Video Games... With Children

Everytime my daughter catches me playing BF2, it's like being caught doing something wrong.

Parents need to seriouslly calm down about this. There are far more worst things out there in the world than video games that can manipulate the minds of our youth.

"You'll learn a lot about your kid by seeing how he or she plays games."

This quote shows how clueless Ford is. Girls don't play games.

I remember in 2nd grade (having not played a lot of video games (other than Solaris, Joust, and Galaxian on the 2600)...and definately nothing violent)...I got in trouble with my teacher (who thought I was much to violent minded or something). We had to draw a monster for a worksheet she handed out...and I thought "oooh monster = scary = big deadly people eating thing!" So I drew this thing that was sorta Godzilla with tentacles or something and a robotic statue of liberty attached to his back or something (I vaguely remember being obsessed with Space Balls at the time)...and he was eating people and there was blood...and he was bleeding from sores covering his body...that sorta stuff (not really detailed...I mean I was in 2nd grade drawing this with colored pencils and magic markers ffs!). In my description I described his color (where it asked what color is this monster) as green and blood or something (to which she, the teacher, wrote in big red letters "blood is not a color!" and deducted a lot of points).

Anyway...she wrote a big note at the top that it was too violent and some other stuff and she made me take it home and show my mom (I was going to show my mom anyway before I got this defiled red marker orgy manifesto that was at one point my masterpiece...I was proud of it). So I showed my mom...and she liked it...she thought it was cool and said something along the lines of "well your teacher has no imagination!"

People spend too much time looking for "warning signs" that some kid is going to go postal and kill people or something. The thing is; that early on you don't get warning signs...its later on that out of the blue a kid butchers a lot of people and you get the whole "he was such a quiet boy" bullshit. People get all uptight looking for some small sign that someone is gonna "OMG murder us all!!!1" looking for people who show some small sign of not fitting the normal teen archtype...and totally miss the dude who's stockpiling pipebombs and illegally obtained RPG-7s in his front yard under one of those open tent picnic table things (the blue ones that light up everything underneath them blue so you feel like you've crawled inside a smurf's asshole or vagina or something).

Thats all bad enough...but the people who are soooo worried that their child might show signs of being a mass murderer when he/she is like 7 years old needs to get a grip (not talking about not letting your kid play GTA...I respect that...thats fine...I'm talking about the shit we keep seeing where we're afraid that little Johnny is going to be warped and ruined forever because he saw something mildly inappropriate ONCE in a game...I'm talking about kids getting suspended for waving a chicken nugget at another kid and going bang...its this sorta shit that drives the pendulum way in the other direction so that we don't notice the really obvious shit...like the kid who comes to school with a ski mask and a broken bottle cutting himself and yelling "I'm gonna send you all to the fires of gehenna tommorow...yeeehaw...rawwwrrrr...bangbangbang").

My wife got mad when I let my 3-1/2yr old play Hulk last night. :(

I love the fact that the Playboy game was designed by a chick.

This is a great writeup, only point I would say I didnt like and that was the one about "Car Crashes" and the such, I'm sorry as a kid I always loved playing with my toy cars and making them crash...hell if I had the Hot Wheels game like they have on the Gamecube when I was a kid, i would have been in hog heaven.

Other then that I am bookmarking these to kinda send to some of the people I know who have a horrible view of video games for their kids (mainly because what the media throws in the face of the public), I believe this article can maybe drive a little more sense into them then my incoherant babbling when the issue is brought up to me.

Insulating your kids from cartoonish images of in-game car crashes? That's pretty extreme isn't it? To me - that's like taking the hotwheels and matchbox cars away from the kid, since they have a tendancy to crash.

I don't know, I played Doom, Mortal Kombat etc. in 3rd grade and I'm... damnit nevermind.

"Games are not harmful, but sitting on your butt all day is harmful." I like that one.

I believe that there is an 'age appropriate' aspect to any entertainment medium, and that the visceral nature of many action-oriented games makes it more important to consider.

I also believed that parents making informed choices are awesome - whether or not I agree is irrelevent. But someone abdicating their parental duties byeither blindly allowing or rejecting video games is not doing anyone a favor.

Also, just to let you know that there is a site called GamerDad (http://www.gamerdad.com ) that is all about gaming parents and gaming with kids.

Mike

MorristatMSNBC?

Wow, responsible parenting. Who knew? ;P

MSNBC deserves kudos for these reports (and I hate the word kudos so they REALLY deserve it). I hope a lot of parents see their news stories.

This should be added to news:
http://egm.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3143540

And Chris Remo is doing an awsome job!