Shagrath

I'm glad you guys (the "prudes") are not my parents. I played Doom, MK and shit in junior high and I'm just fine. Hell, my grandmother babysat me when I was a kid (4-5 years old) at my uncle's place, and I'd run up to the bathroom and rummage through his Playboys and look at titties for hours. Did I become a sexual deviant? Of course not.

Kids are too sheltered these days. I'm never going to have any, but I believe they should be given some freedoms.

superfro

To be fair...how do we know?*

*Don't show me please.

pinata242

Who said they don't have freedoms? Oh, it's a talking point, gotcha.

There's a big difference in sheer graphical violence of games like Doom and games like Gears of War. Both had chainsaw kills, but not exactly the same.

I got Se7en on Blu-Ray for Christmas and my 10 year-old wants to watch it. I tell her she's never allowed to watch it. Half jokingly. Sure she'll see it eventually. I saw it in the theaters myself in 1995 (I was 17). Having seen it I can make that decision.

I let her watch Being John Malkovich on Netflix instant. It has serious adult sexuality themes, but I don't worry too much about that because, as you say, when I was a kid I was looking at Playboys and watching late night Showtime and Cinemax. If kids today want porn, it's far easier to get than it was for us. My kids don't have to know the terminal commands to make their modems connect silently when hooking up to a BBS for 4-color ascii porn on their Commodore 64.

We live in an age where we don't have just Mortal Kombat or Doom or whatever. We have the entire history of video games to share with our children. I'm not a prude because my kids enjoy Pac-Man and 'Splosion Man and Rock Band. They see me play Gears and Dead Rising and Dead Space and Red Dead Redemption and Borderlands and on and on and on. These things are not hidden away, I just let them experience things in context and not on their own. I'm there. I'm attentive. Not a prude.

foxdvd

My son is 11...I will not let him play GTA or Red Dead, or even a game like Bulletstorm, but we have had a blast with Left 4 Dead and I let him play MP of Black Ops, as long as he only chats with friends...call me a bad parent, but all three of my kids seem ok to me.

foxdvd

and his controller is clean...I actually checked after watching that video..LOL..

orangecrush

IMO MK=Dead Rising 2 in the same way that playboy=2 girls/one cup.

To be fair, my oldest is 6, so I could easily change my mind as he gets older, but I would rather he play through the countless great non-violent games before he starts in on the graphically violent ones. There isn’t really any good reason to rush to have him play games like Dead Space, Dead Rising, Fallout 3, etc. There will be plenty of time for him to enjoy blowing the head off a feral ghoul when he is a teenager.

Shagrath

If I had a kid and he wanted to play Dead Space or Dead Rising or Bulletstorm, he could as long as he was not like 5 years old. If he wanted to play Cakemania or Cooking Mama, then he could play that too.

To be fair, I don't have kids and don't ever want to have kids. So maybe that makes my opinion invalid. Anyways, back on topic.

Cheating is bad. Ban the kid's 360!

orangecrush

I don't really care what other people let their kids play. It only bothers me when they have no idea what their kids are playing.

Michael Corvin

to comparing Doom, Wolfenstein and Mortal Kombat to today's games.

superfro

Who needs context?! Mature=Mature right?

mattysemo247

Shit, my ten month old sits on my lap watching me play all of these M rated games as well. Guess I'm a bad parent too

I guess the good thing is she's a girl and doesn't seem to care much anyways

pinata242

Don't confuse mental inequality of gender with disinterest.

orangecrush

I would play Oblivion w/ my now one year old girl sleeping in my arms. Now, I don't play games with her around because she won't sit still and gets into our dvds and games. But back onto the subject at hand: yes, you are a bad parent.

kgrogers1979

It isn't really all that simple. You have to compare the era as well.

50 years ago, the movie Psycho was controversial with its violence and sexuality. Today that movie looks really tame.

20 years ago, Doom and Mortal Kombat were very controversial with Doom's satanic imagery and MK's realistic digitized characters. Today they look tame.

I bet that a few decades from now, games like Gears of War will be looking pretty tame compared to the new stuff of that era as well. People will be looking back on the PS3 and Xbox360 as primitive machines like we look back on the NES, SNES, and PS1 today.

superfro

And they'll be doing it from.....THE MOON!

Michael Corvin

True, I'll give you MK, but Doom and Wolfenstein were always very cartoony, even way back then.

fumanstan

I don't know about that, Mortal Kombat using motion captured actors made it pretty realistic for the time.

pinata242

Pit Fighter dulled me to that violence. It was a natural progression from bar fights to spinal columns.

PerryD

Wolfenstein and Doom created the FPS genre... it created the new ability to aim and shoot and kill anything that walked in your path. Definitely there were concerns and worries about desensitization of violence, and the threat of banning, free speech concerns, etc. It seems like yesterday, and now people don't remember those games being that violent?

Michael Corvin

That was my point. MK was realistic, the other two were not.

fumanstan

Oops, misread the "I'll give you MK" part. My bad.

Boba Fett

I'll agree too MK was realistically violent for the time. Doom and Wolfenstein 3D were always comically goofy; I remember being young and making this argument to my mother who stuck by her guns and said, "No."

We went off anyway at school and installed it on a computer (the lab monitors didn't have a clue how things worked) and played it for a good month straight when we were supposed to be working on a math project.

In hindsight my mother was right; there was no need for me to play that stuff when I was that age, and the games I did have at home, a lot of graphic adventures like Fate of Atlantis, Kings Quest VI, MYST, and Sim City were much more suitable and in all likelihood better for my mental development.

I''ll backpedal slightly and say not everyone who lets their pre-teen kids play M rated games are failures, provided their kid has a good grasp on reality and the game doesn't "become their life."

JohnnyDaBull

I didn't know 360 did that PS3 needs to do all of these glitchers like that. Take all their trophies away and put "Dick" under their username.

DaveyJoe

I always suspected that the players on X-Box Live were retarded.

TimeandTide

This. It's not so much the content that's worrisome, it's the time that these games take away from other meaningful pursuits. Many of my ninth grade students play Black Ops for hours every night in lieu of doing homework or reading. Not worried about how the games affect them emotionally or psychologically, but the game-playing is creating a generation of barely literate, reading-averse young men.