I agree with Paul and Howard, and the author of course. I’m 35 and far from the nerdy stereotype. I’m an avid gamer and I play just about every genre of game that exists. Recent next-generation games for Xbox 360 and PS3 are more like simulators and movies than traditional video games. Games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Mass Effect play just like movies, where your decisions affect the outcome of the story. You can choose to be good or bad and there are rewards and penalties associated with each choice.
Grand Theft Auto IV has been getting a lot of heat from various activist groups and governments, for no reason whatsoever. M.A.D.D. criticized the game for promoting drunk driving because you can take a friend to a bar and get drunk, then drive a car around a busy city. They should have actually played the game. They would have found that GTA IV sends a clear message about drunk driving, and it isn’t one of promotion. I drove drunk one time and one time only. After exiting a bar, your character stumbles around and falls down, taking health damage. If you get into the drivers seat of a car, the cops are instantly chasing you. It’s impossible to drive in a straight line, and vision is fuzzy so all you can do is crash. I was busted by the cops, so now I call a cab after getting drunk.
Any politician wishing to write a law concerning video games should have to demonstrate a proficiency with many modern games. I can tell by their language that they have never played, nor seen the games they are criticizing and wishing to legislate against. If there is a problem with video games, it’s the amount of underage kids playing rated M games. I encounter these kids online quite frequently. They are common enough to have earned the nickname, “squeakers” because of their high-pitched voices. I have seen various retailers refuse to sell rated M games to underage kids, so the real problem lies with parents. I went to the midnight release of Halo 3, an M rated game, and I saw about a dozen teen and pre-teen kids with their parents. Other parents were talking about how their kids were sleeping and they came out to pick it up for them. The next day, some of those parents let their kids stay home from school to play the rated M game. Currently, Xbox Live offers no way to report underage play, even though thousands of gamers have asked for such a feature on their forums and via email and phone calls. We don’t like playing mature games with kids. They just don’t belong there and we have no way to stop them. We shouldn’t have to stop them, because their parents should never have bought them the game in the first place.
Video games are a great way to have fun and relieve stress. There’s nothing better after a few hours in a traffic jam than coming home and blowing up a traffic jam in a video game. I am far less likely to become overly stressed or violent in that traffic jam knowing I will soon be home blowing up traffic, or aliens, or terrorists, or whatever I want to blow up.
There are plenty of family-friendly games out there and parents need to play with their kids. They need to play the games, so they can know what’s appropriate for their kids. Until then, most parents will continue to ignore the ESRB rating on each game, while griping about violence at the same time. That kind of ignorance opens the door for activists and legislators to force their agendas upon a massive industry. If they push too much, violent games will go underground but they will never disappear. A video games is just software, after all.
