89 percent of parents are wrong about game violence

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After reading this article on Gamespot about a study that 89 percent of American parents believe videogame violence is a problem, I find my blood boiling at how ignorant adults can be.

It amazes me that people can take any study serious that only had 1, 056 parents with children under the age of 18 participating. This very small number can not and does not represent the combined concern of parents across a huge country like the US. That being said, it won’t matter the reasoning, this will be used against us in the future, just like many other bogus studies.

Violence in movies, videogames, music videos and whatever form of media in this world is not the “major” problem, parents are. If you are so absent from your child’s life that you cannot sensor the games they play or the movies they watch then it is your fault that they are exposed to something that might not be healthy for them as an individual. Age restrictions, however useless they might have become, are there for a reason. Personally I find the mild restrictions on sex and violence in some TV programs and movies a lot more disturbing than any so called “cartoon violence” in a videogame rated 13. But I guess I am wrong since videogames are evil and breed mass murderers. Saying that violence shouldn’t be tolerated in the first place is just a stupid statement. By this logic, we should have banned all those old school action movies a long time ago as well as the infinitely more graphic content published today. After all, violence in other forms of media has been present long before video games.

Common Sense Media and the Center for American Progress commissioned the study, which was performed by SurveyUSA on January 4 and January 5.

I have two sons, and both of them have seen the games my partner and I play at home, including Call of Duty and Battlefield 3 and they are the most non-violent kids I’ve seen. We monitor what we expose them to and what we allow them to play and quite frankly the toddler cartoons teaching them that bad manners are funny and cool have a worse effect on their behaviour than the Team Death Match or Hardcore mode in any First-Person-Shooter.

It’s a crying shame that society has not yet grown up enough, after decades of violence in media, to handle videogames in the same way as movies. All of a sudden videogames get the microscope treatment and the industry gets slammed by religious extremists and mindless sheep. The very sad part is that most parents won’t think for themselves and get suckered into some pointless hype about how bad videogame violence is.