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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?
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.