It's fun living in a country whose origins are rooted in Puritanistic, prudish values. Something is refreshing about a group of people so uptight who, as soon as you see a nipple in a video game, are up in arms about it ruining the moral fabric of society. Something is relaxing in knowing the infrastructure of a country can be turned on its ear so easily.
Why do movies and televison get away with so much more nudity and sex-related content? One wonders if moral crusaders have never caught their kid accidentally watching an HBO t.v. series (Hung, a new series I love watching, has scenes bordering on porn at times). I guess the article on sex in video games we read for the week http://www.whattheyplay.com/features/sex-in-video-games/?page=1 is more or less right in people still, for some stubborn reason, believe video games are just a toy at this point. God forbid a parent read a rating label and actually make a judgment call for once.
I work at a game retailer, and it bothers me not that kids get violent video games, but how parents will not buy a game for them with sexual content. I blatantly want to ask a parent sometimes, "Would you rather your kid have sex at 12, or shoot someone in the face?" Because that's where I feel the thought process is going.
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I don't really think I'd prefer my kid do either, honestly. But playing video games will not, in my opinion, influence him/her in either of those directions. There is more sexual content in television commercials (beer ads?) than in most video games. Why? Because in commercials, it's pretty much just accepted as "the way things are." As for video games, it's a relatively new medium, so the watchdog groups are trying to prevent it from getting too carried away.
ReplyDeletePerhaps movies and television "get away with it" more because each is a more established medium. As mentioned in class, I wonder if this is just evidence of the growing pains of the medium of videogames. As Kim stated, movies and television (and comics, too) used to have much stricter codes of decorum. I wonder what the future holds for videogames as these watchdog groups fall by the wayside...
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