This seems more like 'gorilla advertising.' Remember how when Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace then it was the lead story on Fox New every other day? He is kissing the game after all, seems happy.

Of course an 11 year old should not be playing that game. Like an 11 year old doesn't belong in an NC17 movie, in my opinion.

But it's also up to the parents. I wouldn't raise my kid like that, but then my brother took his, I thought too young son, to see Jurassic Park when it came out.

Ultimately, its the choice of the parents.

i agree with this

         Kids playing M-rated games? That is such a new thing I  can't believe it! Just like teenagers smoking! It's not like this has been happening since the 80s and 90s! NO!

I have always loved Rockstar. They have no regrets about putting out the games that they do, and rightfully so the media always ends up criticizing them when things like this happen.

Would I get my 11 year old son GTAV? No, I most certainly would not. Sure enough, I was playing Halo: Combat Evolved when I was 11 years old, and I'm not a raging psychopath (most of the time), but there's varying levels of mature content in M rated games. GTA is definitely on the more extreme side. But hey....they have to decide for themselves if that's cool for their kid.

Nothing changed

Me and my friends obviously played RPGs and stuff too but we had the chance to play games like Quake,Doom,Resident Evil,GTA and other things we "shouldn't" play.
The only difference from those days is the internet and how easy and cheap you can get your hands on those "forbidden" things.
Everyone these days has the chance to post stuff on there,share the news or play online.
Gaming got a lot more common and is a big part of the world.It turned casual in many ways.
If we or rather everyone had the chance to get cheap hardware/consoles with Online Services and CoD we would probably have experienced the same and maybe even would have turned into these kids we hate so much.
I for myself had the luck to have internet and a PC to play FPS online back then and if i would have acted like the 0815 CoD Kid on XboxLive i would have been banned from every server available.

All this changed - Things you couldn't have or do cause of limitations aren't a problem anymore.
You can do whatever the f... you wanna do.

Usually I'm also of the opinion that ratings shouldn't necessarily be taken very stricktly, most kids are able to put these things into perspective and it should be up to the parents whether or not something is okay.

Obviously these parents thought so, but I agree with the OP that giving a GTA game to an 11-year-old takes it too far. The game is extreme, and definitely worse than giving an 11-year-old something like a Halo game or worse than what we were playing when we were 11-year-olds ourselves (even if you were playing M-rated games). Might as well give this kid porn too while they're at it. I hope those parents are responsible.

I can understand what the OP is trying to say and I share some of his sentiments. There are of course, rare instances when an unsupervised kid enacts the things he has done in the game and does it in real life. We have all seen/read this happen but if the kid gets proper parental supervision when playing the game. Then maybe its not all so bad.

Jurassic Park wasn't bad, I saw it very young as well and it was PG 13, but I was kept away from rated R films a lot as a child. Seeing GTA is like letting your child see Pain and Gain, which everyone was funny as hell but turned out to be a dark story.

There was a kid like that in my childhood neighborhood who could play all the mature games. He had MK, Duke Nukem (on PC) and Quake, but seeing games like that opened up a whole new world for me in videogames because my parents paid attention to the ratings. That and if I wanted to buy a game she had to be there, so I was fucked either way. When my parents also picked us up from his house they also found porn. Yeah...a couple of us werent allowed there any longer.