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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?"
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
The opposite is much more likely true : the nature of childhood is to be sheltered. Just as animals shelter their offspring until they are capable of coping with it without being immediately eaten.
Further: the young have a strong 'copy' instinct, which is how they seem to learn the basics. Putting the 'real world' in front of them before they have reached the age of autonomy is asking for trouble.
The "expose them to the real-world dogma" is all nice and progressive and seemingly commonsense, but it is almost certainly unnatural. And anything that is unnatural, like margarine, is bad news, I reckon. (BTW, I am not arguing against the 'artificial', which is a distinct idea from that which is 'unnatural').
I agree that you shouldn't isolate them to much from reality, but neither news or video games are reality. News compress the bad things of the world into tiny 15min action shows, what might be shown might be real to some degree, but its shown totally out of proportion. Planes might crash once a week, but thousands of them also land perfectly safely, news however doesn't show that, same with all the other bad stuff that happens. I wouldn't let my child watch news for quite a while, since there is really nothing you can learn from it when you don't even have a basic understanding of how the world works.
Now with video games things are even more extreme, they have absolutely no connection with reality, they might get inspiration from reality, but you next random WWII shooter isn't like fighting in WWII and GTA doesn't show the normal live on the street either. Now to some degree this is of course good, since well, its all fake and thus you can enjoy it without feeling all that bad, but on the other side I would prefer my child to learn facts about war from a good history book, not from a video game.
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.
"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.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Is that an absolute? Do you believe in absolutes, like the religious do? You are being dogmatic, after all.
"A lot of things we humans do are very, very unnatural. Like social welfare. That doesn't mean it's wrong."
You are presuming that it isn't wrong, but I reckon the opposite. Instead of looking after each other, as we did in the past, and having meaning in our lives through that, the State has rendered our lives almost purposeless. And so we just play video games all day, and watch TV. In the past we would have looked after our parents until they died. We wouldn't have called them a burden. Now, because of our social welfare mentality, we shove them in to tombs for the living. And that is just a small example of one of the many distortions that social welfare has caused.
Ironically a group of people who have a strong reason to want such an unnatural thing as 'social welfare' are the selfish and unloving.
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.
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.
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
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
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!