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."

Comments

I Have A Solution

[BigDork1001]

"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."

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.

Re:I Have A Solution

[fireduck]

Parents, no matter how diligent, can not watch over their children every second of the day.

No, but when the kid comes home from playing GTA at the friend's house and says "Parent, I really want to get this game": Parent says "No."

The author of the article presents this situation, with his nephew now wanting to get this game that he played at a friends house. However, rather than take it the final step (i.e., parent saying no), the author goes into "hey game makers, change your games" land. Obviously parents can't be there 100% of the time, but when they are there they have to be a parent. And being a parent means saying no, quite frequently. Why the author doesn't see this, I don't know.

Kids are exposed to all sorts of "bad" things and parents do their best to mitigate any real or supposed damage by setting barriers, guidelines, rules and having discussions with their children.

It this author wants a better target to go after, why not start with soda / junk food vending machines at our schools. Kids spend more time in school than they do anywhere else (including playing video games). And childhood obesity is, without any doubt, a bigger problem than violent video games.

Re:I Have A Solution

[msuzio]

Thinking that monitoring your child every second is the solution to anything is ridiculous in any case. I don't care if we're talking drugs, alcohol, violent video games, or Scientology. You can't always be there, and you shouldn't expect to be. You have to develop a parenting strategy that does not rely on monitoring for compliance and safety.

When I was growing up, my parents never even knew where I was most of the time. I went out to play on a typical summer day, and wandered around the neighborhood hanging out with friends. I wasn't expected back until dinner time.

Somehow, I managed to come out of it OK. Sure, I saw the porno mags Timmy Smith had stolen from his dad's stash. I smoked a couple cigarettes when I was 12. I saw my friend's brother smoke dope (never tried it myself until I was well past the age of majority). But my parents had done their job in educating me pretty well in their sense of what was right and wrong. Even when I did things I knew they wouldn't approve of, I was able to consider those things in the moral structure they thought I should be educated in. I could ask myself "Why is what I'm doing wrong? Should I not be doing this?". I developed the ability to make my own decisions, and I had enough common sense to not get in over my head.

This is, to me, the only way to go. Don't try to control your kids. Don't make other people responsible for that task either. Do the best you can, take advantage of all the times your kids are with you to point out the moral issues of life and provide your perspective. Accept that they will make mistakes; if you think it's appropriate, administer discipline when they go against "the rules", but understand that this is all part of the learning process too.

Please, people. Produce thinkers, not mindless drones who have to be saved from themselves constantly. Insist on personal moral responsibility and accountability. Anything else is a cop-out. Even a very young child is capable of understanding "right" vs. "wrong" and knowing when they are breaking "the rules".

I don't think this is reasonable

[AtariAmarok]

"Take into account the fact that kids are playing, no matter that they shouldn't be."

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.

Article: -1 Redundant/Flamebait

[tprime]

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.

Re:Article: -1 Redundant/Flamebait

[CokoBWare]

It's amazing how people think that just because someone has a position that is "encourage people to consider additional ways to tell stories that are good for kids" that it means that people are advocating changing exisitng games to make them less violent. Come on, let's actually read what people write here, and not just jump to conclusions. I'm not advocating us changing what the industry produces now, I'm advocating looking underneath that penny and realizing there's another market. Let's keep the GTAs, the Dooms and the Postals... at the same time, game publishers may consider new opportunities for parents and children to enjoy in videogame storytelling. Everyone wins! Kapish?

It's always going to be there...

[IshanCaspian]

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.

Asimov on "villans"

[Samrobb]

personally, I'd hope there to be more character in the characters in games and not always be so black and white, THE WORLD ISN'T JUST GOOD VS. BAD. most of the time the 'BAD' guys have solid motives for their actions as well as the good guys can and have 'bad' motives

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...