Shielding your children from violence doesn’t make it go away, when do they start to realize that.
You have to learn them how to deal with it, if you don’t and they get trown in to the big game of life they’ll be confronted with it anyway and they basicly become birds for the cat.(Belgium saying)

These stupid parents and politicians who want to get rid of this have probably never played video games and then they bitch about violence in them and then probably go home and watch the sopranos or resevoir dogs and kill bill.
F* off.

no. no. and finally… no.

“they think nothing of the implications of a elementary-school-age child ruthlessly gunning down enemy soldiers in CoD.”

ruthlessly? why such a vulgar description for placing my left hand on the keyboard and my right hand on the mouse while looking at a CRT/LCD screen with colored pixels and 3D polygons? ruthlessly… i love it! great attempt!

do you think it is fair that those parents who have tuned-out are causing our government (which includes, me and you through taxes and lack of attention on IMPORTANT issues) HUGE amounts of money and time in order to parent your children? no offense here, but if you DO think it is fair to steal money from taxpayers then i think it is YOU who should lose their freedoms and not me.

furthermore, if i CHOOSE to TEACH my children the differences between MEDIA and REAL LIFE (i would like to swerve from the topic slightly to point out my use of the word “media” instead of video games. why, Gary? well, because this discussion goes way beyond video games. games of the VIDEO persuasion are NOT THE ONLY GAMES THAT AFFECT people.) then i don’t see how YOU or ANYONE ELSE should have ANY say in that what-so-ever.

ya know, i was thinking about this over the weekend: this topic is so beneath us as human beings. there are WAY better efforts to put your hearts into besides whether or not some 13 year old is enjoying his or her FREE TIME playing an interactive story in the comfort of their own home or in the company of friends…

i happened to catch “Varsity Blues” over the weekend. yeah yeah, i know. whatever. now that movie was about the children and the love of the pure game of football vs. the institution of Football and how it played into every part of life in that small town. stores selling alcohol to MINORS, lack of legal discipline for star players, the whole “you own this town” mentality, drug abuse, grade fixing, children being HELD BACK a grade or two so they’d have an ADVANTAGE in the sport…

these were all events that took place with the acceptance of the local adult population or actually forced upon the children against their will (or they were mentally abused until coerced into performing the act) by those parents and adults.

sure, this was a movie. and thankfully i am able to tell the difference between that and reality. however, this was a HOLLYWOOD movie, so it’s not like they came up with these ideas on their own. no, they were influenced from situations in REAL LIFE. so, maybe it doesn’t happen as bad as in “Varsity Blues”, but it DOES happen.

so, do YOU think it is okay for coaches and parents and law enforcement around the country to act like that over a game? why not ban football for kids under 18?

i am dead f’n serious here. if YOU want to ban something i enjoy, OR make it harder for people to play or make a career out of, OR even try to tell me how to raise my kids, then I will find fault in something else that other people say is A-Okay. (read my other post above)

the point of this whole discussion is STOP TELLING ME what to do! just STOP. go do your own thing and i’ll do mine. if we happen to cross paths in that time, i will do my best to not interrupt yours and i hope you treat me with the same respect. if not, well, that is a different issue that you can’t avoid or prepare for.

just like football, video games are both a release from normal everyday life, an inspiration for creativity, intelligence, and artistry, they are a way to show off natural or disciplined skills, a great motivator and reward system, an outlet for behavior outside of work or other social environs, and a heck of a lot of fun.

and, just like football, video games are a potential for anger, violence, abuse, and other “evils”.

my argument in this is so that people will STOP pinpointing video games as the ONLY negative influence in a kid’s life. it is NOT, and i wish people would recognize that.

sports, religion, government, glee club, a date, a classroom, the sidewalk, dinner, the subway… these are ALL areas that have potential to both enlighten and influence. we need to stop focusing on the negative.

if not, then we should outlaw organized religion…

THE number one KILLER of humans of all time by a WIDE margin.

should we outlaw that?

please, please, please recognize these things before you pigeonhole video games as some devil-made evil.

and don’t forget to PICK UP YOUR TRASH !!

Also, there’s been made a lot of studies concerning the effect of violent video games. Of course kids are more desensitized to graphic violence, that is an inevitable side-effect of the technological development the last 50-100 years or so (movies, tv, internet, video games, etc), but that doesn’t mean that kids have more violent tendencies now. Actually, today, the risk of kids getting into crime and violence is a lot bigger if they do not play video games, because playing video games is a part of being socially accepted amongst people your same age.

I know several guys at work who take great pride in the fact that their very young boys excel at PC-based shooters right along side them. They think nothing of the implications of a elementary-school-age child ruthlessly gunning down enemy soldiers in Call of Duty.

I suspect that there’s no proof of violent video games having long-term effects on teenagers because nobody has figured out how – or bothered – try to get a metric on this. There’s no denying that kids today are far more desensitized to graphic violence than any generation before. Videogames must play a part in that.

The game is just a game, and with that it means you can try it out; to live “play/pretend” to be something you aren’t, in this case a thug killing people etc, which is taboo and something forbidden in real life.

In my opinion it’s good that theese games excist, and there is a age limit set on the game, if parents let their young kids play this, kids that yet don’t know right from wrong, then that’s their own stupid mistake.

As with the military thing, in sweden we were shown pictures/movies of people hurt in action, and told this is you if you don’t pull the trigger.
No need to play, just show the concequenses of what happens if you don’t. Will make the hardest pacifict pull the trigger after seeing that.

If somebody does act up, and I’m sure that somebody will, they may even claim that the game gave them the idea, but I think you’ll find that even without the game they would have done something just as bad. Yes, that’s a mutilated sentence.