Sticking Up For Games

I just recieved an email from a coworker in my tech department to all of our schools in our county. It was an email about an internet safety newsletter from a cirriculum organization called iSafe. Dig Deeper is a series that highlights issues that are related to teachers and kids in an educational enviornment. Some of the highlights were about things that are dangerous to kids today, like MySpace usage and cyberbullying. But one stuck out a bit to me.

Gaming continues to be a huge impact on adolescent behavior. Mods (changing the actual program in a game) are increasingly popular with violent acts like killing a policeman gaining the user top points in the game.

This upset me so much, that I decided to write back to my co-worker.

I'm a huge gamer. I consider myself to have a pretty good understanding of gaming culture and technology. I don't know if there is more about this bullet than what you sent, but it isn't very accurate.

No independent study has ever shown that gaming has any "huge" impact on kids. And to converse the point, games have shown more improvements in kids abilities to learning than not. It's just become more of a point that games grab more of kids attention. The mods that they are talking about are pretty few and far between. Of course the most recently popularized is the Grand Theft Auto mod for the game characters having sex. Something that is comletely natural for people. Shooting cops, on the other hand, is sadly already in the game mod free, though it affects the outcome by very little (and only points that don't affect the outcome or even the course of the game), hardly "top points". And killing cops only makes the game harder, usually resulting in a virtually fun escapade that results in death and loss of money.

I do not know how anyone who plays the game could come away with the idea that this behavior is acceptable and even possible in real life. They may talk about how fun or cool itwas, but the blame that is so quick to fall on kids who misbehave AND play games is a more of a scapegoat excuse than a really valid point. Columbine High School was a good example of that. They tried to put partial blame on the violent video games, when in reality it was largely a product of bullying and social cliques that exist in highschools and middleschools, not the violent, unrealistic video games they two boys played.

I'm so afraid that stereo typing games brings an equal stereotype to gamers. It only makes it more of a socially unacceptable hobby when someone has a predetermined idea of what a "gamer" is. Only when gaming is completely understood by the people in our lives that make choices over our laws and practices will we be able to get rid of this stigma.

I know I've wasted a lot of time writing this to you, but it's a hobby I would consider my favorite and I hate to see this type of thing fly around carelessly without any real proof behind it. I know you have a lot of pull with the teachers when it comes to technology and maybe that's why I did.

I wish that I had also included a link to IGN's new article on violence in gaming. The article actually further pushes the idea that violent games do have an affect (not huge) on anyone who plays them, something I do not deny, but also mentions other forms of media like television, which is said to be twice as affecting as gaming as well as the role that parents need to play in their childrens lives.