Today I took a trip to Best Buy to get my camera fixed, but while I was waiting I stumbled into the video games section. Almost every video game most prominently featured in the section had an extremely vulgar illustration on the cover or a suggestive title that implied violent play. I couldn’t help but think of Media Studies class and our discussion on childhood delinquency. I thought of my experience with video games, limited mostly to Nintendo 64 –so old school.
As an only child who received ample amounts of attention, growing up I was never encouraged, or allowed for that matter, to play any type of shooting game or even own a water gun. When I went to other kid’s houses, I got the chance to play James Bond 007 that was ever-so-popular in my youth. I thought it was great, but also fairly violent. Thinking back to this childhood memory, I can draw a few different conclusions as a result. First, I would like to address the concept of parental control and their ability to censor what their children are doing. Second, the so-called violence of James Bond compared to 2010 games where gamer objective is to create town chaos by stealing cars, killing civilians or actually engage in bloody warefare.
In class last Wednesday there became a pretty heated discussion around parental supervision, in particular regarding the weight of responsibility on the parents of the killers in the James Bulgar case. Complete censorship of children to these images is nearly impossible, for example merely browsing around Best Buy and glancing at the covers to these video games. The important aspect is to teach children why doing this type of activity is wrong and as a result hope they will not want to purchase this type of game. Personally I do not understand why video games have been able to rise to this level of graphic imagery. Leading to my second point. The video game industry has evolved creating more and more violent elements as time passes. I was sorely mistaken thinking a simple shooting game was violent compared to some of the screen shots seen below in popular video games.
Call of Duty Screen Shot
Popular Violent Video Games
Cover of Grand Theft Auto
Screen Shot from Player's Perspective
First Comment!
ReplyDeleteNice Post Alex. This is a very controversial topic. It is interesting to look at this argument from the other side. Each video game console has a target market. Currently the Wii is most child/family friendly. The Xbox, which features a wide variety of violent titles is popular among the older crowd including teens, college students and adults. The violent games are targeted at the older crowd, and are even rated that way. Grand Theft Auto is rated M, meaning it is not intended to be played by persons under the age of 17. I agree with you, that it is also the parents responsibility. But it is unfair to expect video game developers to create all of their games, to be kid friendly, especially when there are gamers of all ages. I also want to point out that the reason why violent titles are produced so frequently is because thats what has the highest demand. If these titles were not making a profit, they would not have sequels and expansions.