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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?"
I don't know what I'd do, but I do know what my parents did... both non-gamers, but my dad was (and is) quite proficient with computers. Our advantage was that the computer came "late in the game", so I was about 12, my brother 14 and my little sister was 8.
Computers were expensive and we had to share one computer. My dad or mother didn't say "one hour", no, they said it had to be fairly distributed. The system introduced was simple and self-regulating: write down what you were playing and at what hour you started and stopped. Your siblings could come in at any time and say "hey, you already played an hour... it's my turn". That meant, finish level and/or save and let your sibling have a go. Whining brought you nowhere, because mom or dad would invariably take the side of the person that had played least.
No things regulated "playing time" quite fairly and the net result was that we played each about 1 hour to 1.5 hours a day. Pretty much what the article stated.
Now as for violence and/or sex in videogames. My parents never forbade any games. We had the full programme Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, etc... Blood and gore were not a problem. (Heck, later we loved to play a game called "Blood"... Good times!) In the early days we mostly played Sierra games (a dying breed... alas...) and it helped us (okay, perhaps just me) learn English. I sat there for hours with my dutch-english dictionary. Fun times... We also had stuff like Strip poker and our good old Leisure Suit Larry.
The only thing I remember is that my dad forbade Syndicate... Or better said, we had to play it with headphones. He abhorred the sound of the people burning when using the flamethrower.
The main problem is not the nature of the game. Wolfenstein let us kill humans after all. Except, they didn't look much like humans then, did they? A current game with current graphics is way closer to reality than whatever we had.
On the other hand, I think kids tend to be self-regulating in what they want to do. Younger kids simply won't be interested in shooting people/aliens. They will probably go for the more colourful games. I see this when my fathers in laws kids from his second wife are here. They never ask to put stuff like GTA3, even if I let them choose from my PlayStation2 library. It's always stuff like Kya, eyeToy Groove or Sonic Heroes.
Teenagers will probably love stuff like GTA3, Halo, whatever... but there all bets are off. You cannot control them. They already watch violent movies, they play the games you don't want them to play at friends. In the teenage years, parents have to let loose slowly but surely. Something I also learnt from my parents. (Note that when we got a computer, we were pretty much teenagers)
I know you can tell by now that I think my parents did a great job.... I plan to inspire me as much as possible from what I learnt from then.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
FWIW, Crecente seems to have some pretty reasonable rules here.
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
Seriously, I've been taunted by too many 10-year-old's in LAN cafés, I don't want to have one in my friggin' house 24/7.
To quote my Japanese friend on the subject of Anime censorship:
"Why censor children's [media]; kids have violent! Honestly, a child will see more blood spilled than most people in their adult years outside of war and medicine. Children are naturally violent creatures."
Note: not exact quote.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
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.
You get to be an innocent child ONCE!
Unfortunately too many adults take this opportunity away from their children by exposing them to the violence and stupidities of humanity WAY TOO EARLY. Yes the violence and stupidity of humanity is real, and out there in the world, and it always has been...
What's the damn rush to expose children to it?
(And I'm still pissed off at the idiot parents who brought their toddler to the Planet of the Apes remake at 10:00 pm.)
"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.
"Gamers are getting older"? That's not news, time runs forwards. It'd be more surprising if gamers were getting younger, and I'm damned if I want to go through puberty again.... backwards.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I've been a gamer since the days of the original Wolfenstein 3D, and when I had a son, I decided to use the video games in my collection to teach him a few things: like the consequences of your actions, thinking through problems, and *not* killing civilians indiscriminately. I chose games that had a definite right and wrong about them (and yeah, I'm of that generation that believes World War Two was about right and wrong, so a few of those titles were in there), or about thinking (the original Deus Ex, for example).
Unfortunately, my son quickly learned that there were cheat codes out there, so a lot of my hopes at a learning experience went out the window.
There are some games I keep away from him, such as the Carmageddon and Grand Theft series, along with the ever-popular Postal series.
Every step of the way, I know what he's playing, and we talk about it. We don't play against each other because the one time we did he kicked my butt. But otherwise, we're on the same wavelength. We generally play the same games, and talk the same language about them, even though he's 40 years younger than I am.
Games are no more violent than television, and in one way, they're less violent, because when playing a game, the kid is at least in some control. The parent just has to pick the games, and stay involved with the kids. Neither computers nor televisions are baby sitters, and parents who use them as such get the ba****ds they deserve.
But I'm still not gonna let him play Postal -- not until he reaches 65. There have to be *some* limits, you know!
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
This article is interesting because it highlights a new scenario: Now there are parents almost solely bred up on video games. Now is their turn to reverse the roles.
Problem is, if you think your parents stink as a kid, how would you like having video-game junkies as parents?
(Note there are always exceptions to any rule or hypothesis, every human is unique and no labels should be applied. Just think of this as an enlightening exercise in how you would really like to live your life.)
...that just because you abhor violence, sex, etc., in your media that 'Sin City', 'Doom' et al. are not good. It simply means they are uninteresting to you. It has nothing to do with class, and everything to do with age-appropriateness. Sin City and Doom are bad movies/games to be showing a kindergartener. Beyond that, you are just being snobby. (P.S. I'm pretty sure the arcade became a ghost town not because of violence, but because kids all of a sudden had access to games of similar quality right at their house or their friends' houses, with video game consoles and serious video-capable PCs).
There are, and always have been fun, interesting games that had no element of violence in them. Pinball is a good example (interestingly, Centipede is not, unless we don't care so long as it's violence against things not human, in which case you shouldn't care about Doom either). So was Myst (a personal fav). But there is no magical exclusionary rule that says if there are elements of violence, sex, and profanity a game is automatically bad and/or boring. The Longest Journey was a great game, but was full of profanity and had a good bit of the other two. Half-life and its sequel were both groundbreaking and engaging story-wise, but chock full of violence. Sin City was a fantastic movie, if for nothing else the artistic direction that was taken, but also the stories are quite gripping (and also inherently moral in dramatistic ways; you know, the same way Shakespeare's plays were morally tinged even though they were chock full of violence, sex, and profanity...).
Besides, all the good ol' games you seem bent on being nostalgic about are available in Flash or Java on the net somewhere or other. So, it's not like these options are forever lost to a parent trying to entertain a child age-appropriately.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Maybe.
But it could also be your one shot to get onto the roster for an eleet clan.
"Put daddy in the match, or else you're going to time-out. One. TWO...."
I particularly liked the "Lego Rule." ... Also, I have "this friend" who's about to turn 50, has never played a video game in his life, and has three young children who are soon to graduate from noggin.com to the real thing. I'm not, I mean he's not, going to be one of those anything-goes guys. Any advice for this type?
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http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/136
That's not a troll, really. The most obvious and ageless example is sex. We did as much as we could as soon as we could get away with it. Now, as hypocrytical, older parents, we can't stand the concept of our precious little darlings doing the nasty at ... well ... whatever age it was that we first wanted to. (Actual age citation omitted so that I don't draw too much negative response. God knows that the ages of kids getting naked and freaky on their webcams is sufficiently low that it may never be mentioned in polite company; adults just don't want to hear about that stuff.)
It's the same for alcohol. We got drunk on our ass at 16, most of us got away with it, and we think we were *special* and could handle it. Our kids? Those morons couldn't handle a sip of ceremonial wine before they turn 21.
Video games. Driving fast. Ditching school. Going out in the woods with some dynamite and blowing shit up. (OK, that last one was pretty personal, I guess.) No matter the subject, we simply don't think our kids can do the things we did. We're hypocrites. All parents are and always have been.
Adults have no respect for children so we treat them differently than we still think we should have been treated when we were their age.
Hypocrisy and lack of respect from parents towards children? This is news? Is this surprising to anyone?
Or don't buy anything at all. Kids don't need video games.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Wow, I'm glad you're not my parent!
Seriously, games actually have been proven to have a lot of positive effects on kids and adults alike. Everything from hand-eye coordination to better problem solving skills. Not only that, but it has a great social aspect as well. You learn to play with other people, against other people, how to win and loose with grace, etc.
Not to mention, who wants to be the only kid on the block without an XBOX 360 or Wii?
Usually it's something like doing drugs or premarital sex.
Believe me, I've learned from my mistakes for both drugs and premarital sex.
I should've done a lot more of both.
Eh. You live and you learn.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
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 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
Half the problem is this insane idea that being an adult at 13 is an "early grownup". For a 100,000 years, humans have reached adulthood at ~13. They have raised children, fought wars and ran nations. Somehow over the last 3 or 4 generations, the entire human populations seems to have become retarded. It seems that it now take 50% longer for a human to reach maturity. It looks like we need more studies on just what kind of damage DDT did on our population, because if it takes 18-21 years for current humans to reach adulthood, SOMETHING went seriously wrong.
I don't know about the rest of society, but my genetic code has not degraded to that point. While I have certainly learned many things since I was 13, the only thing that prevented me from living as an adult at 13 was the artificial legal system that criminalized my age. I'm not saying that it wasn't great living for 6 years as an adult who had no responsibilities. I'm just saying that at 13 I was an adult, irrelevant to what the law said.
I have 3 kids, aged 15/12/10. The oldest isn't really into Video games, but the 2 youngest are, I let them play every game that I play (CS, Diablo2, GTA3, Quake3/4, warcraft, etc) and i always have.
Some things I have noticed:
They know the difference between games and real life, the routinely gib people in Quake, headshot people in CS, wipe out creeps in WC3 (when we all play together), but in school they get good grades and their teachers love them (no behavior problems), I know this because my wife works in the same school they attend and is privy to all of the lunch room commentary by their teachers.
When they play these games their mindsets and preferences are mirrored in the game, not the other way around. This is the biggest point I can make.. games are a way for them to express themselves, I don't see any "conditioning" that should be prevalent if you are to believe video game alarmists (E.G. Jack Thompson)
E.G. My second youngest (girl) likes to drive around GTA3 in a firetruck or ambulence doing the side missions helping people.. she doesn't gun people down/kill hookers/ etc.. in fact she berates me for not obeying the speed limit when I play.
When playing CS she likes the surf maps (where you glide around a map in a race type setting) and barely (if at all) tries to shoot anyone or fight in general. Same for Warcraft, she likes the maps where you build towns or can generate unlimited creeps and walk them around the map (no objective). In real life she loves animals, being social, and helping people...
With my son he likes to play games (CS/quake) with other people and make friendships in game, leaves if the competition is too tough and avoids conflict, and tries to help people who don't know how to do X in a game. He is the same way when playing with kids on the play ground at school.
I have never seen an increase in violent tendencies in their interactions with each other or other kids (like the neighbors, at school etc...) as a result of playing these games.
So there ya go.. btw, I have been playing video games since Doom first came out, so they have been around these games for ALL of their lives, if there was some kind of influence you would expect it to be manifested in some visable way?
I might be biased so I offer this as well, my wife doesn't play any games at all but shes their behavior constantly every day, she doesn't have any problems with them playing these games nor has she seen any changes in their behavior due to their playing them more often.
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.
"The more realistic the simulation, the more concerned we should be about the impact on the impressionable."
So today's youth are going to be desensitized towards killing cross-dimensional alien monsters or the walking dead? And this is a bad thing?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I did allow one exception for the cartoony "Destroy All Humans" game, where invading aliens zap laser beams from their UFO's at crowds of fleeing people, making them disappear in a puff of smoke. But we have successfully held out against the 007 types of games as well as Grand Theft Auto and other obviously anti-social or gory titles.
I don't buy them any realistic toy guns either. We have real guns stored under lock and key, and the children are well versed in how to handle and shoot them safely. We don't want the two confused. They have some neon colored water soakers for the pool and that's about it.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
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.