Gameman

The fight over children’s use of violent video games is escalating as parents, retailers, legal scholars and elected officials debate proposals to restrict minors’ access to the most violent games.

Disputes in Florida, California, Washington state and Congress pit parents and lawmakers against merchants and civil libertarians. Parents and lawmakers say the games may prompt some teens to commit violence. Merchants and civil libertarians disagree, saying no link exists and such entertainment is a constitutionally protected form of free speech.

Both sides are watching a case in Washington state that some legal analysts predict will be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. The state passed a law last year restricting the sale of some violent games to minors. Video game manufacturers argued that the law violated the First Amendment’s free speech protection. A federal judge barred enforcement of the law until a hearing in June. Both sides have said that they will appeal if they lose. Proponents of government restrictions argue that the interactive nature of violent video games, in which players kill human targets over and over again, take them beyond the realm of movies and television. Courts so far have rejected that argument.

Meanwhile, some elected officials are proposing laws that would keep the most violent games from children: The City Council in North Miami, Fla., approved an ordinance requiring retailers to get written parental approval before selling or renting such games to anyone younger than 17, but the council delayed enforcement until key court cases are decided.

California state assemblyman Leland Yee, introduced a bill that would limit sales of the most violent video games by adding them to existing laws regulating the distribution of “harmful matter” to minors. As video games have supplanted simpler diversions, the industry has prospered, netting $6.9 billion in sales in 2002. An estimated 145 million Americans play video games, and adults buy nine of 10 games sold, according to industry statistics.

Those who favor laws restricting the sale or rental of violent videos say government should treat the games like alcohol or tobacco. They say retailers don’t always enforce a voluntary rating system and parents don’t know how violent some videos are. They say growing scientific evidence links playing violent video games to violent behavior.Opponents of such bans said that the industry polices itself and that most games are bought by parents or with their consent. “We don’t ever get complaints from parents that the rating system is broken,” said Bo Andersen, president of the Video Software Dealers Association.


USA Today/The Lafayette Daily Advertiser
http://www.theadvertiser.com/busines...A7F18541.shtml

__________________

XBS Jason

No offense anyone but the left wingers are at it again, once again denying the parent's responsibility for their children and their actions in an attempt to make government bigger. It's a pity.

__________________

Before you post, consider searching. And please, read the forum rules.
Looking for Video Game Cheats? Head over to Video Game Strategies.
Don't let me forget.

Viper 776

that's like parents sending their kids into r rated movies and then complaining about it. it makes no sense!. i've been playing video games since i was 5 and i'm extremely pacifistic (i've never been in a fight). the cases where kids did do something violent, they would have done it with or without video games.

__________________

Kurdt Kobain

Its's been said before but this is what i think:
A parent should play the game for themselves and judge wether their children can handle it. Not all 10 year olds are up to handleing a game like GTA III, but some are. If you think you can determine whats appropriate for every 6-12 year old then you are drastically wrong. Some kids are just more mature and emotonally stable and can handle a more broad ange of games. Most 10 year olds can handle a T rated game like DOA or Soul Calibur, but still some can't. Sorry, its long its just my 2 cents.

Gameman

Well said Kurdt Kobain!

Since I haven't before, let me say...

__________________

Kraven

__________________

Alienated

Ya, i havta say that the odds taht a video game is going to make you kill is small. however i do still quinch when i see a adult go and buy their 5 year old kid a violent game (i was at wallmart earlier today and a lady bought her son GTAVC because the little boy said you could kill gays! whats happening parents? are you all *Ive decided to censor this bad word* seriously! think. I usta do lan Tourns. at this guys house and his 3 yr. old bro. played halo sometimes with us. he is now uber corrupt and believes that if he kills you, you will spawn in your bedroom... oh dear.... this is bad... he is going to cause the next columbine..... ~ALIEN

__________________

Gameman

This, from the CBC...

To best experience, you should turn off the lights, close the drapes, lock the door. Then get ready to kill."

Such instructions aren't typical of a video game, but Manhunt isn't a typical game. Developed by Rockstar Games for the Playstation 2, this is one of the most darkly violent and disturbing games on the market. The above words appear on the opening screen, and things just get worse from there. To succeed at the game, players must suffocate enemies with plastic bags, stab them to death with glass shards and break necks barehanded. (And that's just the first stage of the game.)

Games like Manhunt – and other Rockstar atrocities including the Grand Theft Auto and Max Payne series – are the ones that get parents and academics so riled over video game violence. The most recent issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Adolescence highlights a slew of studies linking video game carnage to real life violence.

While there's much to learn from these studies, the idea that video games have the power to turn children into a bunch of pugnacious scrappers and serial killers is intuitively preposterous. Whatever correlations academics find between virtual and real aggressiveness, the fact is that a well-adjusted person could play violent video games all day every day and it would do nothing to disturb their serenity.

The reason should be obvious: most of us can tell the difference between a game and reality. Running over civilians in a video game is hilarious. In real life, I refuse even to break the speed limit.

That's well and good for the mentally stable, the counterargument goes, but what about impressionable kids and people on the edge? What about stepbrothers William and Joshua Buckner who in 2003 fired shotguns at random vehicles, later telling police they were inspired by similar scenes in Grand Theft Auto? What about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold who killed 15 people including themselves at Columbine high school in what appeared to be a chilling imitation of Doom, a first-person shooter game the two were known to play?

"I refuse to believe that a video game caused two right-headed kids to kill all those people," said Malcolm Kelly, editor of the National Post's video game page. "I think there would just have been another trigger. You only have to go back and realize there have always been crazy things that happen in the world."

Jack the Ripper, for instance, didn't play video games. Of course that argument only takes you so far - just because there are other causes of violence doesn't mean video games aren't a contributing factor. But there has been a strange tendency in the past 50 years to blame the corruption of young people on new forms of entertainment.

In 1954, psychologist Fredric Wertham's alarmist book Seduction of the Innocent argued that comic books were leading young men into a world of sex and violence. In the 1970s, a couple of suicides connected to the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons led to mainstream panic that the game drove people insane.

Video games take a particularly hard rap, partly because they're so immersive - you don't watch somebody getting beaten to death, "you" beat them to death - and partly because the technology allows for such realism: the sound of bones snapping, the fine spray of blood splashing the "camera," the look of grim satisfaction on the killer's face.

It's no surprise people find these scenes objectionable. It's no surprise critics want to protect young people from seeing them. But to leap from there to suggesting the games cause violence simply doesn't follow.

In preparation for writing this column, I spent a weekend shooting, beating and slashing my way through the worst of these games. I can say with certainty that video games don't teach you to kill; they teach you to push buttons in a proper sequence. I'm not being disingenuous. I have been mugged. I have been in car accidents. I've fired guns. None of these experiences bears any resemblance to playing a video game. Realism isn't the same as reality, and anyone who confuses the two owes their psychosis to something other than the technology.

In a recent New York Times article, Johnathan Dee describes the amoral quality of violent games. "Actions have consequences - even in [Grand Theft Auto], if you steal a car and the cops catch you, you have to go jail… but the consequences are inside the game itself; they have no application outside it…Everything is permitted."

He's correct that the consequences of an action are contained in the game, but he forgets that the action itself is also contained in the game. You're not facing the consequences of stealing a car, you're facing the consequences of playing a game in which your on-screen agent steals a car.

The critics get it right when they call on the industry and parents to take greater responsibility for what children see on the screen. As with comic books, television and movies, video games need to be rated (which they are), and those ratings enforced (which they often are not).

But to suggest that video games present some new, violent threat to society simply makes no sense. Teen violence is a real-world problem; it seems highly likely to me that its causes will also be found in the real world.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_barss/20040227.html

__________________

GSmiles

Um........ funny thing I thought somewhere in there I read that "you can kill gays" so I have read. Just kidding lol

__________________

Alienated

I said that, cause the little boy said it. and the little boys mommy is a dumb person. Violence and Discrimination at very young ages will affect you all the way through your life. you cant flat out deny it.

__________________