Interesting article from Ars Technica earlier today about a poorly thought out survey on What They Play. I will qualify the following post with a note that things like ESRB ratings and intentionally playing on paranoia to sell products really really irk me. So if you’re a fan of fear advertising and extortion we’ll have to agree to disagree.
Anyway, back to it.
Basically, the article points out that a survey asking parents what would most worry them when sending their child to a friend’s house to spend the night (with results like drink beer, smoke marijuana, play GTA, and watch pornography) is not scientific and is in fact misleading. Duh! Btw it seems folks who took the survey thought that weed and GTA were much more worrisome than beer and porn.
Look, What They Play is an advertisement driven, for-profit web site started in 2007 as the first product of What They Like by “entertainment and media industry veterans Ira Becker and John Davison.” The site’s stated mission is to offer “helpful resources within an unbiased, non-judgmental environment that provide parents with unparalleled insight and guidance about the various forms of popular entertainment that engage children.” All of this is from their About Page, I did truncate but did not edit the mission because I figured you could click on the link and see it for yourself.
The mission sounds great. Nothing like a unbiased, informed source to help adults gather enough information to make decisions about how to raise their children, right? I’m not a parent, so I’m no expert at the parenting thing, but at a glance it sounds potentially helpful. The problem is that the site is not unbiased or non-judgmental. Check out this article from the site about Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim entitled “AdultSwim.com Games: Get the Facts; Racism, religion, sex, violence, and suicide. All in your browser, for free.” If you read it, you’ll notice that it definitely doesn’t start off very “non-judgmental” with a quick jab referring to Adult Swim’s content as “immature” – interesting choice of words, especially when later referring to the site content as inappropriate for younger viewers and the games as featuring “violent or otherwise mature content.” Ugh. I can’t even express how angry that kind of blatant misrepresentation makes me.
Turns out What They Play is just another product trying to make money off of scaring well meaning but ignorant parents by feeding into paranoia about “evil video games” while showing them advertisements for “innocent games”.
Hey Parents – Video games do not cause violent behavior. Violent kids sometimes enjoy violent video games. That’s it. So maybe your kid is a psycho about to rampage through the halls of his junior high with a blowtorch, but I can assure if that’s true, you’ve got a lot more to worry about than which games he’s playing at a friend’s house.
Now, I’m going back to working on my next interweb startup idea – basically it’s about books. There isn’t anything more dangerous than the printed word. Books cause violence, sexual promiscuity, and are bad for children’s eyesight. After I get it off the ground, I’m going to start a book ratings organization where publishers can pay me a fee to receive a rating. I will then collude with retailers to block all non-rated books from being sold in stores. Say byebye Tom Sawyer and you better pay up King James, or else!
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