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A Plea To Game Makers To Act Responsibly?
Thanks to AVault for its editorial discussing the responsibility videogame makers have to use their powers for 'good'. The author expresses concern about games' influence on the young: "My love of digital maiming is tempered by the fact that, at this stage of my life, I can tell right from wrong. I have a fully developed set of ethics. I wouldn't say my nine-year-old nephew has quite had the time to develop these tools." The article ends with the exhortation: "Developers and publishers, hear my plea: start injecting a strong sense of right and wrong into your stories. I don't want you to pull back on the gibs, I don't want anything more than a stronger sense of ethics and perhaps a small dose of moral fiber. Take into account the fact that kids are playing, no matter that they shouldn't be."
Gee, maybe your 9 year old shouldn't be playing Grand Theft Auto. It's more the parent/guardian's responsiblity to ensure that their kids aren't playing violent games than it is the game makers.
"Armed forces abroad are of little value unless there is prudent counsel at home" - Cicero
So, should Quentin Tarantino take into account that kids are watching "Kill Bill", and Playboy similarly tailor itself to be kid-friendly? I don't think so.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The author expresses concern about games' influence on the young
What the hell are the parents doing?!
Don't we get at least 2 of this type of article on this site per week? It seems like I am always reading the:
"It is the parents' job to teach their kids wrong and right, not the video games."
All these articles are good for is getting gamers upset. Call it Flamebait or a Troll or whatever, but these articles are getting Redundant.
http://www.tomandemily.com
There's always going to be violent video games. The problem is not that there aren't video games that have morality...look at the Ultima games...or the Star Wars ones. The problem is that kids are naturally curious about the games that are BAD. It doesn't matter how many good video games there are out there....kids are always going to find the one game that's evil. Really, there are only three solutions:
1) Forbid all video games that do not impose "correct" morality
2) Raise your children in an isolated bubble, never exposing them to anything that espouses "bad" morality
3) Let your children experience what they want, within limits, so long as you teach them what is right and wrong
You can let a kid play all the violent video games he wants; so long as he has a caring mother and father, he'll turn out OK....and if he doesn't have caring parents, if it's not GTA teaching him how to be a criminal, it'll just be something else. In short, bad parenting creates bad kids who have independent, unrelated desires to play "bad" video games and do "bad" things. Good parenting creates "good" kids who have the same desire to play "bad" video games but less chance of a desire to do "bad" things.
To all of the parents who are always whining "the video games are controlling my childen" I say: you have a thousand times more influence than any video game ever will...if your kids are turning out poorly it's because you're a shitty parent....stop trying to blame everyone else.
I don't understand why the author's article is so upset at this kid playing GTA. If his mom is raising him correctly, he should be able to cap grandmas all day long and still be a well-adjusted kid. If she's not, well, then he's got bigger things to worry about than a video game. Everyone just wants to bitch about the video game to show that they are MORALLY OFFENDED! You know what offends my morals? Watching a mother just dump her kid off in day care for the first 6 years of his life so she can drive a nicer car. I'd rather raise my kid on GTA than put him through that.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
That said, I really don't have a problem with developers and publishers making violent games. Similarly, I don't have a problem with publishers who distribute violent books. I don't shun museums for displaying various garish incarnations of St. Sebastian on their walls. I am one of the vast majority of people--young and old alike--who can distinguish fantasy from reality, and are able to appreciate that the character being crushed by a tank on the game screen is not a real person.
You'll find no lack of people here on Slashdot who played games like Smash TV, N.A.R.C., and Doom as a kid. Staggeringly enough, the vast majority of us are perfectly well aware of the fact that in the Real World, one does not drive a Ferrari at 100 mph on a bridge whilst mowing down junkies, firing rocket launchers, and gathering cash and drugs.
I'm tiring of those who advocate solving the problems of the few by restricting the options of the whole. Let us use our own judgement, for Pete's sake.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Then the international corporations.
Then we might start childing games manufacturers.
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
I was rereading the Hugo Winners Vol II last night, and in the introduction to "Gonna Roll Dem Bones", Isaac Asimov related a coversation he had with Fritz Lieber... in short, Lieber pointed out to Asimov that his stories had people who opposed the hero, but that he never had any villans. Asimov reasoned that it was because he tended to write a more cerebral sort of stoy, more about the conflict of ideas than anything else; and in that case, the a good story demanded reasonable, intelligent villans who did not see themselves as bad/evil, and were capable of explaining themselves and their motives clearly. While they opposed the heros of the story, they had (at least, by their own thoughts) good reasons for doing so.
This reminded me a lot of the role that Magneto eventually grew into in the X-Men comic books - an intelligent opponent who had what he thought were very good reasons for his actions. IMHO, this leads to a much deeper, more satisfying type of story than things like Star Wars, where the villans are villans because... well, just because, you know, they're evil. You never get any background on why they're acting the way they are.
If Asimov had written the Star Wars scripts, he'd probably have set up a situation where Palpatine saw the existance of the Jedi leading to the eventual development of a hereditary ruling class, the destruction of the Trade Federation, and an interminable galaxy-wide dark age of stagnation. A few scenes, a little bit of exposition, and voila! - Palpatine goes from being evil to being a tragic figure, someone who initially desires good, but who finds himself seduced into thinking that the only way to save the Trade Federation from the Jedi is to forge an Empire strong enough to resist them if they were ever to rise again...
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Being in a gang, crew, or mafia can get you killed WAY too easily.
If you break the law, and the cops don't get you, and the FBI doesn't get you, the military will bring in tanks and run over you.
Never play with grenades in an enclosed space.
Molotov cocktails may be fun, but if you're not careful you can catch on fire.
Hookers take your money.
Doing a double backflip with a barrel roll off a cliff is cool... until the end.
25 rounds of ammunition seems like alot of ammo until you have 26 opponents.
Don't try to snipe people while standing on the sidewalk. You'll never see the billy club coming.
Busses are too slow to out run cop cars. Sports cars aren't heavy enough to run through cop cars.
You can't fly a plane without wings. At least not for very long.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Things I remember from growing up:
Superman comics were going to make children tie bed sheets around our necks and jump off the garage roof. The A-Team was going to make children turn violent. Rock music was going to turn us into Satanists. Sweet alcoholic drinks were going to turn the young into alcoholics. The ice-cream man was really a slipping LSD into their ice-cream to turn them into addicts, but only if the punch given to them at Halloween didn't do it instead, and don't forget about all the pedophiles that were just waiting for children in every chat room.
In other words everything that is even remotely popular is somehow going to absolutely destroy the lives of children everywhere.
Articles like this are good for quiet news weeks. In a year or 2 they will be about something new that is also going to end life as we know it. (The evils of golf or something)
I would also hazard a guess that people who came from homes way too poor for them to have ever been exposed to DOOM, GTA etc, commit most of the violent crime.
regarding ESRB and putting specifics on the box:
I think they already do. Or at least some game makers take the additional step to do so. Checking out the ESRB rating for Warcraft III (bottom of page), you'll note it got a T for blood and violence. Checking out the ESRB for Metroid Prime, and it's a T but no mention of specifics. So there are some thorough developers/publishers and some not so thorough developers/publishers. (To Nintendo's credit, when you try to access any game with T or higher rating on their website, a warning will pop letting you know the rating and asking if you want to continue.)
What will happen is Lieberman and other congress-types will hold more hearings and eventually the ESRB will cave and be forced to enforce their ratings both at the publisher side (i.e., more acting like Blizzard) and at the retail side (i.e., don't sell the M games to children). Hopefully, it won't make it fully into the realm of regulation. (both the music and movie industries averted that, no? I know the MPAA rating system is voluntary, and I presume the parental warning stickers on albums were a self-regulated thing, rather than a governmental mandate)