Thursday, August 5, 2010

An article that made me cringe

I am a big video game fan. There is something magical about entering a world and being able to be apart of a story. Over the years I have rescued princesses, stopped the world from being destroyed, defeated evil doctors, explored vast lands, and even raced a few cars at breakneck speeds. Through it all I have noticed how a game effects me. I wanted to deny this when I was in high school. "There is no way the game changes who I am or how I act!" I would retort.

It became obvious to me that this was not the truth. After racing games I would drive faster on the roads and take corners harder. After Grand Theft Auto I kept looking at cars as something take (press X) and even made a goal of learning how to hot wire a car. After shooting games my anxiety went through the roof and I became irritable and agitated towards minor transgressions of others. As psychological studies and tests have shown, I was changed by what I played.

It is with this maturity and understanding that I worry about small children playing Mature games. Every church I have been to elementary age children talk about how they have killed others, seen the blood, caused the damage. I pray that their parents rethink the choice of allowing Mature games in their house. I pray that we find other ways to have fun, especially at such an impressionable age. Then I read this article: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/110/1104146p1.html

IGN is one of my regular reads. I love the site and the information I get about upcoming games and movies. I find myself at odds with the game community every now and then when a "government wants to make it harder to get M games" article gets posted. This article goes beyond and calls for complete immersion into the emotional side of killing within games. It is already dangerous that we have desensitized ourselves to death so much in games and society.

The writer goes into detail of how he killed a chicken. As he describes this I wondered "Do I really think this would be a good thing to expose children to hundreds or thousands of times?" Here are his words and maybe you can tell me:

"I was wracked with predictable doubts of the justness of taking the life of an animal when there were other foods easily available. These doubts are irresolvable and they either prevent you from acting, or must be forced away into a drawer of silence."

To kill this chicken, he had to learn to force away his doubts and fears to do something unnecessary. I hope when it comes to violence among children, youth and adults, we never ever learn to force away doubts into a drawer of silence.