| Skill |
08-29-2013 12:06 AM |
I blame the parents, entirely. They should not let an 8 year old have access to M rated games, especially ones that have such realistic violence. The same goes for R rated movies.
At that age children have a very distorted sense of reality. They are still learning about the world and what life is like, and naturally tend to learn from their surroundings and the environment that they're in. When I was 8, I still believed in Santa Claus and all that, and so did most of the people my age. I had no idea how adult life worked or how the heck my parents managed to handle everything they did. The world seemed overwhelming to me, and I was clueless. It takes time for people to fully learn how the world works and what is acceptable, and for their mind to physically develop to handle so many things. If a child plays a game in which you can freely kill innocent civilians with guns for extended periods of time, it may take over their view on life. He probably hardly realized what he is doing is "just a game", and made comparisons to RL. His mind was not fully developed and therefore not yet capable of making rational thoughts based on reality. When a child is growing up they tend to reflect their surroundings. If they spend their time surrounded by nothing but mindless violence that they can't even fully understand, they will grow up and learn based on that. I'm not saying that every kid that plays a violent game is going to be a murderer, I'm just saying that playing such disturbing games extensively at a very young age can have a dramatic effect on their understanding of everyday life.Any grown adult can clearly realize that GTA is just a game, and know that such things should never happen in real life, an 8 year old child has no clue what the world works like or what is reasonable. People need to respect the age ratings of games, they're there for a reason.
The second mistake they made was leaving a gun in the open where it is accessible to a child. It should be in a locked case, and out of reach of a child. Not necessarily to stop something like this, but to stop them from accidentally harming themselves(there have been numerous deaths from children who play with weaponry they aren't aware of how to use). Even if it was originally unloaded, I'm sure he learned to some degree how to load it from the game he played, which his parents should not have let him play in the first place.
Parents need to pay more attention to what they're buying their children. Rather than blaming the gaming industry for putting out games with content inappropriate for children, they should blame the parents for ignoring age ratings and giving their children whatever they want. Most major gaming studios have their games Rated by the ESRB, which provides a very clear description as to what types of mature content are included in those games.
|
