Sir, you offend me. I live in a beautiful home with my wife, and we just happen to like living more than 3 feet from our neighbor. I have served my country with more pride you can’t even imagine, I have watched men die in combat that wanted nothing more than to make their country a safer place. The fact that you categorized me as a mother fucking terrorist offends me in the worst way.
Wii pistols at dawn?
“Unabomber-style shack” is a quote from the Simpsons, so I am pretty confident Bryan Ekers was not categorizing you as a terrorist (or even comparing you to one). It was a joke. Let’s move on.
Once again, who are you to judge my age? Just because your collecting your social security and popping your Viagra so you can keep it hard doesn’t mean you know something about anything. I put this post on here to have a discussion, not for you to attack me.
And your calling me “Dude”? Seriously?
Even though he pissed me off to the point of violence, you really made me laugh right then.
I am bowing out of this discussion, because it has just turned into an attack on me when I just wanted to read subject matter opinions. For the most part that’s what I got, it’s just a few pricks that ruin it for the whole tree.
You’re being awfully defensive. All he said was that your OP seemed out of place. To the extent that there was an attack, it was on your post, not you.
You put this in Great Debates. There will be opposition to your position. Try not to take it too personally.
In your future posts in this thread, please leave out the comments about Social Security and Viagra. If you think you are being insulted, report the post and let the moderators deal with it- and don’t insult anyone else. Comments about posts are allowed, but insult of other posters don’t belong in this forum.
You thought I was attacking you? Well, I apologize, because that wasn’t my intent.
But you have to realize that your childhood experiences weren’t just outside the norm for people your age, they were outside the norm for people my age (again, I’m 42, so I’m not that much older than you), they were outside the norm for people your parents age, and they were outside the norm for people my parents age (my Dad was born in 1940).
My Grandmother, who is 93, tells stories of growing up on a dirt farm in North Dakota during the depression. Back then hardscrabble rural life was typical. But when she was 16 she got a job working at the only hotel in the town near her farm, and promised herself she’d never live on a farm again.
I’m just a little suprised by your reaction to kids playing videogames inside, because these complaints have been going on for literally longer than you’ve been alive. And you’re complaining about “kids” who are only 10 years younger than you. Complaining about the “videogame generation” is pretty odd, because you’re part of the videogame generation. I’m part of the videogame generation, and I’m 42. Although the difference is that I’m old enough to remember when videogames and computers were brand new, whereas kids your age don’t.
Anyway, 28 years old seems a bit young for curmugeonly complaints about kids today. And the reason it’s weird is that nothing has changed between when you grew up and today. It’s perfectly valid for you to complain that kids should go outside and work and contribute and so on, but it’s not like kids who were teenagers in the 90s were all working on farms and suddenly in 2000 they stopped.
Are these really that different?
In addition, OP is a new poster. In a community that has had continual posters from 2000 (or earlier), anyone coming out with an OP like that and posting in GD is going to be questioned. For all we know, you could be the standard Internet Tough Guy.
Look, I’m your age. Being born in 1982 doesn’t make you the video game generation (that would be the guys born a decade earlier and can actually remember the Video Game Crash of 1987.) And it’s hard to say what will happen when all of the post-boomer generations will do when we’re in total control–hell, just look at the Boomers in 1968 vs 1988 vs 2008. And hey, kids can be dumb. I agree, just because you kick ass at Modern Warfare 2 doesn’t mean you know anything about actually being a soldier, no more than playing Aces Over the Pacific qualified me to fly a P-51 (or any other aircraft.) But hey, I grew up in a moderately sized city (population 500,000 to 1,000,000), had a computer to play on since I was four or so (true IBM 286 with various upgrades and newer computers ever since), never had a console until my brother and I bought ourselves a Playstation in 1997, read a lot of books, loved to go watch minor league baseball, was in Boy Scouts, didn’t have a job (even part-time) until I was 18 and about to graduate from high school so I could get some spending money for college, got out of college in 4 years, got a Master’s degree, and am now a professional organic chemist. And hell, sometimes I feel like having a “kids today” rant, just as sometimes I wish the Boomers would shut up and get out of the way. I don’t think that having it fairly easy in life growing up has made me an unproductive, apathetic sponge. It does make me wonder how the hell my parents pulled it off for my brother and me, considering what the economic and political climate looks like these days.
Look, we’re going to have a lot of problems and fix a lot of things. Hey, if you know what you want to do, I’m happy for you. But as others have said, I’d say that your experiences in the 1990s were pretty abnormal.
I understand what your saying and apologize for my comment earlier, I think the root of my discussion has long been lost or never even got in the first place. And my childhood was not the only one in my area. Most kids that I grew up with, had the same lifestyle. And let me go over it again, it was not a bad childhood by any means. I think you are all taking it like I was a slave, and would get whipped if I didn’t produce my keep. lol, It wasn’t that way. But I did work a lot and hard. I was taught self reliance. I did play a lot, but when it was time to do my chores, there was no complaining about it. I grew up with my grandparents, my mother only came around sometimes on the weekends. My Pap grew up in the great depression and was VERY, VERY strict with his rules and I sometimes HATED him for it, but now am starting to turn into him. A high amount of pride was put into me at a early age, and is sometimes hard for me to swallow.
Now, that being said.
The whole point of this topic, the whole reason I started talking about this.
The video game has advanced SO much in the last few years that it is starting to take over the perception of reality in young kids that don’t have a complete grasp of what reality is in the first place.
When I use the term VGG I mean the xbox/playstation generation. (The Xbox didn’t come out until I was 19 years old.) Kids that played the early video games didn’t incorporate the game with real life.
My question is. How is the VGG going to affect our civilization when it has fully taken over the country?
Some say it will be positive due to the mathematics in modern day games.
Here, though, you begin with a faulty assumption. That’s why we didn’t move on and directly address your question as you wished, because we’re not starting on common ground. There’s no evidence that anyone but the already disturbed have any trouble separating fact from fiction. Some folks may prefer the fictional world more and want to ignore reality, sure, but that’s not quite the same thing.
As I said earlier, this is not a new “insight”. People literally have been saying that about video games since before you were born. And there’s still no evidence at all that it’s now even marginally less false than it was in 1980. Can children not tell the difference between a well written book and reality? What about a well-shot movie? How about a play - hey, they’ve only been around for thousands of years.
In short, it looks to me like you’re assuming way too much here.
Well, they used to complain that kids that grew up watching TV were unable to distinguish between TV and real life. And there was a lot of worry over what would happen when the “TV Generation” took over. Bob Dole back in 1996 was the last WWII veteran who will ever run for the presidency, and back when Clinton was elected in 1992 there was a lot of handwringing about the Baby Boomers finally taking over. Well, it’s pretty entrenched now. If you were 18 in 1945, old enough to serve in the tail end of WWII, you were born in 1927, and would now be 83 years old in 2010.
So pretty soon the WWII generation will all be dead, and aside from a few holdout octogenarians they’re all retired now anyway, and so we’re in the hands of the kids, the kids who don’t know what suffering and discipline is like because they didn’t go through the depression and WWII, and who grew up watching TV and listening to rock and roll and spending their pocket money on whatever they liked instead of contributing it to the family budget.
That’s what the “generation gap” was all about, and the “generation gap” sounds old-fashioned nowadays because it wasn’t a permanent fixture of American society, it was caused by the transformation of American society from the struggles of the 30s and 40s to the prosperity of the 50s.
I guess it’s weird because I play computer games, and I help teach my 7 and 4 year old daughters how to play as well. So we now have second generation videogamers, like how I grew up as a second generation TV watcher. Maybe that’s the difference–you see computer games as something kids do that old people don’t do. Yet I’m an “old person” who grew up with video games, I had a computer and video game consoles literally before you were born. And I have friends my age who have teenage children (please don’t get your girlfriend pregnant when you’re in college, trust me on this kids).
How many kids were in your graduation class? I had 63, 17 of them are already doing state time for drugs and whatnot. I do not live in a large city, you said you live in an area of 100,000 people. I could not imagine living near that many people. I did not grow up on “little house on the prairie”. I grew up in a farming community. Our way of life is not abnormal to us. It’s not really that way now, most farms have shut down. Most of the farmers have sub divided their properties and there are more homes and camps on them. I still have horses but that’s it. The Amish life is abnormal to me, high speed city life is abnormal to me too, so it must be a circle of abnormalities for every lifestyle.
We just got high speed internet in 2007. There is talk of getting digital cable soon. We can get satellite tv but I’d have to cut down a bunch of trees to get it. We have no cell service (which I like and dislike). Half of our roads are still dirt, the other half only taken care of like every 5 years.
I only say that because I have seen it. Like I said before. When I was in Iraq I got a letter from a kid wanting to know how my “slight of Hand” was in combat. Another kid telling me that he could shoot my personal weapon because he shoots one all the time in COD4 and has all this stuff done to it. In reality he would have to idea how to handle a real weapon.
Going 'round again: that just proves they have no clue about the reality of combat/shooting. It doesn’t mean they can’t tell the difference. And kids are always bragging about that kind of stuff. Video games or not.
I would just like to see any data that shows a corresponding shift in the amount of sports kids play or the amount of extracurricular activities kids do that proves that they don’t want to go outside or whine all the time about being hurt when they play.
Many kids today are bigger, faster and stronger then generations before. High school athletics are as popular as they have ever been. There has been a shift in the last generations away from baseball the “pastime” and towards football and MMA, sports that are much more physical. The video game generation grew up at the same time as the extreme sport generation. It seems to me Shawn white didn’t make it to the top of the snowboarding world playing a video game (though you can be him in a video game).
I think you are just making all your assumptions based on what you see in the media, your own bias, and a small sample of poorly parented kids.
I remember reading how, back in Vietnam, the seargants would have to train the new recruits not to act like John Wayne. They’d see John Wayne pull off stunts in the movies, and the kids figured they’d emulate him. Except that tended to get the new recruit killed, and often his buddies too. So back in the 60s kids figured they knew what war was like–they’d grown up seeing war in the movies and on TV. Turns out they were wrong.
So yeah, a lot of drill seargants are going to have to scream at a lot of recruits that this ain’t Call of Duty, and your momma ain’t here to pay your Xbox Live bill. This is not a new thing.
So, for the sake of my very idle curiousity, how much did those tree climbing skills you picked up growing up out of doors as a small child help when you enlisted in the military?
I’m really a little perplexed here. You’re coming in with some very anecdotal evidence about a couple of kids you talked to and complain about how it’s the fault of video games, then come back and say that a quarter of your graduating class (who, presumably, grew up similarly to you, being from the same area with the same services etc.) are now doing time for drug abuse, etc. That’s…not a compelling argument for how the hard life you lived breeds good character.
So… I guess my question for you is… why do you think videogames are responsible for the clueless kid you met? So he says he knows how to use a gun. So what? Did you give him an unloaded weapon and tell him to load it and see how long that delusion lasts? Wouldn’t be the first time some kid boasted to try to impress people.