2013

Hello DW, and Happy New Year,

This is going to be an interesting year for me, I am expecting to finally move into the first stage of real personhood by the end of it. This means real job, a car, my own apartment my own stuff and my own time. There are just a few more big steps to take before I get to that point. One of the things I want to do is start writing, or typing whatevs. I have always envied those with journals and more so now as I realize that while I may have been a boring person I was and am not as boring as I thought and keeping a record of that will help me remember that. So that will be a focus of this journal and I hope that those of you who do take the time to read my posts find them enjoyable though I expect this experiment will benefit from the writing of posts for my own sake than others.

Have a great year,
Haxxson

A Surprisingly Sane Article About Burning Video Games

The article is hear, I do recommend skimming it.

 http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/2/3828182/connecticut-town-holds-drive-to-collect-and-destroy-violent-video

We have all heard it before, "Violent media causes kids (and adults) to do violent things." The biggest issue is with the word cause that the media seriously implies.

Here are a number of research experiments and their results organized by whether video games do or do not significantly effect violent behavior. Mostly we see
http://videogames.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=1608

Now that the research is dealt with let's look at the article. The article above is one of the first articles that decidedly falls in the "video games are bad for children" category but remains sane in its suggestion of what to do about it, to an extent. Burning the games is decidedly extreme, but this organization has made it clear that the first step to dealing with violent media is parents. Parents should take the time to talk to their kids about violence in Media and also be more aware of what media they are consuming. Games have a very clear rating system similar to movies and it is up to the parents to decide what is appropriate for their child. If you would not take your child to an R rated movie then you should not buy them M rated games. I would not be surprised to find that most 13 year olds could explain the difference between reality and a video game and how the consequences of ones actions in a game are much different than in real life.

Thanks for reading, comments and critiques are appreciated and I would be happy to readdress this issue in a later post. Hopefully it will be a better written post.

Haxxson