Annual Video Game Report Card Is Positive, For Once 75
Every year, the National Institute on Media and the Family releases a report card which grades various aspects of the video game industry on how well they keep "inappropriate" games out of the hands of children. This year's report was largely positive, which is surprising given the history of strong criticism by the Institute. They acknowledged that gaming is becoming a much bigger part of family life than it was in the past, and they're making an effort to shift the focus onto the parents to keep their kids' gaming habits under control. The full report is available here (PDF), and Game Daily has an interview with Entertainment Software Alliance CEO Michael Gallagher which touches on some of the same issues.
Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Simple answer: (Score:3, Interesting)
Parents shouldn't buy their kids games that they consider inappropriate (Grand Theft Auto, Manhunt, etc). They should keep an eye on them to make sure they don't play these games.
Re:Wrong idea (Score:1, Interesting)
Conversely, I've been mostly playing Nintendo games all my life (which, for the most part, are very non-violent), and I'm just about ready to kill the next person who intentionally decides to piss me off.
I've been dealing with idiots at school who like to hurt me for more than a decade now. This has nothing to do with video games, and yet I'm about to crack.
Go ahead - tell me how my video games factor into this.
Kids are Kids (Score:4, Interesting)
Video games have been around for about 40 years. To put them in some kind of special category that needs unique oversight or attention is just ridiculous, alarmist behaviour. Kids have been entertaining themselves with one thing or another as long as humankind has been around. They play with fire, fight, pick on and make fun of each other, climb to dangerous heights in trees or towers, toy with combustibles and explosives... sometimes they get hurt, sometimes they die, but video games haven't altered childhood in any significant way.
Of course parents should be aware of the games they're playing, but no more so than they should be aware of everything their child is doing.
It's frustrating that the world is scrambling to deal with computers, cellphones, video games, movies, etc. They haven't really changed the nature of what it is to be human. We had Sweeney Todd, The Tell-Tale Heart, King Lear, and MacBeth long before we had video games. Kids have been getting warped ideas into their head as long as human imagination has existed. Sometimes kids even act out those fantasies to horrific ends which I don't believe is any more frequent either before or after the advent of video games.
As much as people want to attribute violence to video games, people are very quick to hush up once they realize the perpetrator of the latest school shooting, mall shooting, or spree killing wasn't even a gamer. For the first 48 hours, dozens of investigative reporters tried to draw a line between the Virginia Tech killer and Quake/GTA/Halo until they realized he didn't like video games or TV for that matter.
The whole video games : violence angle is a dead horse.