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You Played Violent Games - Why Can't Your Kids?
An anonymous reader writes: "On the Wired site, Clive Thompson has up an article that points out a sobering truth: gamers are getting older. Folks who grew up playing videogames like Doom and Quake are now facing parental decisions with their own kids regarding appropriate content. Thompson cites well known gamer dads like Kotaku's Brian Crecente, discussing some of the approaches folks educated in gaming take with their own offspring: '"Everybody knows, as an adult, that the world is not always a nice place," Crecente told me. "But I don't want him to know that yet. I want him to have a childhood." So he disallows games with "realistic" combat, like World War II titles, or Resistance: Fall of Man, but permits highly cartoony shooting, like Starfox on the Nintendo DS -- since he regards it as essentially as abstract as playing cops and robbers with your fingers as guns.' Where do you think gamer parents should draw the line? If you have kids, what approach are you taking to introducing them to gaming? How old is 'old enough' to start fragging?"
If you're sooo concerned about video game violence, just buy your kids a Wii then. Or a SNES.
As humans we are not perfect, it's like telling your kids to buckle down in school knowing full well you never did all the time.
The world is a big and scary place. And children need to learn that too, and fast.
There's nothing worse than isolating children from reality, because it will start hitting them in the face one day or another. Let them watch the news, play video games, etc. It can't hurt.
When they go to school they'll need to learn the rules anyway, in order to survive (not literally, of course).
The world is full of sick, twisted, demented elements. Video games, and also the internet are a very safe approach - because you can't be harmed. Chatrooms can help children to spot lies - and this is always a helpful skill out there.
Sheltering kids has never helped them.
Why can't we continue to play hand-eye coordination improving games? I've played pinball and hung around arcades for over 30 years. When the fight 'em kick 'em punch 'em games came in, the arcade became a ghost town.
I can understand that pinball machines, being electro-mechanical, are expensive to run. These days you might only see one or two in an arcade. But where have the simple but good video games gone? Oh, that's right, they have become violent.
It is not about censoring out violence -- our society has already done that, with kindergarten kids getting expelled if they use the f word twice (our son used it once, so we are flying without a safety net). It is about having some class -- Sin City is not a good movie, and Doom ain't interesting. Sorry to burst your bubble, script kiddies.
P.S. Sierra's 3D Ultra Pinball Thrillride is proof that you can make a superb video pinball game. Sadly it is discontinued. Luckily it is still available via Amazon, etc. for about $10.
I come here for the love
If you raise your kids well, they will recognize what is a game and what isn't... and in the end, that is the issue here.
I suspect it's a matter of degrees of realism. There is a big difference between playing Doom, where you're shooting at bad guys who are fireball-throwing aliens, and playing recent GTA-style games that glamorise killing civilians in a realistic setting.
I don't like censorship as a general principle, but I have no problem with restricting what people are exposed to until they're grown up enough to understand what is real and what is pretend. This is probably where I would draw my line, if I had kids old enough for it to matter.
For what it's worth, I don't think the best games tend to be the photorealistic people-maiming types anyway. They can be entertaining for a while and have pretty pictures, but they tend to lack the depth of things like puzzle games, RTS or RPG titles. The only time they really have long-term value is when played in a co-operative environment with other real humans, and that changes the atmosphere fundamentally anyway.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
"How old is 'old enough' to start fragging?"
When they're mature enough to handle it with the realization that it's not real life.
What, you expected a number? Sucker.
When I was a kid, the "violent" games where 8-bit pixelated. The games now are much different. With graphics approaching nearly the realism it is, the games take on a new light.
I probably won't let my kids play the violent games of their day. Racing games and sports games, yes. FPS with gruesome graphics showing blood spurting from a beheaded body? No. Not until they are older and have the intelligence to understand the different between games and reality.
Bearded Dragon
As a parent of two, I can tell you I'm not worried about my kid having a sip of ceremonial wine before 21. And, frankly, I don't care if they get "naked and freaky on their webcams." Here's what I'm worried about:
1. my kids dying or getting maimed in a car accident with or without involvement of alcohol.
2. my kids getting an STD.
3. my kids getting addicted to tobacco.
4. my kids getting addicted to any other drug, including alcohol.
5. my kids getting pregnant before they're ready to take care of a child.
All of those things happened to kids I at the high school I attended during the 1970's. Call it hypocrisy if you like, but I think it's called learning from experience and trying to pass the benefit of that experience down through the generations. When we do this with science, it's generally recognized as a good thing.
The time passed, usually 10 or 20 years and the fact that the parents usually aren't currently engaged in the risky behaviors they once were and now want to prevent their children from engaging in mitigates, in my mind, the hypocrisy of it all.
On the other side of it, I've seen parents "teach" their kids how to "hold their likker" and that's uglier than the hypocrisy.
As for violent video games, I try to get my kids to play them, but they just want to play fluffy happy games like Sim City. It drives me nuts.
I think this is the most interesting issue here. While its still VERY clear to my kid (6 year old Girl) the anything on the screen is not 'real', even the people are usually talkling rubbish, games are going through a continued, fast pasted, evolution. IF games ever became more intertwined with are lives, or SO imersive that you forget your in them, then the psychology will get tricky and relevant. But right now, my 6yr daughter can spot a 'good' fake effect, much better than I could figure out what I saw when watching Jason and the Argonaughts, when I was her age. But we both know and knew it wasn't 'real'.
Because you can - or because you should?
"Tu fui, ego eris" - Virgil
Define "innocent."
... but you know, raising a kid isn't supposed to be easy.
Like a lot of the posters here, I grew up in an age when violence in video games consisted of pixelated blobs doing horrible things to other pixelated blobs, so I can't really speak to the effect (or, I suspect, lack of effect) of modern video games on tender young minds. But I loved books and movies that explored some of the worst things humanity is capable of (still do, as a matter of fact.) My parents, bless 'em, never tried to shield me from this stuff. If I had a problem with some of the things I learned about, we talked about it. It probably wasn't easy for them, explaining things like genocide and serial killers to a nine-year-old
Was my "innocence" ruined? Did I grow up scarred, warped, lacking in moral sensibility? Hell no. I grew up understanding that there are some very bad people in the world, who do some very bad things, and that good people have both the opportunity and the obligation to ameliorate some of the damage. Which is, I think, a pretty "innocent" atttitude to carry into adulthood. Because innocence is not the same thing as ignorance.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
It's more of a question of when do you let the innocence go by the wayside. Sure, when they're young it's your obligation to protect your children from certain aspects of life but at what point do you stop grabbing their hands and let them find out on their own the "the fire burns" after you've just told them for the millionth time?
Being over protective is a sad state where, as a parent, you did your job but you also did some harm when a young adult who should be able to stand up to some of life's challenges with no backing from a parent has problems with independence. These are the kinds of people who'll end up exploited and their meek existence will hardly be considered living by most.
I'm not saying that a 6 year old should be playing CounterStrike or Hitman but a 13 year old shouldn't be stuck with nothing more violent than checkers either.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Well, while I understand your reluctance to let your kids play more realistic modern games depicting violence, I don't know if better graphics make the games more detrimental to your children's mental health. When you were killing aliens and monsters in Doom and Wolfenstein, you knew exactly what you were doing. It didn't look anything like real life, but you were still running around shooting things with a gun. I don't think more realistic graphics can change the argument-If it was a safe activity for you when you were a kid, it should be as safe for your kids now. When I first got Doom, my mother was fairly upset. Even though the graphics left much up to the imagination, the sight of pixellated blood flying about disturbed her. It wasn't the realism of the graphics that disturbed her; rather, it was the intent behind her child's actions that disturbed her.
I'm not advocating that you change the way you raise your kids, I'm just making a point
Nintendo seems to be a big fan of the family style game, so we'll probably buy their systems for the kids
Sure you won't find Postal on their systems but Call of Duty 3 is still a pretty violent game...
For older kids though I prefer the Rainbow Six covert style of games where kids don't think they're omnipotent... Those covert games teach them that a bullet will kill, not just decrease your health a bit which you'll recover later on...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
BTW, this rule applies to medical and grad school.
"I had to work 14 hours straight during residency so you should too!"
"I had to spend every night, and holidays, in the lab working on my research and getting no credit for it and so should you!"
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
As an only child and a proud father of 5 (ranging from 8 years to 6 months) I know what I went thru as a kid gaming. I had a computer, NES, SuperNES, and, later, a N64. My parents would get me any game that I asked for, as long as we could afford it. I'm doing the same thing with my kids. The oldest has her own computer, with lots of games and PaintShop. Most of the games that she wants are Barbie, Bratz, Trollz, and things like that. My boys also have their own computer, with the same amount of games installed. Their games are mostly SpongeBob, Jimmy Neutron, and things like that. I have a gaming PC, with Grand Theft Auto, DooM 3, Halo, and lots of violent games.
They like watching me play my games, but don't like to play them because there are so many keys and buttons that need to be pressed that they can't play them very well and get frustrated. Now, in a few years when they have better reflexes and motor control, if they want to play GTA or Halo, I most certainly will install them.
The more you forbid a child to do something, the more they are going to want to do it, especially as they reach the teenage years. And I would rather have them play those games here at home where I can monitor them than at a friends house where I have no control at all.
I turned out just fine playing DooM, Quake and the like. I see no reason why my kids can't have the same gaming experience.
You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.
I owned a BB gun, my dad and I shot off model rockets every weekend, so I was responsible around things that could be classified as weapons or explosives, I still played outside much more than on my computer, so I didn't get fat; maybe my parents just knew I wasn't a fuck-up. After all, the 'vibe' your own child emits is the easiest for any half-decent parent to read. Maybe more parents should be able to determine those kinds of things, I guess it's hard to say, I'd doubt a parent would hand their 8 year old kid a copy of a bloody shooter, but if the kid is exposed to it and likes it they could have a lot of fun; people think too hard about the simulation of video games, and not the fun. Just as shooting a can with a BB gun can be a fun way to experience physics, a shooter is a fun way to experience the act of shooting and destruction in a safe and legal manner. Would you send your kid to counseling for building and destroying a lego tower because you think he's going to be a terrorist? No.
These days, shooters are more graphically intense, more immersing, and focus more on semi-realistic human against human combat. To imagine a kid playing Battlefield 2142, I'd honestly be more afraid of what they read in the in-game chat than seeing ragdolls fall down from in front of their crosshair. But, to fly around, drive around, shoot a tank, and rampage with a battlewalker; if I happened upon anything like that back when I was playing Doom, I'd feel cheated to have it taken away because my parents didn't trust that I wasn't going to fill up a car with plastique explosives and blow it up into an armoured personnel carrier, or, perhaps more reasonably; stab/shoot someone at school. Above all, I would be insulted, and would my view of my parents would be altered forever; to think they'd even consider me a potential killer!
Maybe they should make some more kid-friendly first person games, I bet that'd be a blast for them, and yes kids grow up too damn quick these days. Innocence is a terrible thing to waste, and a tragedy for anyone who witnesses it being taken away from a child too early. But how much of that could possibly be video games? What about cell phones? Reality TV? Public school? Materialism? The media gets into our kid's heads earlier and earlier, and a global collective of misguided parents follow every lead the same machine throws them for sources of their offspring's troubles. It's as old as the hills, I suppose, and video games are just the latest scapegoat. I'm too young to have kids, but I am guilty of using discretion with my little sister years ago, we'd always play Mario Kart and Waverace because I didn't think she should play Goldeneye. A bit of that is sexism, had I a little brother, I'm sure I would have taught him the way of the gun early on. But, you can call me a success story, a kid who stumbled upon Doom at a young, impressionable age, and only good came of it, fond memories and an early boosted interest in technology. It's not all bad.
I ranted pretty
I wouldn't let my kid play games like WOW or Neverwinter Nights. They'll grow up thinking it's ok to be prejudiced against orcs and that you can just go around robbing dragons.
On a serious note though. I'd say the biggest problem games pose for anyone, kid or adult, isn't losing track of reality vs the game it is losing track of time and wasting huge amounts of time on it. Games are supposed to be a relaxtion and a break from reality, not an escape or substitute.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I was born in the mid 70's, grew up in the 80's and when I got to university I realized that there were 3 types of us in my generation: 1) People who had nightmares about nuclear holocaust. 2) People that didn't really know or comprehend what it was or how big it was and didn't have nightmares and 3) People that knew and understood vividly what is was and didn't have nightmares. I've only meet one person that I honestly thought was in the 3rd category and he's not a terribly normal individual. Generally, I think we fall in to the first two categories. I personally am in the second; I knew the concepts and numbers and knew what it was but I simply couldn't comprehend it. What's really remarkable to me is the number of people that really had nightmares about it. It's not something that is talked about that often. There are people that had terrible nightmares and a really rough time with that, they are way more common than you might think. I really think it was my parents that sort of sheltered me from that, I don't think it's a bad thing at all, it was probably because of them that I didn't really understand that nuclear holocaust really meant until I was probably in my 20's. I don't want for my kids to have nightmares or live in fear. It's really that simple. I also don't want them to not feel when there is suffering or tragedy in this world; that might be even worse. I don't know what the fear is for the next generation, terrorism or a meteor impact, or global warming or what, but I simply don't want my kids to be afraid of something they cannot control. I don't want them to be afraid of anything. I don't know for sure but I think the movies they watch, the games they play, the books they read all affect that. That's what I think of when my kids want to play games and watch movies.
Bullshit. Being a parent is not difficult if you're not a lazy shit. I have an 8 year old boy who is routinely receiving praise for his politeness, manners, etc. It wasn't difficult to get him to learn those skills, but his mother and I also treat him as a person and a member of the family -- so those skills basically come naturally. It is completely natural for him to act "right" because that's pretty much all he knows. The problem, as I see it anyway, with today's "parents" is they are nothing beyond care-givers. They don't interact with their children, or include them in their own lives. When they do, it's by scolding them, screaming at them, griping, or any other batch of negativity. While discipline is absolutely NECESSARY in a child's development, so is doing POSITIVE things with them. I don't LET him play video games, I play WITH him. We have a ball, playing all kinds of genres. He's quite a good shot in Call of Duty, I might add. I go out and play baseball with him. I'll run around with him. I'll try to do whatever he wants to do, because those memories will last him a lifetime -- and he'll pass on MY habits when HE has children.
I was born in the late 50s and grew up in the 60s. There were no computers. TV was black and white. My class was probably the last to be taught to use slide rules in high school.
We played outside. During the peak of the baby boom, there were lots of kids to play with. We'd round up 10 or 12, split up and line up on either side of a creek. We'd throw dirt clods, shoot bottle rockets, throw firecrackers and shoot BB guns (the old, whimpy kind) at each other. One parent gave us shop goggles and several of us carried trash can lids as shields. We escalated to Whamo Wrist Rocket slingshots, homemade catapults, sky rockets and roman candles. We'd play all day. When I'd get home, I was so dirty, my mother made me strip on the screened back porch and make a beeline to the tub. Sometimes people got hurt. I got hurt several times. It never stopped me. What we were doing was basically poor man's paintball.
When we got older, we entertained ourselves with vandalism, model rocketry, homemade explosives and other adventures. Yessir. If a boy does that nowadays, he'll get a cavity search.
I suppose if we'd had Doom and Quake we'd have played those games. But damn if it ain't fun to throw dirt clods.
As for these kids going on shooting rampages, it just didn't happen back then. The reason was no kid ever got that far out of line. If you acted up, you got your ass beat. The punishment was swift and sure. Today I see kids testing and pushing the limits of what they can get by with. Back then, you didn't have to push very far before you got your ass beat. If we'd continued corporal punishment in the schoiols, Columbine and all the other shootings probably wouldn't have happened because we'd have taken care of little problems before they became big problems.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
How do you know?
~Idarubicin
You cite "for 100,000 years" as if our evolutionary past should be something we should strive to model our lives on. For most of our past, small tribes fought other small tribes and raped/enslaved the defeated women/men, sacrificed animals to appease gods, and generally lived like animals themselves with disease and ignorance enshrouding their lives. Culture, religion, law, and technology slowly emerged as threads to bind larger groups together.
Modern society is now, for better or worse, of sufficient complexity that the life experience gained between ages 13 and 21 is enormous. Faced with larger choices and increasing individual power and lacking ubiquitous religious structure, humans now DO require more time to adapt and mature.
If you considered yourself mature at age 13, then I have no doubt that you are as sadly immature now as most 13 year olds I know (including myself at 13).
For a 100,000 years, humans have reached adulthood at ~13. They have raised children, fought wars and ran nations. ... if it takes 18-21 years for current humans to reach adulthood, SOMETHING went seriously wrong.
For 100,000 years, most people have been unable to read or write, and "adulthood" essentially implied that they knew a single trade well (generally whatever their parents did) and/or could kill wild animals, and could more or less keep their family from dying -- and not much more. There is a problem today in that the expectations on children can become too lax, but your implication that something is "seriously wrong" with someone who "takes 18 years" to reach adulthood in our society is ridiculous -- we expect much more of adults now, and it is reasonable to do so. We are not (typically, in the western world, at least not in those segments of the population likely to be posting on slashdot) so close to mere survival that the physical abilities of a 13-year-old boy will make a life-or-death difference for most families, or that a 13-year-old girl should start churning out babies just to ensure the survival of the species.
If you want to say we should teach our children responsibility at an earlier age, great, I agree that's something we should work on. But saying they should be "adults" at 13 just because that's what it has been like for much of history is kind of throwing out the legitimate and positive changes that have been made since then. I'm not into the philosophy that says the future is always better than the past, but the very fact that we're having this conversation from physically separated locations without even knowing each other should suggest that there are some useful aspects to recent changes...
I am the man with no sig!
Given that I spend much of my childhood simulating the killing of all of my friends (and they trying to shoot me; an actual frag being a matter of consensus), I don't think video realism is really up to par yet with little kids aiming guns at other little kids. Yes, there's more gore in the video game, but that's only because my mom didn't allow us to smear ourselves with ketchup.
Uhm...
my kid wasn't really that interested in gaming until more recently and he's 14 now.
The reason is that we tossed a frisbee every afternoon at the park and went mountain biking on Saturday morning every week and I got him interested in building and racing R/C cars when he was 10 and playing hockey when he was 8 and by the end of the day, we sit down and catch a movie and he goes to bed (and I wander off to Slashdot).
Wow, profound. It was never an issue. But I never forbade anything either. When he played GTA2 at a friend's house at 8, he told me that he didn't like the game because it didn't feel right to run around running down innocent people in a stolen car. He still played now and then when I assured him that it was OK to play video games, but that he was a good person for having feelings like that and to hold onto those.
He still won't step on ants on the street, even though he watched R rated movies and played GTA at 8 years old.
Big surprise. It's not about the games a kid plays but the lessons he learns from his parents.
Stewed
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
This probably won't get read or responded to now, but anywayz...
Want to know why I seriously first started playing San Andreas? Anthropological curiousity.
As someone living in Australia, I knew nothing about African-American gang culture whatsoever. My girlfriend's teenaged daughter, when she lived with us, listened to a lot of rap music. I heard some of it, but never really understood the context behind the lyrics at all. Hearing about San Andreas got me interested in learning about it in the same way that I ended up reading about the Amish after hearing the song Amish Paradise, or reading about the Ojibwa after watching Commander Chakotay on Star Trek: Voyager. (I'd read some Voyager fanfic where Chakotay was depicted as an Ojibwa shaman, or fairly close in terms of their spiritual beliefs) I like learning about different cultures.
From what I read, the depiction of the hood in San Andreas was very thoroughly researched by Rockstar as well; they apparently got a lot of rap musicians and other people who were/had been part of that culture. I think one the main reasons why it's interesting is because it actually makes you think a lot about different systems of morality; what some other people might think of as degraded or antisocial (in terms of prostitution, hard drug use, violence etc) would presumably have been seen by people living within that environment perhaps as simply being elements of their everyday lives.
So if you look at it from that point of view, (or in terms of another example, where you're playing a game set a few thousand years ago) the violence is only excessive by our own contemporary cultural standards. By the standards of the culture the game is intending to simulate/represent, the violence is actually one of the main parts; if you took that out, in many cases what the culture itself was based on would be lost, or at least fundamentally altered...it wouldn't be authentic.
Hence, violence in games doesn't have to encourage violence in real life...it can allow us to look at other cultures or time periods, and remind us that in those other scenarios, violence often led to extremely negative consequences...and so rather than encourage it now, it can actually help us to see why reducing it is a better idea. CJ taught me quite a lot.