Wow, Xemu, tell me your secret!!! My almost 3 year old demands that he play “all by self” – and that goes for Halo, BF 1942, PGR, and MotoGP. He would play all day long if he had an audience!
Wow, letting a 3-year-old play BF1942?
That could engender an interesting debate, methinks… :)
“Daddy! I make Jap soldiers die bloody death! Wheeeee!”*
[size=2]Edit: Okay, there’s no blood. So you’re just killing people cleanly. I guess THAT won’t desensitize a 3-year-old to violence. My apologies.[/size]
My oldest daughter (7) likes to play Nerf Arena Blast*, but her sisters (5 & 3) haven’t started with any games beyond educational & kid games.
NAB’s a decent shooter, and does not have explicit gore & violence. She does have a tendency to say she “killed” opponents, but her mother and I are pretty strict about correcting her to say “tagged” or “knocked out.” She really enjoys FPS and is quickly mastering the mouse/keyboard, though I’m stumped for what other shooters to try next. We’ve played some Buzzy Bots (which is supported by Akimbot for offline play) but it is too hard for her. I’m trying to find some other co-op games we could play together, but all the ones I have considered (like Diablo II) are probably too intense or scary for her.
All of the girls like to watch me play Ecco the Dolphin, and there are a few other DC games they like to watch or try to play (Sega Swirl, Mr. Driller).
I get most of my gaming time in after they go to bed. I may slip a bit on weekends, but generally that’s the case.
- She’s watching me type this, and wants everyone to know that she has made it further in the single-player tournament than I have, and is near the championship.
Is there blood in BF1942? I didn’t think so because they got a Teen rating on the game. I don’t remember seeing any when I shoot another player. If there is, it definiately isn’t in the same league as QIII or UT2003.
I understand your concern and I also wonder how games, TV, movies, and the like influence types of behavior. I think back to when I was a kid and the assortment of weapons, military toys and such that I had and look at how I turned out:
*I wouldn’t let a real gun in my house.
*I don’t have uncontrollable violent outbursts or want to kill anyone.
*I still like to play soldier (BF1942, Hidden & Dangerous) :D
If Lando’s kid seems OK otherwise, let him play BF1942**.
-DavidCPA
**Unless he plays online and is able to continuously snipe me. That would make me cry :(
-DavidCPA
Nope, no EA game will have blood in it, because EA games have to have no higher than a Teen rating, otherwise Walmart won’t carry them.
This was a problem in bf1942 for a while, because there was no visual feedback telling you whether you were hitting your target or not. It was corrected in the first or second patch, by making the crosshairs flash red if you hit.
David,
I’m not one of those peaceniks who’s going to not let my kid have toy guns or army men. And while my wife would, I think, be happy if he never saw a video game, I don’t see the harm in age-appropriate games and educational software.
And I’m relatively sure that even if I let him play BF1942 – or Kingpin, for that matter – he’s not likely to turn into the next Columbine maniac.
BUT – I do think kids get desensitized to violence and murder if overexposed to it before they can process it and rationally analyze what’s going on. What most kids see on TV is even worse, certainly. But to let a three-year-old play a game where you’re weilding a gun and shooting at people who are shooting at you – people who fall to the ground and die, or blow up – isn’t the same as a couple of kids playing “cops and robbers” or “new-world-invaders and native americans,” where the special effects are in the imagination and Bobby from down the street respawns in about 20 seconds. Maybe letting a three-year-old play BF1942 teaches them the difference between fantasy killing and reality – it could even be better for them. But that’s not a chance I’d take.
Which is not, or should not be, an argument in favor of video games, but rather an argument against TV.
Tell me again what’s the difference in playing cowboys and indians and cops and robbers and playing BF1942? (Respawn times aside – it might be plus or minus 5 seconds) I’d think pretending to shoot a living, breathing child, who falls down and plays dead would be MUCH worse than shooting a small pixelated representation of a human being on a computer monitor. Then again, I could be wrong.
Also, my son may be able to work a mouse, but I doubt he could tell you who is Japanese and who is German – much less what those terms mean. (The French are another story - they of course would be “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”)
Hopefully my son will not learn from Project Gotham Racing that going 110 mph in to a wall is ok, you just might have to slam it into reverse if you get stuck.
I’m still not sure what role desensitization to violence plays or how it factors in – I’m a huge gamer, I love war movies, and I played tons of “armymen” as a child, and it still makes my blood run cold to see pictures of dead Iraqis in the trenchs.
Interesting debate though, either way.
What is the rationale with gore being rated higher, by the way? I mean, M because of blood, but T without it? You still kill it, which I think should be seen as more serious than the amount of blood. I’d be a lot more comfortable if they had automatic M if you killed people, instead of this (seeming) hypocricy where you can kill people as long as it’s “clean”.
It’s not hypocrisy. The “no blood” approach stems from the dramatic usage of the past, in which the emphasis was on the moral implications involved in killing. Stories had plots and morals (as in “the moral of the story”), and if a death was displayed for the audience, it wasn’t in order to titillate, but rather to illustrate or emphasize the moral horror of the act (or the justice of it, or whatever). NOT the horror of being confronted with the material aspect of it, which is all modern audiences can conceive–this is why they go ga-ga over shallow, bloody fare like Saving Private Ryan–but rather the horror of the act as it affected the moral characters of the people involved. It’s not necessary to display blood in order for the audience to understand that a person has just been killed, and the message that a person had just been killed was all that needed to be communicated when the emphasis was on the moral questions surrounding the death.
In modern times, however, as trust and belief in Christ has declined and the new paganism/barbarism has set in, moral reasoning and moral teaching has come to be ignored and suppressed. Instead, there is an implicit message in all popular art, brutally enforced by the p.c. police at work in all the relevant industries, that there is no hope for any of us. There is no purpose to life. All there is is whatever we can grab for ourselves in this life, and when we’re gone, well, that’s the end (which kind of begs the question, “why bother?” but that’s a matter for another day). Given a view like that, death then becomes a devouring monster to be feared and hated, and the depiction of death necessarily takes on a nightmarish cast mirroring its author’s own inner turmoil. Since there is no longer any objective ground of morality, any moral questions that seem to be raised by a movie or a book are simply idle noodlings–things to be oohed and aahed over for their supposed profundity, but with no lasting consequence for anyone, as there is no particular ground for making them binding on anyone. This is why stories have degenerated from what were once high-minded, serious teaching endeavors into the pointless, sensual extravaganzas we have today.
Which brings us 'round to video games. Video games clearly belong to this latter, modernist category of popular “entertainment.” They very clearly teach the same message being taught by our cultural terroristas and have no pretensions whatsoever to any objective moral code or the investigation/illustration of serious moral teachings. Death in the video game exists simply to titillate, in exactly the same way that the fights in the Roman arenas existed to titillate, and in exactly the same way that the battles in the Matrix movies exist to titillate. Consequently, there is a kind of hypocrisy in not displaying the blood that Anders so desperately wants, if one’s purpose is simply to surrender to the forces of disintegration and immorality entirely. On the other hand, for those who are fighting tooth and nail to retain some semblance of Christian sanity in the world, the reason for it should now be clear. The absence of blood, and the insistence on it by a large segment of the American population (and those few corporations who still seek to serve them), is a relic of the past indeed–one small victory in a war that is now all but lost in the rapidly declining West–but not one devoid of meaning or consequence.
And here I thought I was being stuffy and conservative by saying that every game that had killing in it should be rated M.
We’re all doomed.
The ‘declining’ rates of American churchgoing could be explained, by the way, that it was never has high as was claimed in the past in the first place.
http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/csrpl/RIN%20Vol.1No.2/Church_lies_polling.htm
I guess I’m really the odd one out here. I discourage my 3 year old son from playing any computer games. The best I’ll do is open up notepad and enlarge the fonts so that he can type in as many words as he wants. The main reason I’m not into giving him carte blanche is because I feel that the play is too passive. I’d prefer him to use his imagination and creativity at this age- building things with blocks, pushing trains around and playing with play doh. He’ll probably get into it later but not through my urging.
I also often worry that he could have autistic tendencies (As I often think that I have) and I don’t want to start any addictive habits with him. Or maybe I just don’t want to share my PRECIOUS…
:wink:
Agreed. Hell, I never had a console when growing up. No NES, no Sega, no nothing. I had legos dammit. We got a Tandy 1000 at one point. Still needed imagination to play games on that dammit, and I do think that the lack of simple fighting and shooting games helped.
So hell yeah, if I was a parent, like hell I would let my kids play video games until well after they have taken to spending all their nights at their friends houses so they can play Zelda X on their Microsoft Playstation.