Personally I think video games(in moderation, just like every other single thing in life) actually is a huge learning asset to any child. I’m pretty high up on the ‘food chain’ in the video games skills department, but the young children of today by the age of 7 have incredible reflexes and fine motor skills and can multi-task at an amazing level. My 5-year old niece can operate a universal remote control by feel alone and can already predict the trajectory of a relatively fast moving ball with precision, let alone engage in two conversations at a time.

HOWEVER!
Politicians don’t give two S@#%s about video games, or global warming, or gun control, or speed limits…. They only follow what they see in the media news of the day. They are completely controlled by their advisers and handlers to jump on every bandwagon, regardless if it wastes millions, billions, or even trillions of dollars to chase the cult of popularity with those that vote for them. For McCain, a true war hero, (for which Hillary or Barack have never remotely close to anything as dangerous as the most innocuous single minute of rest on an aircraft carrier) to completely roll over onto the global warming bandwagon can show its power over politicians. The scary part is the absolute cowardice and sudden liberal slant of the supposedly ‘conservative’ politicians, leaving us with absolutely ZERO hope for anyone in congress or the White House caring about anything regarding the American citizen.

Every politician has completely folded to pander to the media. Watch what any major politician does or say these days, they simply run their lucrative careers and campaigns terrified of upsetting the nightly ‘news’. So if nitwits say video games are bad on the news, expect the stupidity to quickly move to politicians. What do you think the chances are that any politician who is on this particular bandwagon has ever even played anything outside Solitare on a computer or console before. These are the same morons that hold a press conference on the content of movies they have never seen before.. And they day after it stops running in the ‘news’, they never mention it again.

I too am a middle aged gamer and I have played for hundreds of hours with thousands of kids and adults alike. I can tell you within 2 minutes which of the squeakers are problem kids and which are not. I’ve had kids tell me online that their fathers are drunks and beat them in the lobbies of multiplayer videogames. There are responsible adults and parents online, which is something a lot of people like to pretend is not real. Still, I couldn’t tell you which problem kid would or would not commit violent acts. That’s a job for psychiatrists (which of course, if they were doing that job nobody would grow up to be a criminal). It seems to me that if you can’t catch ‘em at school, how are you going to catch them online when nobody knows their real name?

Anyway it’s more paranoia that yeilds nothing. Remember Tipper Gore’s music stickers? That really helped.

Parents need to realise that its not the job of Facebook, EA Games or any other company to look after their children, its their job after all.

Before that, it was “little big books” and pool, I guess. I don’t know what it was before that – maybe penny dreadfuls, whiskey and poker?

There’s a new book for parents out, called _Grand Theft Childhood_, that sounds like it takes a sensible approach (unlike most books on the subject). I suspect the writer of this post would agree with the authors.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/62przq

Spot on article. It’s not about the thing, it’s about politicians breeding fear of whatever the thing is so they can wring more $$$ from their constituents and prove they are doing something to combat this menace.

Though parent’s negligence is indeed a problem, I think Halo 3 is a bad example. From my point of view, it was the definition of a “soft M”, as it’s called. There was some scattered cussing, but for the most part it was nothing I wouldn’t let a 14-year old play. There are quite a few games that are rated unfairly simply because there’s no rating level that would properly describe the content. In film, this problem was solved for the most part by creating the PG-13 rating (specifically for Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom), and the ESRB should do the same. What’s chiefly called for is a label between “Teen” and “Mature”, which some other ratings bureaus, such as Japan’s CERO, already have.

Grand Theft Auto IV has been getting a lot of heat from various activist groups and governments, for no reason whatsoever. M.A.D.D. criticized the game for promoting drunk driving because you can take a friend to a bar and get drunk, then drive a car around a busy city. They should have actually played the game. They would have found that GTA IV sends a clear message about drunk driving, and it isn’t one of promotion. I drove drunk one time and one time only. After exiting a bar, your character stumbles around and falls down, taking health damage. If you get into the drivers seat of a car, the cops are instantly chasing you. It’s impossible to drive in a straight line, and vision is fuzzy so all you can do is crash. I was busted by the cops, so now I call a cab after getting drunk.

Any politician wishing to write a law concerning video games should have to demonstrate a proficiency with many modern games. I can tell by their language that they have never played, nor seen the games they are criticizing and wishing to legislate against. If there is a problem with video games, it’s the amount of underage kids playing rated M games. I encounter these kids online quite frequently. They are common enough to have earned the nickname, “squeakers” because of their high-pitched voices. I have seen various retailers refuse to sell rated M games to underage kids, so the real problem lies with parents. I went to the midnight release of Halo 3, an M rated game, and I saw about a dozen teen and pre-teen kids with their parents. Other parents were talking about how their kids were sleeping and they came out to pick it up for them. The next day, some of those parents let their kids stay home from school to play the rated M game. Currently, Xbox Live offers no way to report underage play, even though thousands of gamers have asked for such a feature on their forums and via email and phone calls. We don’t like playing mature games with kids. They just don’t belong there and we have no way to stop them. We shouldn’t have to stop them, because their parents should never have bought them the game in the first place.

Video games are a great way to have fun and relieve stress. There’s nothing better after a few hours in a traffic jam than coming home and blowing up a traffic jam in a video game. I am far less likely to become overly stressed or violent in that traffic jam knowing I will soon be home blowing up traffic, or aliens, or terrorists, or whatever I want to blow up.

There are plenty of family-friendly games out there and parents need to play with their kids. They need to play the games, so they can know what’s appropriate for their kids. Until then, most parents will continue to ignore the ESRB rating on each game, while griping about violence at the same time. That kind of ignorance opens the door for activists and legislators to force their agendas upon a massive industry. If they push too much, violent games will go underground but they will never disappear. A video games is just software, after all.

The established film industry is losing sales to the game industry. Since the film indusry is a status quo power base, their lobbyists will attempt to use the power of the pol to punish their competitors. This will require hiring more establishment lawyers on all sides to battle this out. This avenue gives employment to establsihment lawyers and increases the chances of the pols to get a bigger cut of the loot.

The elites may know that video games reduce violence in a demographic historically the source of violence. The establishment may not desire this effect for it would reduce the influence of the corrections industry. What do the pols do with all the social workers, police, prisons and detention centers. A reduction in violence in a key demographic would adversely affect a powerful lobby and endanger the living of thousands of parasites developed by the state to enhance its power over the citizenry. A side effect, of course, would be the need on the part of the corrections industry to make up the revenues somewhere elese; to the detriment of the rest of us.