You Played Violent Games - Why Can't Your Kids? 501
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?"
My vision on things (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org], 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.
Re:My vision on things (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:My vision on things (Score:5, Interesting)
In that case, the message is simple: Raise your children well....
Easy to say, of course... Difficult to put into practice.
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For the first part of that; `Don't feed a coin slot.` is the morale of my story and the grease that helped bring the console into my home.
For the second part of that; It ain't the frags that worry me, it's the gibs that raise red flags with me.
Re:My vision on things (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My vision on things (Score:5, Funny)
Banning your kids from doing anything you thought was fun as a child.
Listen, I was living on high with a pad of my own, 100k surplus to spend on whatever I wanted, and then I got tied down with those little shits... why should *I* be the only one to suffer for it?!
(ED: BakaHoushi is a 20 year old jobless college student. Any resemblance to actual fact in the above post is unintentional and completely coincidental.)
Re:My vision on things (Score:4, Insightful)
"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!"
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Well, of course wenl had it tough. We used to have to dial into the internet and download at 1200 baud. Then we'd have to unzip our warez at the command line and build a boot disk just so we'd have enough conventional RAM to play Zone 66. After that, we'd call our friends while still chained to a wall by a telephone cord and have them come over and play 8-bit video games on our NES's.
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Re:My vision on things (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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...
Re:My vision on things (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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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?
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The workaround was to play Cowboys and "Native Americans", play soldiers, and read those evil comic books ("subversive" if you count Mad magazine, but that flew below adult radar). Lots of play that mimicked fantasy and real violent behavior.
Most folks turned out okay, except that when some of us had kids we forgot what it was like to BE one!
Re:My vision on things (Score:4, Interesting)
So, when we had the action figures in our grasp, people got wasted all the time. That's just one of many things. We did Cowboys and Indians, soldiers, knights in shining armor, Star Wars, whatever. The object for my brother and me, as well as any of our typical male friends, was the KILL THE BAD GUY. Given our evolutionary background, this isn't all that peculiar. Boys have been doing this for... well... I would guess throughout our whole existence. Even my sister, having two older brothers, did the same stuff. She turned out all right too.
Hell, my dad, once we got to be around 7 or 8ish used to read us fantasy novels in chunks rather than children's books. He read the Hobbit to my brother and me as well as the Iron Tower Trilogy. The latter had quite a bit of violence in it.
And I have to say this, children have vivid imaginations. My brother did, my sister did and I did. Scary graphics on the computer, no matter how realistic, have got nothing on what I could and did form in my own head. Although, with that said, I don't think putting a 5-year-old in front of GTA3 is a good idea either. Is there an age? No. You need to know your own kid and his/her level of maturity. The biggest problem we seem to have today is that parents want other organizations and technology to raise their kids.
I think this society has become way too paranoid. WAY too paranoid. As a joke, my sister got me a DVD with some old He-Man episodes on it the other day and my friends and I sat down and watched it for a good laugh. Given the freakish religious state of the nation right now, I can just see massive protests about Skeletor's staff with the Ram's Head on it and all the "evil magic."
Really, what it's come down to, is that no one wants to take responsibility for a damn thing any more. If a kid goes bonkers... it's not his fault, it can't be that his parents were crap parents, it can't be that being abused by school mates breaks people, it can't be teachers or administrators that did nothing about it... let's blame the faceless video game makers and gun makers and people who make violent movies. It's ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. When I was a kid, when I did something dumb or hurt someone else, my dad belted me and that was that. I didn't go into therapy to discuss my feelings. THe belting was quick, simple and did the trick.
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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
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I started gaming off with arcade classics on a 8088. Galaxian, Dig Dug and the like. My parents
Ban D&D style RPGs! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
There is no right age (Score:4, Interesting)
FWIW, Crecente seems to have some pretty reasonable rules here.
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Exactly. I've got a 7-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a 2-year-old. (And one due in June). They have plenty of fun with the Humongous games (hint: they run really well, and without the CD, under SCUMMVM), but the oldest sometimes likes to run the mouse when we play Descent3 or the older Half-Life games or a couple of other first-perso
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Lego Star Wars is also a spouse-friendly game. My wife loves it because, after I beat the levels, she can go around and collect every goddamn stud in the level. I wouldn't mind except she insists we play together, and waiting for someone to check every single place for studs is crazy-making.
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Parents bred up on games makes poor parents (Score:2, Interesting)
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.)
Re:There is no right age (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry. I don't buy it. I demand you give me a list of ages and what's appropriate, universally. Also, if you have any pills that will make kids sit down and shut up and get smarter, I'd appreciate it.
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Half the problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Half the problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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On the other hand- I have a brother who is currently 17, and he is not ready to leave the nest, not by a long shot. Even basic stuff like laundry and cooking simple meals totally confounds him (Ea
A lot of parenting is hypocritical (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A lot of parenting is hypocritical (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:A lot of parenting is hypocritical (Score:4, Insightful)
When/if I have kids, I'll be able to point out this situation and show them why they should work harder and not do what I did. Same thing with drinking and drugs. I'm not going to say "go nuts", but I'm also not going to give my kids the DARE version because I've been there, done that, and know better.
The world is a big and scary place (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:The world is a big and scary place (Score:5, Insightful)
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').
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I'm not sure where you live buddy but during my public schooling we saw everything, by the time highschool was around the corner nothing was a big deal. IMHO sheltered kids DO tend to have problems later in life especially socially. Think about all those kids "sheltered" by their religious nutcase parents, that kind of sheltering still exists unfortunate as it is.
In my opi
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Re:The world is a big and scary place (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I am about as anti-statist as one gets and you know...I really have trouble blaming the state for that one. I think technology like games has evolved to attract us a
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I don't know about you, but I've never seen a nature show with baby animals where at least one of them didn't get eaten by something.
What you don't understand is, it's all the real world. We try and make things safe for our kids, but the real world can intrude at any time and there isn't much that we can do about it.
So don't feed 'em a line of crap. The best time to learn that the world is dangerous, is before you have to find out the hard way.
Re:The world is a big and scary place (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Our oldest is naturally bright, I guess. He consumes books yet loves WoW, and leans towards our adult movies despite being 13. He has a great sense of humor, is very helpful around the house, and will probably become a video game addict like his biological father.
Our second oldest loves Bionicl
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Good idea. Let's rally for mandatory military enrollment for all adolescents; after all, it's a big, scary, violent world out there, and the sooner they find out what the front lines are like, the better! ...Right?
Obviously not. Sheltering kids from sex and violence is not an ancient, irrational tradition brought down from the puritans; believe it or not, it actually has scientific backing. Young children expo
Glamorized violence is the problem. (Score:2)
I would much rather have children watch things that realistically portray violence, and its consequences, than some semi-abstract depiction of it, where the baddies just fall down dead without any blood. That's not reality; the world isn't clean like that. You don't walk around shooting anonymous bad guys in black jumpsuits who appear endlessly out of nowhere and
Actually, I played pinball and Centipede (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Times seem to have changed (Score:2)
Arcades didn't help themselves any either. (Score:2)
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But maybe you haven't seen Visual Pinball. While not quite as exciting as 3DUP Thrillride, it does seem to accurately recreate the classics.
http://www.pinballnirvana.com/ [pinballnirvana.com]
http://www.pinball-originals.com/portal.php [pinball-originals.com]
There's probably better links out there for it, but these give you access to some tables.
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It doesn't follow... (Score:5, Interesting)
...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.
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Mmm, mushrooms...
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The arcade became a ghost town because the Super Nintendo eliminated the disparity between the arcade and the home, with the exception of games that either used elaborate props (pinball, sit-down racing games, rail
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The preceding was my opinion. Good luck with your's.
You Played Violent Games - Why Can't Your Kids? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re: You Played Violent Games - Why Can't Your Kids (Score:5, Funny)
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...."
15, I think (Score:2)
Hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
"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.
Wooo (Score:2)
I will now supply a one-size-fits-all answer to the question, so that parents can do the right thing with a clear conscience.
No, wait! The world is a big and scary place for parents, too. You know (should know) your kids better than anyone else. What's right for them? If you don't know, start with the small stuff, watch them play it, see if it's okay. If it worries them, they're too young. If they enjoy it, they're old enough.
People often forget that kids are a lot tougher than adults in many regards. C
Realism (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I realize you said "GTA-style" there, but GTA itself doesn't glamorize killing civilians at all. In fact, there are immediate consequences for doing so unless no one else is around at all--just like in real life.
I've played San Andreas with my toddler on my lap. Granted, it was me getting into a semi and driving around at about 5mph trying to avoid smashing other cars or people, but he liked it anyway. You can even get a camera
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There's 'voluntary' behavior and then there is 'encouraged' behavior. The game certainly facilitates through the way it is designed and the missions the characters perform a certain penchant for theft and murder through the liberal application of semi-automatic firearms. Sure, you don't *have* to kill everyone in sight, but it is expected by the structure of the game that you get your hands filthy dirty; the violent life is glamorized and encouraged. And yes, I have played. Thought GTA 1 and 2 were mindles
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Sure. But that's still why most people buy the game.
Your argument is like saying they put those "Parental advisory: explicit lyrics" stickers on CDs to help parents avoid their children hearing words they're too young to hear. Maybe that's true for five parents somewhere in the world, but it's still really there to increase the appeal of the CD to younger teenagers who see it as a badge of hon
You get to be an innocent child ONCE! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.)
Re:You get to be an innocent child ONCE! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 challeng
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This is the first, last and only time in history where such a made-up thing as innocence has even been available for children. Get over it. Kids are going to see violence and do violence no matter what. They're going to bang at twelve, smoke pot at thirteen and get drunk at fourteen. And there's nothing anyone can do about it (no matter what you think), so we should accept it, attempt to mitigate any negatives, and move on with our lives.
My two nephews (Score:2)
The 10 year old does kick all of our collective asses on pretty much any game we tend to play. Its no wonder I rarely play online, I am humiliated
What I'm doing (Score:2)
More seriously, although I'm not planning on having kids in the near future (I need to get laid first!), I don't think there would be any problems with regards to violent games if there's a supply of good non-violent ones. Not necessarily games absolutely devoid of any conflict, but could be either those cartoonish games like Psychonauts, or even realistic sports, racing, or flight games. By the time they actually want to play viole
Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
When they're mature enough to handle it with the realization that it's not real life.
What, you expected a number? Sucker.
"But I don't want him to know that yet. " (Score:2)
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I've worked at one place where it was "dog eat dog." I left after three months. I'm amazed anyone would let themselves be put in that situation. Cooperation makes us more powerful than competition. While I won't discourage my children from pursuing a job like that, I'll try to point them in the direction of a cooperative environment because it's much more fulfilling.
Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Just Get Involved With Your Kids (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
The time to worry is... (Score:2)
But, since you as parents are giving them a healthy regular slice of quality time, nurturing their emotional development, encouraging their self-esteem, and especially creating a happy, balanced, loving life for your and your significant other, and healing your issues as they arise
Re: (Score:2)
300, man (Score:2)
The only morality that matters in the U.S. is religious (because it is said that atheists can't have a morality) and the only religion that matters in the mainstream media is evangelical and evangelicals already have their own "swept away" FPS where your victims convert or die. So
Anecdote time. (Score:2)
After more shock, I realized that just because it was how he grew up doesn't mean he wants his s
speeding (Score:2)
What about parents who don't play at all? (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/136
Isn't the nature of parenthood hypocritical? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:Isn't the nature of parenthood hypocritical? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Thompson??? (Score:2)
"On the Wired site, Clive Thompson has up an article
Is this Jack's non-evil brother who derives a healthy, cathartic enjoyment of occasionally playing violent video games?
A few thoughts (Score:2)
Are forgetting how real it seemed? I remember being 9 or 10 playing Doom95 in the dark and being absolutely horrified when I turned a corner to see a new enemy. It is all relative, so don't put too much stock into the idea that the less-realistic games have less of an effect on kids.
(Also, remember Harris and Klebold didn't have Gears of War on HD, they had Doom)
I think that the real idea is that you just c
Why can't my kids play violent games? (Score:2)
Frankly I just don't buy it. I don't buy a word of it.
I realize that all things influence how kids act, but I think it's marginal at best and I find it impossible to believe that video games are going to make a kid become a psychotic nutcase. That's just bull, and frankly I don't know how any reasonable person can think otherwise. I know they did some dumb studies where they had kids play games and then watched them go play fight and concluded they were being more violent (doh!) but
We survived (Score:2)
It's just amazing to me that we survived without bike helmets, seat belts or child safety seats. We played Defender, Smash TV, Missile Command and a host of other violent video games and managed not to grow up being violent people. At least most of us and those that didn't were probably fucked up anyway. My opinion is children are more intelligent (though inexperienced) and resilient than we give them credit for. It's also my opinion that we coddle and fuss over them to the point of nausea. Kids aren't
Hazard (Score:2)
Mistakes Jr (Score:2)
Because we're messed up, and we want our kids to be less messed up.
Parenting is powerful because we can teach our kids to learn from our mistakes. Even if they're mistakes we liked at the time, which might even cloud our judgement. Like wearing plaid polyester leisure suits.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Boys will be boys (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
my kids (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
My kid (Score:3, Insightful)
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
One example... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org] after hearing the song Amish Paradise, or reading about the Ojibwa [wikipedia.org] after watching Commander Chakotay on Star Trek: Voyager. (I'd read some Voyager fanfic [aol.com] 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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm just coming out of that age (I'll be 26 in September), and I was never violent. I never picked a fight and I never was picked on. In fact, none of my friends were like that either.
When I have my son, which might be in September, I'm going to teach him that violence is th