we live in times where we are ruled by fear, terrorism and market prices. so, it is little surprise that most news today is bad news and that no news is often good news. it is also perhaps little surprise then, that much of the world has labeled video games as a source of vital concern to the well being of their children. there are those who feel that video games in all forms are nothing more than devices used to twist the minds of their children and corrupt them into little devils. video games are at best in their eyes, time wasters.perhaps there is a little truth in parents' stance against video games. some games are definitely not for children under a certain age as the themes tackled and shown by a game may not be suitable for them or maybe of a much more mature topic like politics; a realm possibly even dirtier than label given to video games. games like 'Mortal Kombat' and 'Custer's Revenge' are early progenitors of mature and overtly adult material in what are supposedly "children's" games. at the time these games were released, the ESRB or Entertainment Software Rating Board was not yet formed or any form of advisory panel for that matter. the ESRB was formed as a response to the increasingly large number of games that included what was deemed as mature content or things that are inappropriate for children.
one would think that the formation of such a board would have led to less children receiving games of questionable or mature content; that parents upon seeing the labels in stark black and white would think twice about buying 'Grand Theft Auto V' for 6 year old child. well, in an alternate reality this might be true but in our world, it isn't. most gamers today will agree, that in games that have been rated for people above a specific age, there still are children well below that age who still manage to get their little paws on them; never mind that they have microphones as well. a clear example would be games such as "Team Fortress 2" is rated M. M means mature, which means only people above the age of 17 or are 17 should be allowed to buy the game and play it. yet, somehow on Youtube there exist videos showing children no older than 12 entering servers in the game and causing much grief to other players, in a rather ironical way.
the issue therefore, doesn't seem to lie so much with the failings of the ESRB system but the consumers who are either illiterate or are unwilling to even glimpse at what it is they are buying. parents in general appear to not care what it is they are buying for their children. in their mind, any game is suitable for children, because it is a game. they think of this as much in the same way that any and all cartoons are silly little things that only children will like and enjoy. a slightly less negligent view is that the children pressure their own parents into buying a game and in an effort to get the child to shut up, parents give in. however, the former issue of parents not looking at the game they are buying seems to be of greater concern as well as the root problem in my opinion.
it is ironically, very childish of American parents and family associations to blame both the ESRB services and the video game industry for their failings as parents. little wonder then, that with each generation humans appear to become stupider in general. this is a culture that appears to have begun sometime in the eighties where movies started to branch out into the action hero genre, where blood was spilled by the tanker load, explosions lit the night skies and sex was something that was no longer confined to porn magazines and dirty little tapes. the pattern appears to be that as a part of the entertainment industry matures and delves into other risque areas of the human psyche, parents' become increasingly unable or unwilling to inspect what it is their children are up to. another great example would be of rap music in the nineties, when music started to become rather crass and shallow, with lyrics transforming from beautiful rhythms to a rather graphic description of how large that lady's buttocks are and how the "singer" would like to "tap it". parents were furious on a global scale but decided not to intervene in any way, opting instead to throw ire and flak at the music industry.
it is perhaps time to look at how an actual parent should function. a parent should take an interest in whatever it is their child is doing. a parent must be aware of what their child is up to. if the child is accessing pornography, the parent must have the guts to talk of the birds and the bees or whatever is applicable for this generation. if we take a step into the world of gamers, we find that it is perhaps rather strangely, polluted by what are supposedly pure children of a certain age group. going back to the videos of underage gamers on Youtube, we see this is a sort of pandemic that nobody has actually thought of addressing. in most cases, underage gamers are a source of unnecessary stress to online multiplayer gamers. gamers prefer the camaraderie of a person or persons within his or her age group, a person who is mature enough to understand the finer aspects of a certain game as opposed to the irascible shouting, screaming, crying and more shocking to parents of said underage child gamer, cursing.
to take a slight detour, the very fact that underage gamers curse is a rather glaring fact that parenting has not been done all that well. the fact the child has access to a microphone shows that the child is to a degree, spoiled by what is possibly very disposable income. in short, the parents do not care much for their child. the child becomes a burden to feed, dress and house until said burden goes away to become a burden to someone else. rather neatly this brings us to the fact that parents who are irresponsible should not even be given the ability to "care" for their child.
perhaps rather fittingly, most people will choose to ignore family associations these days as they do nothing but reinforce the stupidity of our age. they become clubs where supposedly aggrieved parents come together in mutual suffrage and vent it upon the industry they unwittingly aid anyway. i bemoan the fact that the ESRB system, despite working well enough for most of the part fails simply because the people the system is supposed to inform are not listening to it. maybe the biggest red flag that parents aren't doing their work in the first place is the fact that we needed an ESRB system anyway.
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