T said:
as if Australia's Imperial Mage clapped his hands and sent forth his drakes to call the wizards of the council to his dark tower
You should be the public face of games and gamers because you, sir, are awesome.
I agree. This was the only thing I'll be taking away from this, otherwise, well written piece. I will treasure the image in my mind.
That said, I'd wager it's true that kids brains are pretty easy to affect. As was mentioned up stream, you can condition kids to anything. So while I agree that video games does NOT lead to violence as a general statement I DO think that care should be taken by the parents as to how, when and how much their kids play.
But that's about as far as I'll go. The fact that kids needs to have rules set by their parents does not, in fact, mean that an 18+ rating is the undoing of moral fabric of society.
I'll take myself as en example: I am a gamer, I play role playing games (the pen and paper ones), I listen to metal, I drink, I smoke(though it seems that is the least of my vices according to this), I read comics, I read books, I watch movies and I even dance at times. By all right I should be doing life for multiple horrible murders and school shootings. But I'm not. And neither are most gamers, rpg'er, metal heads, drinkers or smokers. Not even dancers.
I was brought up well and I was playing under various degrees of supervision. I got context. So when I started on the more violent stuff I was "all grown up brain molding wise".
I got my first computer at 10, an Amiga 500 and have been a PC gamer since I was 15, in 1995 and have all three Playstations (though I'll be buggered if I'm not pissed at Sony at the time of writing. Damn expensive brick they've made 3 into.). I'm not new to gaming, and I remember the talk about Doom back in the day.
I also see a potential problem with the ready availability of games from a very young age these days. As I said, when I was a kid we didn't have games. Simply because there were none to be had. The NES was rare to the point that I only had one mate who had one. Another had a Commodore 64 and that was pretty spectacular back then. We simply didn't have the option of gaming until we were older.
Running the risk of being an old fart and yelling for the kids to get of my lawn, I think the parents these days have a huge responsibility to introduce their kids to gaming in a proper fashion. That goes for cell phones, Facebook and what not as well. No way in hell my kids are getting a cell before they are 15 or so. They should get a childhood without the insane need to be "on" all the time. Likewise their gaming, if they even want to play, will be heavily moderated.
Now get of my lawn!
I guess I ended up taking a few more points from the article. Well done Mr. Chalk. Now I will withdraw and venture back into the Zone to find Strelok.
Edit: also, well done on the picture, Mr. Chalk. Very apt if might comment.
