Blatherscythe said:
Plank of Wood said:
That child is a winner and needs to be thrown at any anti-games watchdog debates.
We must make a statue for him.
Damn rights, present the little man to Atkinson and Thompson and watch their idealogies cruble beneath his kind unviolent might!
Okay, I'm sorry but I can't stand this longer.
The reason why Atkinson and Thompson is so aggressive towards video-games isn't so much because kids play them and get exposed. It's the longer term effects that poor moral control and being exposed to violent media can bring in terms of development. Just because the child right now is playing nicely on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, doesn't mean he always will. He will grow up and he will experiment. He'll toy with moral limits. First it'll start with "the crusader, who goes out and kills people who are bad!", then it'll slowly dissolve into someone who doesn't mind shooting an innocent person and then killing cops.
Does this mean Atkinson and Thompson hold a point? No. Yes, video games can cause people to become murderers. However, does it mean video games are the only reason? God no. To put everything down to video games is horribly reductive and ignoring so many factors. There are two parts to someone breaking moral boundaries: The idea of how to do it, and the moral mechanism compromise. The idea of how to do it, yes it can come from games. However, it can come from so many other places as well: It can come from media (watching the news for instance), it can come from history and it can even come from military training. The idea of how to do it is hard to fix and would require complete blockage from all sources of information. This, for obvious reasons, is impractical.
The second part, the moral mechanism compromise, is slightly easier to fix. For a compromise to happen, requires either a very weak moral system (which can be due to poor childhood development, e.g. child abuse or bullying) or a strong motive to do it (e.g. poverty or revenge). However, usually, it's both in one way or another. This is what people should be concentrating on. It's easier to instil a strong enough moral system than to block all knowledge of crime from someone.
Anyway, sorry for that tangent. It's not the initial "I'm playing a game, now I get to be violent!" thing that the moral crusaders have a problem with, it's the development that may occur due to exposure to violence. The development from the child which is shown here to be filled with morals, into a grown adult that doesn't see anything morally wrong with rape and murder. However, as long the child grows up with no comprise of his moral mechanism, he'll be a happy citizen until the day he dies.