Nathaniel Grey said:
We're all guilty of this to degree:
Kid #1 - "Yo ma, can I get that Assassin's creed black flag for my birthday."
Mom #1 - "Sure you can Grey."
She is none the wiser. Aye, no harm no foul, right? Now, this is a topic involving the bashing of video games in the media, so if your tired of that talk leave now...
If you are still here, let us get started. I've been playing M-rated games even before I knew there was an M rating. Some games have had a lasting effect on me while others have not. Any time there is a tie between a shooting, or a statistics report on violent videogames with children my instinctual gut thought is "How did he get a copy of that?" 10 year olds are playing Call of Duty... 10 year olds are playing Call of Duty. How do I know? I play with them. You've probably played with them. Most older people don't like playing with them, but, and this is a big butt, I can't say that they shouldn't have the game. Because at one point in time I was them. It would be hypocritical for me to tell them not to play Call of Duty when I was 8 years old and playing Halo. I've have become increasingly aggravated at the fact that we keep pointing the blame the video game instead of the parent. (Side note: This situation will fix itself as the gaming community continues to grow and we, if we already have not, become the parents. But as of now I'm annoyed by the current situation.) I don't care about your opinion about video games in the media or whether the blame should fall on the parents. But if you have played a game you technically weren't supposed to be playing.
1. How did you get that game?
2. Did that game leave any negative impressions on you?
3. When, and if, you become the parent how will you handle the situation?
The problem is that the ratings system isn't used properly. Simply put it's become easier for a company to simply slap an "M" rating on a game that at best deserves a "T" rating to avoid having to fight for it's release. When a company wants to release a "T" rated game they often try to sanitize if of everything remotely offensive and produces something like an "E" rating.
The result is that this leads a lot of parents buying games for their kids to not respect the ratings, since they don't expect anything really bad to be in an "M" rated title. Thus when a game that really deserves that rating comes along they get upset. The same can to a lesser extent be applied to "T" rated titles which people tend to look at a lot less.
There is also a misunderstanding of what mature content consists of and how it warps youth. In general running around doing immature thungs with intense portrayals of it (lots of gore and ultraviolence for example) isn't generally a big deal. On the other hand games that sit down and lecture your kids on the nobility of the criminal lifestyle and how it's wrong to conform to society... a problem we already have with certain subcultures (the whole "git rich or die trying" attitude). Ditto for games that take a more intellectual bent on justifying sociopathic behavior. There is little concern that little Timmy is going to go around with an assault rifle and shoot people (where would he get one anyway?) not understanding the differences between games and reality (well except perhaps by idiots) school shootings that take place tend to have other factors involved despite the tendency for the media to focus on video gaming (when really it's more unusual for a kid to not play video games nowadays). Rather there is more concern that Timmy might say decide to kick some kid down a stairwell and then pummel him when he's down in a surprise attack in response to say a perceived slight. Think at some point how many video games talk about honor and respect for example, and the needs to preserve it, oftentimes with violence, and even at the cost of turning respect to fear. Criminals, warrior-heroes, samurai, and other characters in fantasy espouse very similar beliefs as a way of in part justifying their behavior and the action that takes place in a game. Kids can, and are, very much influenced by this kind of thing. Schools are a lot more violent than they used to be, and stop and think about how many fights we've seen, or even attacks on faculty, because some kid felt the guy he attacked "stepped up to him" and he needed to do something violent to make a point, even worse is the amount of kids that can get behind things like this. On one hand you have adults trying to teach kids to be responsible, back down, trust the authorities, and resolve problems other ways, on the other hand you have media intended for a mature audience giving them exactly the opposite message when they haven't even become functioning parts of society yet to seriously look at alternative morality systems presented in a fantastic context. The point here is that when looking at say a "Grand Theft Auto" game it's not the cartoonishly psychopathic behavior involved in being able to go on a hooker murdering rampage and kill dozens or hundreds of keystone cops magically spawning to stop you, it's when most of the protagonists are being "good guys" or "anti-heroes" that things get touchy. On a lot of levels the more stupidly evil the protagonist in GTA is the less I'm concerned about kids playing it. I consider games like 4 and San Andreas where they are selling the characters as being somewhat justified anti-heroes and glorifying aspects of a criminal lifestyle (San Andreas in particular) where you really see the problem and a need to keep kids away from that side of things.
At any rate, a big part of my point is that the "M" rating doesn't mean a whole lot the way the current system is working. It should also be noted that for the most part violence, even fairly extreme violence, and sexuality (making out, showing bear breasts, etc...) are all allowed within the T / PG rating. Indeed some "self aware" movies like "Scream" even make jokes about it (Sydney for example told her boyfriend she wouldn't have sex, but said she'd give him the PG version and flashed her tits if I remember). As a general rule a war game with some dude running around shooting people with a gun is not in any way "mature" in of itself, even if the violence is portrayed realistically (since you can see real, non-digitized, people acting out being shot, complete with blood and everything... on TV no less, without even needing an "R" rating). When it comes down to sex, some girl with her tits bouncing around isn't "M" rated either, nor is kissing, or even some guy tied down being whipped (where people might not even be showing their junk). Indeed, again, you can find pretty much all of that on cable, even if not all shows push the envelope that far. "Stargate SG-1" even famously got away with having full frontal nudity in it's pilot (Daniel's wife, Shari or whatever, when she was taken by the Gou'ld for implantation in one of the scenes). It got a little attention for about 10 minutes but since it didn't technically violate anything despite what a lot of people thought, no crime was committed, they later edited some of that out, but the original scene as it first aired in all of it's "glory" is still on the DVD copies (at least the ones I have) and again... no real adult/mature rating attached to the series. So really, it's almost not worth fighting about.
