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Parents Not Informed About Gaming?
Thanks to GamerDad for their opinion piece advancing the claim that parents don't pay enough attention to the videogames their children play. The article argues: "While the mainstream press has reported on the push for games to become adult entertainment, and games makers have tried to create so-called 'mature' games to fill this apparent void, the reality is that many of these M-rated games are being played by children under the age of seventeen." It goes on to put forward the theory: "Parents simply are not informed about gaming... [and] probably believe that even games like Grand Theft Auto III are video games, and therefore they are for kids."
The article makes a good point - parents should be looking out for kids, not developers. But read this:
but then the game isn?t to blame if the kid is under seventeen and their parent bought the game for them knowing it wasn?t considered age appropriate.
Fine, that seems nice enough. But this really implies that a game can sometimes be responsible for someone's actions. Or, as the article considers some time later, another form of entertainment. But this is nonsense - people are people, responsible for their actions. Sentient. Once we start taking that responsiblity from them, they aren't really human anymore, are they?
My city is relatively small, so we know all the cops in the area. Most of my friends work at the Gamestop.
About half of our police force (which is something like 14 people) reserved Vice City at the local Gamestop.
--Moo.
when "Leisure Suit Larry" was new and a game for adults, it was very difficult for me, a child, to play it. The game would begin by asking quiz questions that only an adult would know the answer to. Sometimes it took me hours to crack the quiz questions to be able to play. That was when programmers placed that extra step.
pretzel_logic
I think the main problem with this article is that it has a "one size fits all" idea of parenting: violent games are wrong for absolutely everyone under the age of 17 and so are violent movies. That's ridiculous. My mother always paid attention to what I was doing and talked to me about everything in my day. My friends' parents were obviously doing the same, because they were constantly having the same conversations when I was in their homes. We all played Doom some time around fourth or fifth grade, we all played every Mortal Kombat game since MK2 daily, we all watched all three Highlander movies way too many times, and we saw R-rated movies almost as often as any other movie.
These movies and video games were not visual heroin. We did not become violent psychopaths obsessed with video games and pipe bomb construction because we played Doom, Mortal Kombat, Metal Gear Solid, or any other violent game before the age of 17, nor because we saw Connor MacLeod cut some guy's head off or The Crow beat the crap out of someone. Our parents talking to us, being informed about what we were doing, and making sure that we could distinguish between fantasy and reality was what ALLOWED us to watch and play these things, not what barred us from it. At the age of fourteen or fifteen, we would've been part of the 70% of kids under 17 that had played Grand Theft Auto III, but we would've been part of it because our parents were paying attention to us and judged our maturity realistically, not because we were neglected, troubled teens that were sawing off shotgun barrels inbetween rounds of Mortal Kombat 2. They knew what the ESRB was as soon as it came out, they held off on Mortal Kombat when we were too young before there even WAS an ESRB, and when we were mature enough, they let us play what they felt was alright for us.
There are parents out there that don't believe that their children magically mature from mentally unstable toddlers to reasonable adults as soon as they hit the "magic age" of 17 or 18. Some would call them bad parents. I would call them sane. I don't understand how people have acquired this idea that what video game or movie companies think is okay or not okay for their children is perfectly accurate, as if the ESRB and its "M" rating knew your child better than you do. Every child matures at a different speed depending on their own intelligence and how well their parents have taught them, not by whether or not they play certain video games, but by actually TALKING to them. That is what good parenting is, not just taking the label on a DVD as some sort of sacred law that you cannot violate. Video games are not something to be put in the same category as drugs, sex, or criminal neglect as Things That Will Definitely Fuck Up Your Kid. You're not a bad parent simply because you violate the Sacred Corporate Law and let your fourteen year old play GTA.
I really don't understand this trend of reporting "news" than end with a question mark.
In other news:
President Bush addicted to crack?
Personally, although it was a horrible thing to have happen, I really wish there had been something recent along those lines that people could have looked at when I was in government class in high school. Too much of it was too abstract, and although our teacher was also young (25), and offered a fairly different view from what we were used to seeing in school, he couldn't find much that would polarize the class except in general viewpoints. The best he could do, most of the time, was show that even the views most people take a black & white stance on tend to fall into more grey areas (ie having a mock trial on gun control in which each side takes the absolute stance: anyone can have any type of gun vs no one can ever have a gun, although the latter point makes more sense to people that grew up in areas where it is mostly true, it's very hard to drive the point home in the US).
That being said, I'd never wish an experience like that one anyone. I'm just trying to make the point that it brought out a lot of weird ideas that some people always had about what is and is not ok, without really looking at things logically. When people are freaking out about kids wearing trench coats and listening to KMFDM (something I knew a handful of people did when I was in high school from 92 to 96), someone needs to give them a sound reality check.
-PainKilleR-[CE]