huh? Didn't they?
Hell, when I was a kid, my mom wouldn't let me have toy guns, so I made myself guns from lego blocks. When I was done with them I would dismantle them into 3 or 4 easy to reassamble pieces that I would hide in separate sections of my lego chest (Ã la Nikita).
Kids play war. This is what kids do. The fact that kids play war using games that didn't exist when the current adults were kids just scares the old farts like any new tech scares the old geezers. "In my time, kids were respectfull of their elders, we walked a 100 miles in snow to school, barefoot and uphill both ways, every morning, and didn't play violent games".
Yes, put limits to your kids. Yes, don't let the lil'uns play adult gore games (silent hill scares me, I wouldn't let a 9yr old play it), yes, don't let them spend ALL their times on games. But for crying out loud, relax allready! Boys will be boys and trying to hide the fact that there is violence in the world will only leave them unprepared to face it.
You can't take the sky from me...
First, before I say this, it's worth noting that I am a hardcore video game fan. I own all major systems, and have been finding myself caught in front of a TV for hours playing games since I was about 10 (I'm 24 now)
Having said that, there is definitely a correlation between violent behaviour and violent video games. I know this, because I have felt them.
Last year, a close friend and I spent an entire afternoon/early evening inside playing Grand Theft Auto 3, stealing cars, passing missions, running around and shooting people. We blasted the jungle radio station through my surround sound system, laughed, smoked, and had a great time.
Later that night, we went out with some other friends clubbing. After last call, we were stuck about a 20 minute walk from home, so we decided to hike it on foot. About half way home, a cop car suddenly pulled up in front of us, and two officers got out and walked into a chinese restaurant. The window on the passenger's door was wide open.
I looked at my buddy Drach just as he looked at me and then I said "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" And he's like "My dear god... My urge to steal the cop car is ridiculous."
Of course, we're rational human beings, and we did nothing of the sort. But the fact is that after joy riding in cop cars all after noon, it sort of romanticized the idea. Now you could argue that because we didn't go through with it, video games are safe. And I'd agree with that, as I continue to play and just beat Return to Castle Wolfenstein : The Tides of War. But the idea here is that they can be just as suggestive (or moreso, as interactivity increases) as other media.
A game like GTA3, with it's violence and glamorization of criminal acts has no place in the hands of a toddler, or a young child. After that, it's the parent's responsibility to determine whether or not their child can handle it.
-RW
And if that's right, it's a pretty mellow game to be worried about.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I'm sure Hitler must have played violet video games in his youth. I mean how else would he develop into an enraged lunatic, bent on making a perfect race of human beings. I mean he had to have played Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto, right?
The parents in this case are concerned with what their kids are doing. But, at least they know what their kids are doing. That is probably a step up from previous generations. Growing up, my mother was always insisting that I "Go outside and play". And that is probably how it was for most generations that predate videogames.
My mother and grandmother also have all sorts of stories about the things that they used to do as children. Things like jumping off of bridges into rivers while swimming. Underage drinking and smoking. Shoplifting and petty theft. Pranks that were malicious enough that getting caught would probably warrant jail time. One of my uncles told me about putting an elderly neighbors colostomy bags into the mail box.
The scary bit is this. All of the above is basically normal behaviour for childern and young adolescents. Are they seriously telling me that all things considered, they would prefer to have thier children doing that sort of thing as opposed to playing Super Smash Brothers? Granted, young children should not be playing Doom3 or Soldier of Fortune, but there are worse things out there then violent video games to worry about.
END COMMUNICATION
Kids will play violent games no matter what. They CAN conceal it from you, they will go to friend's houses, in short they will play them. I'd be far more concerned about the kid stealing (burning) a game he can't buy than the violent content.
How many GTA inspired crimes have there been in real life?