If you love video games and follow video game politics closely, then you really should add “Bruce on Games” to your reading list. It’s the blog of Bruce Everiss, a UK-based video games industry guru. I always enjoy reading his essays, and I almost always find myself in agreement with him. I’m not sure, however, that I would just let any kid of any age play Grand Theft Auto as he suggested in this essay a few weeks ago, “Let the Kids Play GTA IV.” I think the hyper-violent stuff should be kept away from the really young kids until parents think they are ready for it. Regardless, I absolutely love this passage from that essay:
It is the job of parents to bring up their children, it is not the job of government. Unfortunately anyone can have a child any time they want, if they are physically capable. There is no intelligence test, no aptitude test and no means test. So all sorts of unsuitable people become parents. And governments use this as an excuse to force stupid legislation on the rest of us. We have nanny states that poke their noses into areas where they have no business and where things would work a lot better without them.
Amen, brother. I also found myself giving a second “amen” out loud to this passage:
Another aspect of this whole debate is that it is demeaning of children. Children are sentient, intelligent human beings. They know that when they are playing a game they are playing a game. They know it is not real life. In the 1950s legislators in America made a lot of noise about superhero comic books. They thought that children would think that they could fly and so throw themselves off tall buildings. We know now that this is absurd. So too are most of the concerns about violence in games.
Indeed. I’ve made similar comments here, here and here. Some day, after the first couple of generations of gamers come of age, we’ll all look back at this hysteria over video games as one of the more silly episodes in our cultural history, right on par with the moral panic over comic books, just like Everiss suggests.
Speaking of comics, I just bought my son and daughter their first Marvel and DC subscriptions and they are loving them. They are devouring every issue just like I did as a boy. (Spider Man is proving to be just as big of hit with the Thierer kids as he was for Dad!) I am convinced that comic books did more to inspire my love of reading and my imagination than anything else I touched as a child. And yet all the adults around me at the time belittled those comics for many of the same reasons parents and policymakers belittle video games today. It’s truly pathetic. Dare I suggest that some adults need to grow up? Taken in good measure, games and comics can be wonderful learning tools.
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