[xpost from r/WTF] This is what games teach pre-teens these days...

[–]TheDongerNeedsFood 16 points17 points18 points 14 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

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[–]bobandgeorge 0 points1 point2 points 14 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]oneiorosgrip 38 points39 points40 points 14 years ago (36 children) | Copy Link

Okay, really?

If the silly social network game "It Girl" - which if you take it seriously, is insulting to both sexes on a plethora of levels - teaches preteens to dump boys for better gifts, then what does Mafia Wars teach?

Ooh, or how about Vampire wars? There's also a game called Pot farm.

Point is, it's a dumb game. It doesn't teach anything. If it does, that's a dysfunction in parenting, not a problem with the game. Parents, don't let your kids take their life-shaping lessons from facebook games!

(Signs to watch for include acquisitions of illegal firearms, fast cars, and armored vehicles, growth of long, pointy fangs, excessive zombie hunting, exploration of mysterious caves in the living room, obsessive gardening, collections of strange jewelry, eggs, and animals, compulsive shopping and bar hopping, shallow and materialistic dating attitudes, the habit of throwing eggs at buildings full of pigs, and placing of scrabble chips all around the house in an effort to engage the family in a never-ending series of spelling and vocabulary challenges.)

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[–]oneiorosgrip 1 point2 points3 points 14 years ago (8 children) | Copy Link

It's actually a really boring and stupid game. It's fun for about a week. After that, it gets old fast. It's one of those games that shuts the player out of a lot of features or makes a lot of features hard to access if you don't spend real money and/or a ton of time on it.

That said, I have absolutely never faced the situations depicted in that game. Not once have I ever gone shopping and bought one of everything in the store, been to a party where all of the chicks look like variations on Barbie and the dudes like Ken, or been flirted with by every guy in the room because of my reputation.

Okay, well, maybe that last one. But that was not a good thing.

Anyway, the It Girl is as realistic as looney-toons from the 60s and 70s. Since we gen-x'ers did not all grow up to be insane, shotgun-firing, explosive-flinging, opera-singing weirdos (except me, and you don't want to hear that) I don't expect this generation of teens to grow up dumping their boyfriends after 3 days because a stupid facebook game said so. People don't base our selves on caricatures and parodies of life's little stereotypes.

As to the games for boys, there's a football game (haven't played it in a long time, so I can't remember the name) with stuff in it that feminists would probably find insulting. You buy cheerleaders. Football happens in real life. Ever have anyone try to sell you a cheerleader?

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[–]oneiorosgrip 0 points1 point2 points 14 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

Actually, on further thinking, I had to come back with this question: If - and I'm not sure this is where you were headed with your argument, but if - you are arguing that girls' behavior will change because they played this game, I see that as equal to arguing that games like this excuse behavior like that.

That is one reason why I so strongly disagree. There is no excuse for one dimensional, simplistic, shallow behavior. Media exposure happens from all angles. People are responsible, as we grow into adulthood, for sorting through the bullshit and figuring out that it's wrong to treat others as less than human regardless of what we see in video games or other entertainment media. We're responsible for that whether games and other entertainment media are violent or not, whether they are misandric and misogynistic or not, and whether they are realistic or not.

Exposure to bad concepts does not excuse bad behavior. Bad behavior should not be used to excuse censorship of disliked concepts, no matter how repugnant.

[–]kragshot 0 points1 point2 points 14 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

Exposure to bad concepts does not excuse bad behavior. Bad behavior should not be used to excuse censorship of disliked concepts, no matter how repugnant.

We are in complete and total agreement on that idea.

I have no truck with the idea of censorship on several grounds. But my concern is simply that exposure to concepts and ideas without any responsible moderation is very dangerous and can result in people acting in a harmful manner.

There is nothing wrong with letting your child play GTA...as long as you are responsible enough to discuss the real-life ramifications of such a fictional environment with your child. Most responsible parents will have such a discussion with their boy child in that light. But how many parents will have a similar discussion with their girl child regarding the kind of behavior that is encouraged in a game like "It Girl?"

Furthermore, real life reinforces the concept that criminal behavior is not condoned in our society. You can point to any given news media outlet for evidence that crime is punished in our society.

The unfortunate truth however is that there is hard evidence that gold-digging/status dating, is also condoned in our society and that behavior is reinforced. Our society is conditioned to excuse and/or rationalize the worst behavior when the person indulging in that behavior is a cis-gendered female (especially when it is a cis-gendered white female). Furthermore, the ratio of excusing/rationalization is directly proportional to the female's adherence to society's idea of attractiveness (the hotter the woman, the more she is likely to get away with). The further the woman is from the accepted median, the less she will get away with in the eyes of our society and lawmakers.

Case in point; Debra LaFave vs. Senorita Walker vs. Toni Woods. Three women; all teachers, all convicted for statutory rape of a minor male. What is the difference?

LaFave is white, blond, and a former pin-up girl. She was acquitted even though she was a repeat offender.

Walker is African American, brunette, and considered somewhat attractive by conventional standards. She's doing 20 years.

Woods is white and overweight, bordering on obese. Woods was convicted and sentenced to 20 years, despite the fact that her lawyer cited and provided evidence that she was suffering from the exact same medical/psychological condition that was used to acquit LaFave.

Forgive the digression, but the point that I am trying to establish is that games like "It Girl" do reinforce negative behavior but because they are targeted toward females, they just like many women themselves, are not held responsible for their influence and are often overlooked because socially, we are conditioned to excuse bad behavior in women. If women are not seen as able to behave badly, then anything that can be seen to influence them cannot be held responsible either.

[–]oneiorosgrip 1 point2 points3 points 14 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

I question the validity of the argument that games like It-girl are responsible for unacceptable behavior on the basis that the behavior existed prior to the game. I contend that it neither encourages or discourages behavior other than the act of frequent use of the computer. I think you are assuming a much greater level of reality to that game, and much greater level player psychological attachment to its mechanisms, than actually exists. Basically, you're reading way too much into a simple crappy game app.

The fact that there are inequalities in perception, in social treatment, in legal treatment, and other aspects of existence, has no bearing on whether playing that game will change the type of people girls or boys (when I had that app on my facebook, half of my it-girl connections were guys) players will become as adults.

The assertions I'm seeing here about influence related to this game are no different than the assertions I've been hearing over the last 30 years assigning the same kind of power to children's television programming, Dungeons and Dragons and other RPGs, video games, each new generation's brand of popular music, and and various styles of dance. None of them have ever panned out.

On a side note, by making the arguments you do, you become guilty of the same level and type of whining as that of women who attack the porn industry.

[–]oneiorosgrip -1 points0 points1 point 14 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]zyk0s[S] -4 points-3 points-2 points 14 years ago (11 children) | Copy Link

There's two concerns here.

One, video games have rating boards (ESRB in North America, PEGI in Europe). Why? Because people understood that games are just like any other type of entertainment, and can be enjoyed by a large population. Like other types of entertainment, games allow the creators to tell stories, pass messages, tackle life issues, and touch on subjects that are not appropriate for everyone. That's why some games are made for kids, others for adults. Violence in games will limit the rating: 13+ for implied, cartoonish and otherwise non-gory violence, 17+ for realistic, sometimes set in modern times violence, and 18+ for absolutely gruesome and quite extreme instances of it. Look at the rating for It Girl: 4+. That's right, the game is specifically targeted at pre-teens, especially when you look at the flashy colors and "prettiness" of it all. I'll take the opportunity here to mention one game that I was at first surprised received a 17+ rating: The Longest Journey. For those who haven't played it, it doesn't contain violence, doesn't contain sex, but at one point treats of mature themes of a sexual love triangle, boyfriend issues, career and life prospects and parental relationships in the life of young adults. They just talk about it, but the themes are mature enough to warrant the classification, because a teenage boy or girl might not be emotionally developed enough to understand what's going on. The point I'm making is: games are made for an audience, and mature textual elements are just as important as visual ones.

Two, it's completely faulty to equate fantasy role-playing and realistic role-playing. Let me illustrate: how would the world react to a game where boys are invited to hit their girlfriend? Quite badly I'm sure, yet purely objectively, you could argue that killing someone (even an enemy combatant) is morally more reprehensible than injuring a person. So why is the former unthinkable, yet the later is ok? Before we someone starts talking about "decline of morals", I'll offer another examples: children stories. Who has been told bedtime stories in which a witch burns kids alive in a stove, princes fall to their death trying to rescue a princess, and a mermaid not only sacrifices her ability to talk, bears excruciating pain when she walks, and arguably commits suicide? And we tell these stories to kids aged 5, yet they don't become apathetic, quite the contrary, these stories motivate and develop human emotions in kids. What's going on? It turns out we can demonstrate kids, even very young, can correctly separate reality from fiction, and fiction is a way to release anxiety, fears and desires without affecting the real world. If it wasn't, then we should be putting people who went to the theater to watch Saw behind bars. Look at It Girl: it's not rooted in fantasy, it's very clearly supposed to reflect the real word, in a way Mafia Wars doesn't (btw, the latter is rated 12+). If mafia wars was about bullying people in high school, it would be even less appropriate for younger audiences, and would be treated by the media as the game Bully was. So the second point I'm making is: games whose universe are rooted in fantasy can get away with more mature themes because it will have less impact on a younger minds who can distinguish between reality and fantasy.

tl;dr: read the stuff in bold.

[–]oneiorosgrip 0 points1 point2 points 14 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

I think the big issue here is your misconceptions about real life. It girl isn't based in real life any more than Mafia Wars is. It's ridiculous and insulting to think of that or any of the multitude of other games like it as a realistic portrayal the female teen/young adult experience.

And I'm not defending the game itself - it really is an insulting, stupid and boring game, and that's coming from a person who does not get bored and is not easily insulted. I'm attacking the idea that video games shape kids. They don't. They never have, and they aren't going to start now. When I was a kid there was this same kind of hullabaloo over our book-dice-and-paper Role play games like (but not limited to) Dungeons and Dragons, and later over LARPing.

Like the violence-in-cartoons hue and cry, the assertion of game-related youth corruption is a fallacy that blames parenting failures on influences which are at best, marginal. Also, Facebook's rules require members to be 13 or older, so technically no preteen should even see that game. But that takes me back to the parenting failure point again, so... there you go.

Now, if you wish to complain that the game is insulting, I'm happy to go with that. It's horribly insulting, and trashy. But influential? Nope.

[–]zyk0s[S] 0 points1 point2 points 14 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

It girl isn't based in real life any more than Mafia Wars is.

To a younger mind, yes it is. That's the whole point of the rating system.

I'm attacking the idea that video games shape kids. They don't. They never have, and they aren't going to start now.

It all depends on the game and how young the kids are. Are 12-year-olds playing Diablo going to turn violent? Doubtful. Are 5-year-olds playing Manhunt going to turn violent? Not necessarily, but that would be more probable.

Also, Facebook's rules require members to be 13 or older, so technically no preteen should even see that game.

We're talking about a 4+ rated game on the iOS App Store, where it would be accessible even with parental controls on because hey, the game is made for kids! I agree that parents are the last arbiters on what their kids play, and are the ones responsible if it goes wrong. But It Girl is clearly something that should not have the rating it has.

Now, if you wish to complain that the game is insulting, I'm happy to go with that.

It is insulting because an audience who would be mature enough to identify this message as a joke would find the rest of the game too childish. But that's not what's going on here.

[–]oneiorosgrip 0 points1 point2 points 14 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

To a younger mind, yes it is. That's the whole point of the rating system.

Not really. To your mind, it is. And the point of the rating system is to pacify parents who don't want to take responsibility for teaching their kids critical thinking skills and instilling them with a sense of morals, ethics and differentiation between playtime and real life. A side point of the ratings system is to allow parents and users avoid surprise, unwanted exposure to violence and nudity. IMO people have become way, way too dependent on the use of ratings systems in deciding what is or is not appropriate for their children. If you want to keep track of what your kids are doing, seeing, and experiencing, it helps to pay attention to them.

It all depends on the game and how young the kids are.

Again, we're back to parental responsibility. If you let your 5 year old play Manhunt, and your 5 year old adopts behaviors because of aspects of that game, that's your fault, not an indictment of the game.

We're talking about a 4+ rated game on the iOS App Store...

Here, you're contradicting yourself. You cite the game's rating as making it accessible to kids after arguing that the rating system exists for the purpose of protecting younger minds. Either it does, or it doesn't. But later in the same paragraph, you admit that

parents are the last arbiters on what their kids play, and are the ones responsible if it goes wrong.

Now, I'll agree that if we let people depend on a rating's system to determine what they let their kids play, 4+ is a wrong rating for that game. But again, that is not an indictment of the game. It's an indictment of the rating system - the same system you value enough to use as a supporting point in your argument that this simple, fleeting pastime would act as a behavioral influence on preteens. On a side note, the fact that the game is rated for 4-year-olds is not evidence of what effect it would have on 11-year-olds. It's not what you argued, but it's an important point.

For the record, at 4, my kids didn't get screen-time without my participation, partly because they were 4 and I didn't want them wrecking my computer, and partly because it's fun as hell to watch 4-year-olds respond to things that entertain them. (For that matter, it's fun to watch them do that now and two of them are adults.)

If parents are using phone and computer apps to avoid monitoring their kids, the problem is not with the apps. It's with the parents.

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Title	[xpost from r/WTF] This is what games teach pre-teens these days...
Author	zyk0s
Upvotes	87
Comments	50
Date	June 1, 2012 4:32 PM UTC (14 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/ufsvp/xpost_from_rwtf_this_is_what_games_teach_preteens/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/xpost-from-rwtf-this-is-what-games-teach-pre-teens.1020666 https://theredarchive.com/post/1020666

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