I know this subject has been broached before in regards to movies and cartoons but it seems lately that the focus has been on violent video games.
I wandered into my ten your old son’s room yesterday and he was playing a borrowed video game. The focus of the game seemed to be to select as many different firearms as possible and blast the smithereens out of any life form that crossed the screen.
I probed a bit and said, “What game is this son? It seems a bit violent for my taste.” To which he placed the game on pause and turned to me and said, "Dad this is not real life ok? Duh.
Well it set me to wondering if violent video games have any negative effects on well centered kids. I tend to think not. But I can’t speak for every kid out there and I can only hope that my kid has his morals set by now at age ten.
I have often thought that maybe it was only coincidence that some of these kid shooters at schools and other places just happen to play these violent games, I mean these videos sell like hotcakes and a lot of kids have them.
Any opinions pro or con would be enlightening.
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FWIW, I’ve got a 13-year-old son who seems perfectly capable of understanding that “Mortal Kombat” on Playstation isn’t real.
I think kids that are stable to begin with won’t be adversely affected by video games, and kids that are not stable to begin with, will.
(We do check to be sure that he’s not playing the real gory M-Mature games. But those usually have scary supernatural elements, too.)
Hey, in the 1950’s my parents were being told that TV violence would make me grow up violent, and I don’t recall having robbed any banks lately…Wait, I’ll check.
“Honey, have I robbed any banks lately? Or burned down any orphanages?”
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She says no, but then she’s always *BEEN SUCH A LYING BITCH!!.. <<< sound of blows falling on unresisting human flesh >>> *
[note to the humor-impaired: no wives were harmed during the making of this post]
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
Saying video games inspire teen violence is no different than saying the bible is responsible for what happened in Waco with David Koresh. Some people in our society are disturbed. Probably a million people have played “Doom” across the planet, an infinitesimal amount of them shoot up their school and suddenly the game is the sole cause of blame? I could easily say the bible has claimed more lives if one considers the Crusades, the Inquisition, et cetera, but I won’t because some people will find an excuse or impetus to kill in anything.
I think most children are grounded enough to know what’s right and wrong, and what’s real and what’s not.
But there are children out there who don’t know what’s right and wrong, and there are children who don’t know what’s real and what’s not. And these children latch onto the violence of video games and emulate it.
Is it the fault of violent video games? Not at all; remove the video games, and they’ll hook up with something else- violent movies, violent TV shows, violent comic books, violent books, etc.
So either we accept this as part of life and try to identify and deal with these ‘off’ kids ASAP, or we censor everything. Quite frankly, I prefer the former option, and I’d like to think I’d prefer the former option even if I didn’t get such a marvelous rush from mowing down an entire parade in a stolen police car in Grand Theft Auto.
JMCJ
“Y’know, I would invite y’all to go feltch a dead goat, but that would be abuse of a perfectly good dead goat and an insult to all those who engage in that practice for fun.” -weirddave, set to maximum flame
BEWARE: The details in the story below are second-hand and kinda fuzzy.
My friend listened to NPR the other day, and a woman was interviewing a man who is running a military-style summer camp for teenage boys in England. She criticized the camp for teaching boys how to use guns, saying, “Aren’t you providing them with the tools they need to become killers?”
To which he replied, “Well, you have the tools you need to become a prostitute, but you’re not.” And that ended the interview.
Media violence and even hands-on training do not make balanced humans killers.
Now, you’re all forgetting that teens only began committing violent acts after computer games were invented. Before computer games, teenagers were all gentle, harmless creatures who cuddled rabbits and wrote haikus about butterflies.
Seriously, though, I think computer games have coincided with increasing visibility of teen violence, both real and electronic. This is totally unrelated to actual levels of teen violence. Back in the Golden Age of Harmless Adolescents, teenagers used get in fistfights behind the school. They used to set stray cats on fire, out behind the old warehouse. They used to throw rocks through the old widows windows after dark. Now they play Postal in the family room and their parents have made the startling discovery: primates, especially juvenile males, spend a lot of time posturing, play-fighting, and brandishing fists.
Adults like to amend the memories of their childhoods. If you and four other 11th-graders broke a 9th-grader’s nose that one time, you’ll remember how you and your buddies used to tease the younger kids, all in good fun. Nobody really got hurt, right? In contrast, in the average game of Quake, several hundred demons, flying snakes, and magical knights are maimed and killed. The horror!
I personally think that it’s quite possible that they teach violence/violent ways… I mean, if a young kid is playing a video game, and never before knew how to chop one’s head off and disembowel them with a butter knife-- chances are, now they know at least a little bit about how that works. Not that they’ll ever put that skill to use… and not that their own imagination couldn’t come up with how that is done… but still, why would a kid come up with that on his/her own? Maybe one kid in 1000 might conjure up that image unprovoked in their head… but with the video games, it’s probably more likely that maybe 300 out of 1000 will actually see it on a screen and have to accomplish that particular act to win or move on to the next level. (I’m just throwing out a number, no stats there)
I’m guess I’m just really mixed on it. But when my own child is old enough for those games, I don’t imagine that I will participate in those purchases or allow it to go on in this house. Not to say he won’t go over to a friend’s house and play, and that I won’t let him know I don’t approve. I still want him to have the message that I don’t like violence like that so it’ll be stuck in his head. And I certainly don’t want him running around bragging to his friends about how his mom lets him play mortal kombat or something… ugh.
Clearly violent people will be drawn toward violent images, games, etc. But do violent games cause people to become more violent?
It seems the most likely that violent individuals were either raised in a violent environment (along with real life violent people) or had a genetic disposition toward violence. I think if you raised 1,000 children with no exposure to any violence (group A), another 1,000 with some violent images (group B), and a third 1,000 where violence was the norm (group C), you’d find an increasing number of criminals from A to B to C. But I’m pretty sure you would still get criminals in group A, no matter how hard you tried.
I do think that if violence was eliminated from all types of mass media, there would be some decrease in violent crime, but it would likely be minimal, while the infringement on personal liberty would be horrendous. Who decides what images to censor? There’s a certain purple dinosaur whose very name can incite violent tendencies–should he be banned?
Still, for the sake of those impressionable individuals out there, I think those in authority in the media need to take a good, hard look at everything they release to the general public and ask, "What would an idiot do when they absorb this? Much of the garbage out there is sold simply because of the almighty dollar, and they are simply using freedom of expression as an excuse for giving up their good sense and common decency.
There will always be a few kooks who are a few sandwiches short of a picnic (they’ve been amongst us as long as we’ve recorded history) who will get out of some outward stimuli something other than the usual reaction.
It has been proven that some people will say that a rap song inspired them to kill someone, a movie gave them the idea to rape someone, pornography got someone interested in pedophilia, yadda, yadda, yadda…
But a few random nut cases - who would have probably reacted to the next thing down the pike had the particular movie/song/video game was not there - do not an overall “bad influence” make, IMHO.
I HAVE BEEN SMOKE-FREE FOR:
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This will only make it harder for him to resist his curiosity.
Sounds as if you’re more concerned about what others think of you as a parant than you are of what may psychologically harm your child.
As far as violent video games go, my boys (ages 10 & 12) have played them all. I have never once seen them assault another kid or each other. I have never been called into school because one of my kids beat the hell out of someone.
Could just be they’re storing it all up for another Columbine down the road, but I seriously doubt it.
“I mean, if a young kid is playing a video game, and never before knew how to chop one’s head off and disembowel them with a butter
knife-- chances are, now they know at least a little bit about how that works. Not that they’ll ever put that skill to use…”
Allow me to reassure you that despite the fact that I studied serial killers for three years in college, and, by default, some of the most awful ways humans can kill each other, I remain a vegetarian who freaks out when someone bleeds at all.
“and not that their own imagination couldn’t come up with how that is done… but still, why would a kid come up with that on his/her own?”
Because they are not right in the head, as my Grandma says. Why does it not occur to anyone to mention the possibility that some people are merely nutsy? It happens with other animals - ask anyone breeding dogs or horses. Why not humans? Please bear in mind - when Vlad the Impaler ran amuck, there was no TV, no VCR, no video games, hardly any books (I think).
It’s not the video games, it’s being young and dumb. I had video games growing up during the Atari era, and I never had the urge to kill someone with a ping-pong paddle. However, I had access to Vietnam War history books, and that did inspire me to make some Viet Cong booby traps.
I had one where I would hang a huge tree branch (minus the sharp stakes stiking out of it) about twenty feet in the air. It was camo’d nicely with all the other branches in the area . So you hit a trip wire and the branch falls on your head and most likely kills you. I lead my own brother toward the trap, he was younger and easier to intice and always around. I stopped him at the last minute…I guess I did know right from wrong. So we set it off with a stick instead, and yup, he would have surely been killed.
I toned down my traps after that and managed to keep from blowing myself up. Had I killed someone could/should we have blamed books (from the local library at that)?
We need to stop blaming and pointing and banning and passing legislation and start guiding and nurturing. If kids like the games so much then there should be video game clubs or something. Something that makes kids get out of the house and socialize; start building some real skills. Although alot of games enhance eye/hand coordination. Kids need to feel that they belong to something that means something to them at that point in their life…maybe then they wouldn’t all trip.
girl: “My what big balls you have!”
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I played all sorts of violent video games, and I (so far as I know) have yet to break any law much beyond jaywalking. I’ve loved first person shooters ever since Doom, and I’ve delighted in trying to mash my enemies into tiny pieces in the most horrific ways possible. But I have no urge to do the same to the guy who cuts in front of me in the lineup at the cafeteria. It’s not video games that makes a person violent, it’s who the person is and how they were raised. Sure, the game gives the person ideas, but they could have thought up something else just as terrible without the help, it just takes a little less effort this way. You could censor the games, and the movies, and the songs, but horrid stuff would still happen, just not in a manner that the average person can look at and recognize easily.
Besides, it shouldn’t be the job of the government or the game companies or anyone else to parent the kids in the world. It’s up to the parents to decide what’s to be seen and what’s not to, and nobody else.
I seem to recall, back when video games were still mighty new, this same topic being debated. Except the usual objects of blame for rising teen violence were Berzerk and Frenzy. Seems silly nowadays, doesn’t it?
I gotta side with the “stable kids are unaffected, unstable kids will find a catalyst” camp.
This “X causes our kids to be violent!” argument isn’t really new you know. In the 50’s it was “Reefer Madness” and a really funny (today) book called “Seduction of the Innocent” that blamed juvenile delinquency on comic books! In the eighties we had heavy metal music with satanic messages, the horribly Satanic (no offense Satan!) Dungeons & Dragons, and even Looney Tunes. (Anyone remember when they started cutting violent scenes from Looney Tunes cartoons? I’ve yet to see a headline that proclaimed “Murderer Kills by Dropping Anvil on Victims!”) In the nineties we were given the evil internet, gangsta rap, movies, and video games.
All the theories and many of their adherents have in common some basic assumptions:
Many of us are not thinking, reasoning beings with free will who are responsible for our actions, but rather a reactionary bundle of habits wholly imitative of very small sections of our environments.
Even if these entertainments affect only the very unbalanced miniscule minority of the populace, access to these entertainments should be severely curtailed, or better yet outlawed altogether. We must band together and protect you from yourself!
Alternative arguments abound, but are not given much media attention because they aren’t at all sensational.
As video game sales have exploded over the last ten years, the rate of violent crime has steadily dropped for both adults and children.
Although much was made of the fact that Harris and Kliebold (sp?) of Columbine infamy played Doom, that is hardly remarkable. Let me ask this: Would anyone expect known violent offenders to NOT enjoy violent entertainment of some sort? This hardly implies causation when one considers the millions upon millions of nonviolent Doom players.
What most of the supposed “causes” of violence mentioned above (excepting Looney Tunes) have in common is a generation gap. They are all entertainments enjoyed primarily by the younger generation, and not understood or outrighted hated by their parents. I find this somewhat telling.
I, for one, have never played any of these violent video games, I am not really interested in violent movies, I don’t listen to heavy metal and I’m not a drug addict. I do, however, have the capapcity to kill people, I believe. I have no problem envisioning myself killing some one–if they deserved it. In general, when angry, I can be a very violent person.
I am trying to work on this but no one seems to know what caused it. My parents are good parents. No abuse. Not overly strict. I had curfews. I made good grades in school. I could go on but what I am trying to say is that some people are just more violent (read as “crazy” if you like) than others. In my case, it most likely stems from a chemical problem, not an exterior source. So, they can take away all sources of adolescent entertainment, it won’t stop people who are naturally (or unnaturally) predisposed to violence.
I think this falls in the TMI category…
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