o I was picking up the laundry the other night, because I had agreed to pick up the laundry. The Mrs.-to-be washed it, threw it in the dryer, and used drier sheets - the kind that leave a nice, fresh scent in my boxers that I never fully appreciate.
It's a communal apartment laundry room, so it's miserable. There's that dank, fluorescent glow to the room, drier lint swept across the floor like tumble weeds, old socks laying around and the smell of burnt lint in the air. These rooms just suck.
As I'm sorting through my fiance's 12 varieties of socks (we talked on this one - it's cool) I notice pamphlets strewn across a table on the other side of the room. They were obviously religious pamphlets. With a name like "Awake!", they'd either have to be either religious sect materials or self-empowerment, real estate, money scheme propaganda B.S.. When I read one of them raising the question, "stem cells: has science gone too far?" I knew they were religious.
Here's the one that really got me. "Electronic Games: is there a dark side?" I love that journalistic questioning tone that's poised like it's supposed to be objective… sort of like what Fox News does ("do House Democrats drink the blood of sacrificed virgins?").
First off, what the hell is with that kid? It ain't the games, I can tell you that. Something's seriously wrong with your child if he/she comes home from school looking like that. Prison inmates during their first year don't look like that. The kid's got a thousand-yard stare; the last thing he needs is Halo.
Second, he's clearly a wuss. The only games I'm familiar with involve lots of guns, demons and big friggin' katana blades, all of which dance in harmony over 5 hour grueling deathmatches that leave all players emotionally numb. I don't think this picture accurately represents the full extent of violence that Xbox brings to the table. I mean, a sedated, anorexic dog? A snow tubing duck? A purple fish that, with the absence of its teeth, could star in its own Nick Jr show?
Behind the concern
Actually, this is a Jehovah's Witnesses magazine. OK, being fair, I'll agree with anyone who thinks kids are exposed to a little too much. Games went from jumping on walking mushrooms to sniping FBI agents for drug money in under 20 years. Also being fair, Jehovah's Witnesses seem to display more spiritual conviction than half-arsed "sorta" Catholics like myself (sidenote: happy Ash Wednesday by the way!).
Honestly though, I'm not going to pretend to be a father for your child or someone else's child. Every kid's different, and what sets one kid to waste valuable study time may set another to… drop bowling balls off an overpass.
But, when it comes to video games, you gotta' admit things have changed. It used to be games were limited to how violent they could be by how crappy the graphics were back then. I've never proposed to stab a Russian solider, but in Rush'n Attack, I was stabbing them left and right and didn't even realize it… because the guy would fall, blink and disappear. No blood. It was like a different kind of physics - video game physics - where touching an enemy soldier registered a digital sound and took away health. That wasn't real life.
Nowadays, in GTA (not by any fluke the most popular series for PS2), I'm capping bad guys in the head, running over mobsters, blowing up triad punks, robbing stores - and lots of blood. The physics are getting more real, and it's starting to become an outlet for real tensions. Now I feel I'm well adjusted, but that may not apply to every screaming 8 year old boy that wants the same game his friend Jimmy has.
I think this is the part where soft music plays and Kyle starts with, "you know, I think I learned something today…" This falls to parenting. Once again, if you're throwing these distractions at your kid, you need to pay attention to them. I don't think it gets any simpler than that. Watch your children, dammit. You can't scapegoat video games when you don't know what you're kid's doing from 4:30p to 9:00p.
And, if your kid looks like this one, he'll make a fine cop some day. Or college advisor. It'll work out.
o I was picking up the laundry the other night, because I had agreed to pick up the laundry. The Mrs.-to-be washed it, threw it in the dryer, and used drier sheets - the kind that leave a nice, fresh scent in my boxers that I never fully appreciate.
Behind the concern