All Video Games Cause Aggressive Behavior, Say Two US Congressmen 483
Fluffeh writes with news that U.S. Congressmen Baca (D-CA) and Wolf (R-VA) have proposed a bill that would require most video games to have a warning label decrying their "potential damaging" long-term effects on children.
"Under the one-page Violence in Video Games Labeling Act (PDF), packaging for all video games except those rated 'EC' for Early Childhood would be required to prominently display a message reading: 'WARNING: Exposure to violent video games has been linked to aggressive behavior.' The proposed label would be required even if the video game in question is not violent."
Speaking of Labels (Score:5, Informative)
How about "Congress has been linked with corruption and abuse of power" for any campaign Ads?
I'm fine with this, (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
translation (Score:4, Informative)
"The videogame industry should spend more money bribing congressmen, like the other entertainment industries. Then we'll start sucking up to them instead of picking on them."
Re:An important caveat is missing (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think school shootings are really any more prevalent now than they used to be, they just tend to get more attention.
"Between 1979 and 1988 there were 27 school shootings. From 1989 to 1998 there were 55 and then they continued to increase from 1999 to 2008 to 66, so there were 148 shootings in the three decades from 1979 to 2008. What’s most disturbing is that in the three years since 2008 there have been 43 shootings, and that’s almost two-thirds of the number of shootings that occurred in the preceding decade." - http://www.salon.com/2012/03/04/inside_the_bully_economy [salon.com]
Not that far-fetched, actually (Score:4, Informative)
My sons (7 and 9) have been exposed to video games for a good year now, mainly Wii and Nintendo DS ("The Tendo").
My tentative summary: All is fine as long as they play short duration games, like Sports or Mario Kart, where a games lasts only a few minutes.
But it's different when they play games with a story that swallows them, like Zelda or Lego Star Wars. I'm convinced that these games do mess with their minds. Sometimes it takes them the rest of the day to get back out of the game. They don't respond any more. OK, this is probably normal between kids and their parents, but there's more: After a game they are overexcited and hyperactive, they can't focus on a single thought, they have headaches, they scream and shout, they tell us that they hate us and they look as if they mean it. Sometimes I can almost see fangs grow on them.
I guess it's because we take away their super powers when we tell them it's time to switch off. And the worst part is they realize how they are (namely aggressive) and they're obviously not happy about it. But of course they want to play again ASAP. This is highly unsettling form a parent's pov.
You can argue whether this is really as bad as it looks from my perspective, but IMHO these are clear symptoms of addiction and negative side-effects. I have come to believe that video games are unhealthy (to some extent) at a young age and would have liked to keep them away from gaming for a bit longer, and feed them football, hide-and-seek and some healthy mud-digging instead. The kids appear much more sane (and happy, and human) after some real-world activity. But of course you can't help them gaming if daddy owns a Wii, and everybody else in school boasts with their elder brother's gadgets.
In order to mitigate the symptoms we have agreed never to play longer than 30 minutes per day in our family. This has helped a bit, but only quantitatively. The outbursts of aggression have become rarer but not less harsh.
Re:Like War (Score:5, Informative)
Piggybacking on this comment, the two senators obviously didn't read the recent WSJ (or was it NYT) article specifically on the benefits of videogames. They had found that gamers--ESPECIALLY gamers who play violent video games--are significantly (like 25%) faster to arrive at the correct decision to a given problem compared with their non-gamer collueagues. Basically, the whole article was a giant middle finger to everyone who's ever said gaming is good for nothing.