IGN is reporting on a story from The Guardian that a conference of schoolteachers in the great UK have determined that violent video games are to blame for the issues of small children.
Delegates at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers annual conference have a motion calling for “stringent” legislation against the “negative effects some computer games are having on the very Young”. There evidence is that kids are throwing themselves out of play car windows in slow motion and acting like blood is spurting from their bodies.
Oooo nooooo, kids acting like kids! Whatever are we going to do! It must be the games! It surely it has nothing to do with how little we teach kids! Or shrinking school budgets! Or growing classroom sizes! Or the widespread availability of drugs! Or the decrease in the age of kids drinking alcohol!
But wait….I thought pornography was the reason kids were bad? Or was it the sexualization of characters in media? No wait wait, wasn’t it Marilyn Manson a few years back? Or was it gangsta rap? Then you have those dirty hair metal bands and Nirvana. But you can’t forget about that violent movie The Terminator. And trench coats, they are clearly only for the disturbed. However nothing is as bad as fantasy books. Yes, books! And the color red! And witches! Burn them all!
See what I did there?
When I was a kid and the most advanced game was Sonic the Hedgehog we would fight in slow motion. But back then it was based on Power Rangers. Doing slow motion flips as we fought each other in crazy Power Ranger battles. I knew some kids who would play “WWF” and proceed to body slam each other in the grass. Then their was the time in my life each of my friends assumed an action hero, I was Jean Claude Van Damme (WHAT? Timecop was cool…right?). We would then act out our favorite scenes from action movies we watched when our parents weren’t around. Yes someone we all grew up without becoming homicidal maniacs and (to my knowledge) none of my childhood friends have ever fallen in with the law.
As long as recorded history has been around, kids have acted out the world around them. Then at some point you grow up and the world makes sense and you stop acting like a kid (usually). I don’t see 18 year olds who still think that they can hit a reset button in life. I’ve never met a gamer who thought that they were immortal or anything else unrealistic. But I have met avid readers who actually expect to have fairy tale style romances (*cough* Twilight fangirls *cough*). So really who’s more sane?
Games have simply replaced TV as the media of choice for the young. Just like TV replaced the radio and so on and so on. However last time I checked, terrorists and serial killers and women who drown their babies, abusive spouses, criminal organizations don’t play video games, so really where’s the hard empirical proof that games are truly corrupting the young and thus society.
http://www.epicslash.com/now-teachers-are-trying-to-blame-bad-kids-on-video-games/
(Former) Lead Moderator
