Do You Know What Video Game Your Kid Is Playing?
VIDEOGAME
New London Day
Margaret Stevenson
Boston University Washington News Service
Dec. 14, 2006
WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 —This holiday season, as video games top kids’ wish lists, parents may want to spend a little more time understanding what their children are asking for, according to recent studies.
Most video games are rated by the Entertainment Software Rating Board, a video game industry-sponsored group, but the National Institute on Media and the Family, a non-profit group that monitors children’s entertainment, concluded in its annual “Video Games Report Card” that parents needed to be more involved in what is age appropriate for their children.
As consoles like the popular PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 have improved their technology, the graphics have become more intense as well. With the average gamer being 33 years old, many games are geared towards adults, according to Patricia Vance, the rating board president.
At issue is how parents can be sure their children are playing appropriate games and whether legal intervention is required to aide them.
“Frankly, if a parent can’t figure out what’s in a game from those descriptors, then they must not be looking at the box,” said Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank. “It’s right there to see.”
Besides the Entertainment Software Rating Board, there are other ways for parents to learn about the games their children are playing. Jay Senter of Commonsense Media, a non-profit group that closely analyzes the content of mass media, noted that there is an abundance of material available.
“For so many parents today, it is an overwhelming job—to keep track of what kids are exposed to,” he said. “We provide parents with an information source.”
New London mom Nicole Dallas said she is careful in not letting her 14-year-old son get his hands on violent video games.
“I’m on top of it,” said Dallas, a mother of three who heads the PTA at Bennie Dover Jackson Middle School, and works at the school, said she checks what kind of games her kids play.
Sue Radway, the director of the Youth Service Bureau in Waterford and a parent as well, said she thinks more parental awareness is needed in that area.
“The best way to know what kids are doing is to do it with them,” Radway said. “It’s the holiday season and a kid says, ‘I want Grand Theft Auto’ on their Christmas list and the parents may go out and buy it.”
Grand Theft Auto, is not only one of the most popular video games, but also one of the most violent, rated by the board as “M-17,” a mature rating that is designed for those aged 17 and older.
Not every parent is as aware of these issues.
While 70 percent of parents surveyed said they pay attention to ratings, less than one-third of kids polled said their parents followed ratings, according to a recent report by the National Institute on Media and the Family.
“For that reason, this year we are shining the spotlight on parents,” said the institute’s Dr. David Walsh. “That it’s now our job to kind of step up and say, you know, there are some things that we need to do. We need to pay attention to the ratings. We need to use the tools that are now in the consoles.”
Thierer noted that many next-generation consoles sold today have tools that allow parents to control what their kids are watching and/or playing.
Last week, the rating board announced a new television ad campaign that explains the rating systems to parents. Vance said mature ratings should be taken seriously and that big retailers have stepped up their support of the Entertainment Software Rating Board’s system.
“Video games, without a doubt, are one of the most popular forms of entertainment for our children, and half of all the total game sales for the year are happening right now, for the holiday season,” said Vance.
Dallas’ son, Frankie Dallas, a 14-year-old student at Bennie Dover Jackson Middle School, said his parents traded in his violent games after hearing about a school shooting where the shooter said he had been playing video games earlier that day.
“I don’t mind that my mom is tough on what we can play,” Frankie said. “She doesn’t want us to have messed up lives.”
Carlos Burns, a 24-year-old sales floor representative at the Target in Waterford said the problem isn’t with retailers selling games to underage kids, but with parents buying them.
The National Institute on Media and the Family gave an “A” to major retailers like Best Buy, Target, and Wal-Mart for asking for identification 100 percent of the time that the institute had its “secret shoppers” try to buy games that had “M-17” ratings.
“The system at Target is that they have to look older than 41 in order to purchase an M-17 rated game,” Burns said. “Since it is the holiday season, parents are buying a lot of these games for them.”
Sens. Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut Independent., and Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., have co-sponsored a bill with Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., that would award grants to study the impact of media on children. Lieberman said he plans to reintroduce the bill in the coming Congress.
Currently, there is no federal regulation of videogame content. Retailers and most of the gaming industry use the Entertainment Software Rating Board system as a voluntary standard.
Lieberman praised the rating system and said, “This is about parents exercising some responsibility for what their children play and see and therefore to protect their children from the worst impact of them.”
Doug Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association, which represents the gaming industry, said Lieberman and Clinton have “been unwavering in their belief that our industry has a responsibility to give parents the tools they need to make sound decisions about the games that come into their homes.”
Clinton called the ad campaign a “great step forward” adding, “The ratings only work if parents understand them and if retailers enforce them.”
But Jack Thompson, a lawyer who has advocated regulation of the video game industry, said the new campaign was just a way for the industry to avoid future regulation.
Legislation has been proposed at the state and federal levels to try to regulate the sale of certain video games to minors by setting the board’s rating system as a national standard. So far, most of the legislation has been unsuccessful on the grounds that private sector standards cannot be used by the government nationally.
The issue has become so controversial that a Web site called www.GamePolitics.com, is devoted to keeping an eye on the clash between the video game industry and legislators.
“I perceived there was quite a lot going on in this area but very little consistent tracking of what was happening,” explained Dennis McCauley, who launched the site in 2005.
Kevin Bankston a staff attorney and First Amendment expert at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization that opposes regulation on free speech grounds, said that a government-imposed rating system would be unconstitutional and called the attempts by politicians to pass that legislation “political maneuvers.”
“Video games are speech and these attempts are unconstitutional,” Bankston said.
Thompson said the solution is for Congress “to pass a law banning the sale of mature video games to kids and then proving to the court they are harmful. Very simple.”
Complicating the debate is the controversy about whether violence in video games has any effect on the behavior of minors.
Lieberman noted that more than 2,000 studies that have been done indicate violence in the media has adverse affects on children.
Researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine recently announced that adolescents who play violent video games may have differences in activity levels in areas of the brain associated with emotional arousal and self-control.
Nicole Dallas of New London said she worries that playing violent video games does affect behavior.
“If you plant bad things, bad things will come out,” Dallas said. “Children play games and don’t understand that life is not like that game.”
She said parents can get involved by communicating and being interested in what their children are doing.
“Make time, make that game, don’t show up at the school when you get a call from the dean,” she said. “Show up on open school night. Let teachers know as well as the child that you care.”
Parents need to check the ratings of the games their kids are playing, Dallas said.
Her son does not blame his mom for regulating his use of violent video games, saying he hopes to have a good life and knows that his mom only wants the best for him.
The 14-year-old says he has big dreams of playing for the NFL and afterward he wants to become a scientist.
“My mom just wants us to lead decent lives,” Frankie said.
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