I know the name is close to what Bill O’Reilly uses every week night on FOXNEWS so my apologies to him and the show and hope that I can live up to his level of journalism.
This week: Parents of OnLine Gamers
It is well known how detrimental places like myspace.com and other such sites are on our young and impressionable children. Chat rooms, Email, Direct chatting programs such as AIM, MS Messenger, MIRc and the like make it difficult to police what our children see and are exposed to. However one area that has mostly been overlooked up to now is the on-line gaming world that our children spend so much time in.
Eons ago when games were made out of pressed paper and the pieces were made out of wood or metal, there was no such word as “gaming.” Playing games was just that, a past time a way of getting your mind off of the mundane events of your life and living albeit in a fantasy world in which you could become a millionaire, own houses, hotels, get a family of four in five moves, or conquer continents and the world.
Oh how young we were then. Old timers, gaming has evolved.
Now they kill dozens/hundreds of people in less than a half hour, and watch with glee and satisfaction as their opponents’ heads fly off, laugh and giggle as hislife’s blood pours out and splatters all over the walls, and watch with annoyance as they re-spawn behind them only to do the same thing.
Before, we played maybe three other people each man for himself, or herself as the case may be. Occasionally the planets aligned just right and we managed surreptitiously to make a secret pact with another against a stronger foe. Now they strategize in how to ambush an unsuspecting enemy in order to overpower and decimate him. Once, we called this unsportsmanlike, now they call this clever. It is all in the name of war. Obviously in war there are no rules. However these mores stay with these youngsters even out of the confines of the virtual war state.
Now, they group together in clans to make this experience “more enjoyable.” Oftentimes clan membership can be a postive experience which teaches respect and offers a sense of belonging and a sense of a much larger world than you or I experienced in our “neighborhood clan.” It seems that some clans have usurped the positive roles shouldered by the fraternities and sororities of old. However more times than not they preach intolerance, hatred and condone violence against others not part of their clan. Oftentimes they are more the equivalent of cybergangs. Usually these clans get the most notoriety and attention.
Perhaps the real difference is the way we interacted with the world. After the game of Monopoly, Risk, or Life, we all left together and got some ice cream or pizza to enjoy together and relive the strategies of the game. We would congratulate the winner, and threaten revenge if we had lost. But it was mostly all in fun. If there were any hard feelings they evaporated in minutes as soon as we returned to the real world. Rarely, if ever did you hear a curse word uttered during those games as you knew the wrath of the parent supervising you would descend and the after game pizza and ice cream repast privilege would be revoked. Indeed many times the game itself was stopped by a nearby parent if things got too rowdy.
Now, there are admins. They are the new parental figures of a new generation. While most mature admins adhere to enforcing respect for all and ban or kick those cursing or verbally attacking other players there are still many more that do not. On those servers the language that streams out of adolescents and even younger children mirrors the decline of morality as we knew it. The language of those that should know better, is even worse. There is no safe guard, there are no repercussions. If you think I am exaggerating feel free to drop in on the |NYS|’s servers in COD2 (Call of Duty 2). In their server’s rules they even state that they allow cursing but strive for respect for their players. I am not sure how those two concepts can even exist side by side, but the fact is these servers like many others undermine everything you would ever wanted to teach your children. There is no respect, There is no maturity. This is no longer a game or past time. To them it is their life. Take a look at their forums. These people attacked others in the most disgusting manners while maintaining that they strive for respect. I say, keep striving you have a long way to go.
Perhaps even more disturbing to us of the tolerant generation of the sixties and seventies are the racial, religious and life style attacks that run rampant on the forums of these servers. Yes, there are places for your children to rant and rave in any manner they see fit with any language they can draw upon against any group, person or nationality. And they do it all anonymously! Luckily for most of us their language pool is very shallow and one particular word is used ad-nauseum throughout every tirade. Please visit one of the forums and see for yourself.
* note: after one day online this blog has shined such a light into 2 of these sites and how they do business that I am now blocked from viewing further posts. What do they have to hide?
As you will soon see, the arrogance and ignorance is contagious. It feeds upon itself. I ask you could any language be any worse than that? The answer: yes. It gets much worse. These are the people your parents told you not to play with as a child. Now they are in your home, in your child’s bedroom and for the most part we are unaware of what it is doing to our children.
Efforts to reason with these people will result in violent and malicious personal attacks. The sad thing is that honesty is also not a strong point on the Internet. They censor anything they do not want to hear while allowing the in-group smut mongering to continue. Rather than trying to talk responsibly the method now is to shout down anybody trying to stand up for morality with sheer numbers rather than intelligent discussion. And this my friends is the tip of the iceberg. Your impressionable children are learning how to react in the world by these examples.
It has gotten so bad that even the gamers themselves don’t play against each other fairly anymore. Most servers by necessity have to run a program called “punkbuster” which identifies cheaters or hackers who have figured out some cybernetic way to cheat. Creative ways of cheating is considered smart and chic among many of the youngsters out there. After all, the point is to win – Right? After all this is war and there are no rules in war, Right?
Wrong. This is not war. It is a game. I believe the same rules we grew up as children should survive. A sense of fair play, honesty, positive creativity, those are the cornerstones I want my children and grandchildren to adhere to.
Call to Action
One generation of children grew up in front of the T.V. For the most part those values were positive and offered a great past time. But it was overseen by the F.C.C. The Internet is not. Are we as parents going to allow a deviate (possibly from another country where our laws are ineffective) determine the moral and ethical paths our children will follow? Any person with a keyboard and an internet connection has a potentially tremendous audience. Do you want your child subjected to this onslaught without parental supervision? Or will you act for the sake of your child. Will you visit your child’s bedroom or wherever the computer is located and at irregular intervals during their Internet activities oversee as much as you can? Will you find out which clans your child belongs to and read its forum pages? And if you do not like what you see will you be able to forbid your child from going on those forums and consider even making “Johnny” quit that clan entirely? Keep in mind that often what goes on in the forums are but a speck of the print your child reads across the top of his screen during game play. Teamspeak is a way for them to communicate during gameplay with one another. Will you listen in on those conversations?
Parents, we are the only ones who can stop this from happening. The government can’t or won’t stop it and the children are not going to police themselves. We can’t shirk our responsibility and expect an admin that we do not know do it for us. As we have seen, some of the admins are horrible role models themselves! Take an active role in what your child is doing. And if they say you are smothering them or they feel untrusted, remember back. Remember when we said the same things to our parents. Did they stop because we protested? No. Why? Because they recognized the stakes were high, for their children, for their society, for their future. Should we do less for our children?
Ridiculous? Not if you care about your child’s future.
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Thank you for reading this. Please feel free to respond.
Next week: Mid Election Blues.
