Parents Ignore Age Ratings?

GamesIndustry.biz has news of a ELSPA-funded research project that indicates that parents do not pay attention to ratings when purchasing games. From the article: "According to Freund, the study found a high awareness of the existence of videogame age ratings both among young gamers and among their parents - but parents tend to 'divorce themselves' from active involvement in deciding what their children play."

Comments

Re:ok...

[Seumas]

Exactly. That most parents ignore the ratings doesn't correlate to most parents divorcing themselves from being involved in choosing what their children play. Believe it or not, a little violence or even a little sex is not going to fuck a kid up and most parents know this.

I watched Nightmare on Elmstreet and other films when I was about four years old. I saw hardcore porn when I was six to eight in magazines. And I've been checking out some pretty hardcore stuff online since about 1989. Some of it disturbingly perverse and wrong (you know, the kind of stuff friends trick you into clicking on without telling you that scat, horses or hammers and nails are involved).

Guess what? I've never committed a violent crime. I've never held up a convenience store. I've never abused a woman or mistreated a woman. I'm a completely normal person earning a great living in a respectable career with no more or worse personal issues than your average fellow.

Kids are more robust and versatile than people give them credit for. Your kid will not become braindead and stupid by listening to differing opinions and he won't become a rapist because he saw a boob or saw someone having sex and he sure won't become a murderer because he saw violence on television or a videogame or read about it in a book.

Unless my kids were fucking idiots, I would assume that they have the mental faculties to discern fantasy from reality and let them enjoy their videogames. It's no big deal.

Really no excuse

[Dark Paladin]

I mean, pretty much every store I've seen has the ESRB ratings inside with warnings on them. Personally, I think the issue is that too many parents expect someone else to just tell them what to do. Myself and a friend of mine were in a software store when a kid walked in (9 years old) wanting to buy Soldier of Fortune. We actually took the 5 seconds to point out the easily readable sign and explain why something like "Diablo" (T for Teen) was more acceptable for his age perhaps, or something like that.

I'm not necessarily against laws regarind video games as long as they're logical and thought out (example: M rated games behind the counter? Makes sense. M rated games 5 feet above the floor? Stupid, and discriminating against short people.) But until we have parents at least make the minimal effort, I don't want to hear them bitching.

This said as a father of three children who plays games with the little rug rats (we've finished "Ocarina of Time" and, after a bout with "Paper Mario" will be hitting "Chrono Trigger").

Re:In Australia...

[Seumas]

Using ages is pointless. In fact, having a rating system at all is ridiculous.

Just list, briefly, what is in the game and in what context. Let me decide if my kid (at whatever age) is ready for that material. I don't need to be told what is appropriate for the "average" 15 year old. Just tell me if it has sex or drugs or violence or crude language or nudity or anything else and then to what degree. Is it mild? Suggested? Comical? Gratuitous?

This would be far more useful.

Then again, I think my kid would be far more damaged by having a knife pulled on him in school or having classmates doing drugs around him. It's not what in the videogames that concerns me, but what he would have to face in real life. If parents only knew what their kids were dealing with these days, they would understand just how ridiculous and silly it is to be concerned with a god damn *videogame*.

Ok, then you tell me what harm was done

[Moraelin]

So I too grew with a bunch of violence on TV. My parents had some... unorthodox views regarding censoring TV. For example, I was allowed to see wild west movies (lynchings, shootings and all), on account that there the good guys always win.

I saw my first horror movie on VHS at the age of 10. Two of them, in fact. My brother was 6 at the time. Okay, so he was scared into shock. I was a little more robust, presumably on account of being older.

Even earlier, we occasionally had the honour of seing grandma chop the head off a chicken to make food, on the summer vacation in the country. Oooer. Now that was a crying festival for me and my brother.

(Which brings me to another question: the why the heck is it OK for the kids to watch Tom And Jerry and other violent cartoons? One thing I still remember is that kids are very good at anthropomorphising. See the crying festival for the chicken, or when grandma's cat got poisoned. So why isn't anyone worried then about violent cartoons?)

Etc.

So more than two decades later, I haven't killed anyone, haven't assaulted anyone, and generally I haven't even had a jaywalking ticket yet. I'm a firm believer in, well, what can be best described as a "lawful good" approach to the world. Though even that most likely due to mom preaching that, than because of those western movies.

Ditto about my brother.

An older family friend, now that was a bit more nuts. Taught his 2 year old son to play Wolfenstein 3D. (Not "Return To".) I doubt that the poor kid even understood what was happening there, but did as good a job of spraying lead everywhere with the machinegun as the stereotypical gangster-movie mobster.

As far as I know, the kid hasn't killed or assaulted anyone yet.

So, well, ok, I'm willing to take your point that maybe I'm blinded to whatever grievous damage all that did to me, my brother or the other kid mentioned. Well, then you tell me, please: _what_ symptoms should I be looking for?

Because so far it seems to me like while, yes, a game or a movie (Tom And Jerry cartoons included) _can_ give someone ideas and questions, those ideas (or any other ideas) don't exist in a vaccuum. They're judged and fit into the general framework that that person has. As a kid, the framework that their parents and environment gave them.

You're not an automaton which simply executes anything without thinking. If you played a game about jumping off bridges (e.g., City Of Heroes heroes never die when falling), you won't just jump off a bridge to get down faster. Even if the idea does briefly come to mind (I'll admit, it did come to _my_ mind), it'll be judged against that framework you have, filed under "you'd break your legs or die if you tried that", and dismissed.

So for someone to get influenced by, say, GTA (a game which explicitly tells you that that stuff is illegal) to the point where they get their parent's gun and shoot a car driver, that framework must be deffective or largely missing to start with. If a game explicitly tells someone "this stuff is illegal. It's a crime. It can get the cops all over you" and they still do it, you have to wonder if the whole meaning of "illegal" and "crime" was missing from their mental model.