To blame video games is, in my opinion, to excuse the child and family from having a part in their behavior, by saying “it’s not their fault, it’s not the parents, it’s not any other environmental indicator, it’s THIS”, whatever THIS may be.

I do not subscribe to that view. It starts with the parents, and it includes ALL that the child is exposed to, including MOST ESPECIALLY those moments when parents are being themselves to each other when the child is around.

When I think back to the years I was a child, before computers, I don’t remember some idyllic time when everyone played at parks, had active social lives and were all buddy-buddy friends canoeing and hiking and playing frisbee together. There were the same cliques, social misfits, violence, abuse, stigmas and hate you see today.

if anything, there is far less obvious violence and abuse today. What you’ve got to understand is, it just wasn’t talked about much back then. And if talking about violence in all forms, and abuse, and getting everything out in the open reduces how acceptable it is, makes parents rein the shit in, then I say talk about it openly, honestly, get it out there, and don’t ever find some excuse for it that takes the burden off the family to be responsible for paying attention and controlling their own behavior.

What I read as implied in that was a first, unspoken sentence, “Given that playing violent video games makes children anti-social and violent, explain why…”

I don’t take that as given. I remember, DISTINCTLY, what my childhood life was like at age 9 and younger. There are very good reasons why I never speak of those years, and let me assure you, comp;uters did not exist. I can clearly see what being exposed to violence does and does not do to children, what 9 years olds are capable of comrephending, and what careful, loving, supportive parenting is.

Placing the blame of violent behavior on video games and video game violence is ridiculous from my point of view, have seen and been subjected to real violence from an early age.

Or, to put it another way, boys don’t learnt to be sexist, arrogant little pricks from exposure to video games. From unsupervised exposure, and abuse, and neglect, and sneers and slaps and seeing parental figures treat women like shit? Yes, then sure.

1. a new parent who has curtailed his playing time significantly to make time to do things that are more active and social to encourage her growth; and
2. someone who cant appreciate humor in stories where children and violence are both present.

My tone results from the choices that I make and then viewing this entry in your blog through my eyes. You did identify me correctly as a liberal and maybe you are right in that there is no causal link between video games and behavior.

I can tell you that in my arrogance I always believed that in my years of playing WoW, my side always won because I was on that side. As in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg3vzl_VwLc.

Anyway, again, I didn’t mean to offend though I certainly see how what I wrote is easily viewed as argumentative.
Peace

The fallacy of your comment from my point of view is that you’ve already taken the morally superior stance that what your impression of correct activities at certain ages are is the correct one, and therefore I must justify myself and my actions and my ‘parenting model’ to you.

From your comment, it seems to me that you have no sense of humor whatsoever. From your writing, and maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to you took seriously the entire post. All of it. If you had really been reading my blog for years, and had played World of Warcraft for any part of that time, then you would know that there is a very long standing joke that “the other side always wins”. It doesn’t matter what side you are on, the other side always wins. The other side ALWAYS wins.

The joke in this bit was the hilarious fact that my son was unknowingly echoing the plaintive cries of PvPers down through the ages.

The fun thing here is, I instantly spot the arrogance of your assuming the high ground and expecting me to defend myself, explain my logic to you, justify my behavior. There is no point in doing so, your comment is the very essence of bored trolling.

I’ll tell you what, though. I’ll give you this, you made me and Cassie laugh. You almost… almost but not quite, came off with the proper tone. If you’d linked a study from some liberal think tank that supported your implied position that playing WoW and PvP caused people to be anti-social and violent, it would have been more fun.

In conclusion, I’ll link the perfect conversation starter; http://tishtoshtesh.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/curtains-and-chicanery/

Psychologically, how do you make sure that a 9 year old will be able to intellectually separate video games from real life and for them to realize that ganking may be video game alright but morally wrong (i.e. dont be the bully and instead stand up to bullies)?

The lesson your son seemed to learn from the game and that you verbalized here was alliance was too hard and that he should join horde instead as it appears to be easier. Is that the manner in which you think you have lived your life and how he should live his? I know the first part of this last question is not true as I have read your blog since 2007/08 but I cant understand how your current actions and these life lessons you appear to be teaching your son are consistent with everything else that you have up here.

Every single time EotS comes up on my random daily I groan. I know only too well that 3/4 of our team will spend the whole battle pointlessly fighting over the flag while we only hold one base and the Horde have three. Yet your youngster has got to the heart of the problem in a moment.

Incidentally, when I PvPed on my Horde character, I think I lost something silly like 25 BGs in a row; “the Alliance wins” – how sick I was of seeing that. Now I’m playing mostly Alliance and it seems “the Horde wins” is the constant result of most Bgs I go to. It can’t all be down to me!

Now we just need to reign in PvP mode when we’re raiding, lol.

Kudos to the Bear Cub for commencing with becoming a PvP legend. Up next, Arena!