you can beat up pretty much anyone in video games
In Gta, you could hire a prostitute, have sex with her, kill her, and take your money back. That is sort of incidental, in a way. You can pretty much murder anyone and take anyone’s money. That’s kind of the point. Do anything, no consequences. It doesn’t specifically encourage you to be evil (the actual story is more of a noble gangster???) but it doesn’t stop you. Definitely not a kids game.
okay, so BG5150 was trolling there. no way he’s playing this game with his kid.
Yes. Though part of problem with video games is parents don’t always think about the fact their kid is spending 14 hours a day staring down the barrel of a gun and dropping homophobic slurs.
They just say, “here’s a gift certificate for video games have bye.”
why? as far as I know GTA is a kid’s game, as in, a lot of kids play it.
Grand theft auto was really controversial when it came out, because of that. I’m surprised ao fan doesn’t remember that.
I guess I’m old.
Not 6 year olds.
I mean, it’s supposed to be over 18s (at least in the UK, maybe you guys have different rules), but “kids” as in teenagers, yeah.
Again. This stuff is all pretty recent, age restricted games has been a thing for, what? 20 years?
We should be coming to the end of the cohort of parents who are ignorant of what’s possible in video games.
My five year old asked me for GTA a week ago, guess he heard someone talking about it. I laughed hysterically in his face.
I let my kids watch things with swear words and play games with violence (super smash, video games with boss levels, no blood, no depictions of death or crime) but they would not be allowed to play a game like that, ever. I don’t even let them make finger guns around me (I’m a cool mom, I know).
Yeah, we bought games where the kids could kill imaginary monsters, or face off with each other in a fair fight. We didn’t buy games like GTA.
But “ever” is a long time, and at some point they but their own games and get whatever they want. Neither of mine is into that kind of game. And both take a great deal of interest in the motel framework of games. I was playing “Spyro”, a game where you play a baby dragon, and i was commenting about something a little dicey the character does, and my son asked, “why do you think you are playing the good guy?” But i never tried to police their choices in the games they bought.
Well, my son plans on marrying me when he gets old enough, so I’ll always be in a position to police his decisions.
Kidding.
“Ever” was more figurative there, meaning I will never be enabling it. At some point they’ll be making their own money and making their own choices while still living in my home. I don’t plan to prohibit it then. But I won’t be buying it for them, or letting aunts/uncles buy it for them. My kids are also highly sensitive and fascinated by death - I don’t think it would be healthy for them.
What about street fighter and any variation that comes after that? I think that’s undoubtedly a kid’s game (I remember playing that at maybe 10)
The girls have massive tits, and I can only imagine they are wearing less and less as the graphics advance. There’s also a lot of blood and gore, things like decapitation is not uncommon.
But our generation grew up playing those type of games, I’m sure many parents my generation are fairly desensitized to blood and gore and nudity and extreme female body proportions and see no harm in letting their kids play similar games.
I can’t speak for other parents, but because I grew up around some stuff (cybersexing with strangers on the internet at 15, for example) is precisely why I won’t be letting my kids have access to the same things I did.
Assuming this is something you did (no need to confirm or deny), this goes back to the parenting paradox imo. Every kid feels like their parents are too controlling, and then they exert the same or more control over their own kids.
Same thing for corporal punishment.
I had a thread not long ago (I think on old AO) about Cardi B’s WAP and if parents would let their kids listen to that. Then I realized the stuff I listened to as a kid was way worse (most rap songs back then were basically about rape or extreme misogyny).
If you grew up around cybersexing with strangers, and playing games that killed, raped, robbed, destroyed, and turned out to be a decent human being, no reason to expect your kid to turn out a demon imo.
(not to mention tens of thousands of experiments are being done simultaneously in every household, I don’t think there’s been any conclusive evidence that nudity and violence in video games ever made anyone vile)
Same goes for pornography.
The latest Street Fighter is for 12 and over. It has no blood, gore or decapitation. That’s Mortal Kombat. Rated 18.
Video games are like any form of entertainment. They don’t do any harm, in fact, they’re mostly a positive experience. But they need to be appropriate for the age of the player.
i vaguely recall a controversial game like that, but it seems surprising that BG5150 would play this game with a 6 year old.
I grew up in chatrooms filled with predators. And the fact that I turned out a decent human being doesn’t mean this experience did not hugely influence my perception of my own worth, my ability to love myself, or my relationship with older men. Not causing insurmountable harm is not the benchmark for how I’m parenting my kids.
I dated several young men as a teenager who played very violent video games. They also found pain and suffering in real life to be funny. I’m sure I was drawn to a certain kind of damaged guy and there are a lot of things at play there, so I’m not saying video games made them that way. They probably sought out those games because of what they already felt. But I DO think that exposure helped desensitize them further.
There are differing opinions on the effects of violent video games. But at the end of the day, I’m not striving to raise kids who aren’t dissociated violent offenders, my goal is to raise highly empathetic, kind people. I don’t see where gore and role played violence fit into that. My kids may resent me for drawing this line in the sand, and I can live with that.
Oh, and my husband grew up in extreme poverty with uninvolved parents. He brought Mountain Dew to middle school football practice, even though it made him violently ill. He was allowed to make a lot of worse choices for himself, with worse outcomes. He turned out great. We still don’t give our kids Mountain Dew for hydration.
Hmm. I found my son browsing chat roulette one day. I forget how old he was… Old enough that we’d let the kids use the internet in places other than the den, where we could literally see the screen while we cooked. I just reminded him that he could always log off, and not to get sucked into anything that made him uncomfortable, nor to meet anyone in person without clearing it with his parents. I hope he didn’t encounter too many predators. He seems to have grown up okay, though.
My parents had no idea what I was doing online. Our computer was in our living room. I don’t think they thought they had to worry about their 14 year old being pressured into cybersex. Like, it just didn’t occur to them that that was a thing in the early aughts.
If you Google 90’s or early 2000’s chatroom predators and similar things, you figure out quickly that this experience was not unique to me.
1 Like
Gah, that’s awful. I’m really sorry that happened to you.
I feel old. That is, you aren’t much older than my kids. And my generation of parents was bombarded with messages about internet predators and our kids. That’s why i was a little worried when my son was playing with chat roulette. I’m surprised you’re parents weren’t more concerned.
In the early oughts my husband and I met a guy that he only knew from on line interactions, and we joked about the danger. We met at an outdoor cafe, and my husband had been collaborating with the guy on software development for years, so i don’t think it was at all risky, in actual fact. But that was before people trusted Uber drivers, we were all told that online=danger.
Your parents may have been naive, or thought that having the computer in the living room was good enough.
1 Like