With all the troubles in the world today, it's nice to know that we have some hardworking members of the Amherst Town Board are looking out for your children, and protecting them from the evil Chuck E. Cheese. (I debated for a while if I was going to put a link up to the violence and filth peddlers Chuck E Cheese, but I figured that we are mostly adults here, and we know how to limit our exposure from such mind destroying products that they push on our unsuspecting youngins.)
Council Member Shelly Schratz said she was disturbed by several “action-packed shoot-and-kill games...When I see 6-year-olds, 8-year-olds playing those games, when all the time we’re opening the paper and seeing those stories on youth violence, do we need those games to make money?"
PHEW. Thank god for Shelly Schratz. We shouldn't let our youngsters play these "action packed shoot and kill" murder simulators (ok, the last part was not her words, but look it up, you'll see it used a lot against video games). We should be going back to the games that I played as a kid (well, before the video games really hit), and my parents played, and my parent's parents played. Good games. Like Cops & Robbers, where we'd use toy guns to shoot Robbers. Or Cowboys & Indians, where we'd use toy guns to shoot Indians. Or Water Guns, where we'd use toy guns to shoot people with water. Or Laser Tag, where we would shoot people with laser guns. Or war with painted lead toy soldiers. Or do other non-interactive things like watch TV. Or read a book. We don't want kids interacting with pixel based representations of fantasy objects. We want kids to play with reality based representations of fantasy objects. Or enjoy a story that there's no interaction or control over.
Schratz — who was the first to express concern about the appropriateness of the business’s arcade games — tried to change her vote after the fact and table the resolution.“I should have—and I didn’t — just table it from the start,” she said. “But I thought if I brought to the board’s attention the information about the games that I saw, that people would comment. But they didn’t.”
Wait. What? So she did it just as a ploy to get people to "comment"? So it wasn't about Chuck E Cheese, but to steer the conversation to if video games were evil? I mean, we all know that they are evil, but I thought she had our backs. That she was concerned about America's children.
Huh.
-Erik.
And what would be a post by me without a tiny text note?
From the Chuck E. Cheese website:
To help separate the older kids from the younger kids, our game rooms are arranged into different sections:Toddler Zone | Kiddie Area | Skill Games & Arcades
Imagine that.
(PS. Stop by the comments for some bonus content.)
4 comments:
And here's the above promised bonus content:
Penn & Teller did a rather good episode in this season of Bull...t regarding video games. It's worth watching if you have Showtime/find a copy, etc. And again, yes they do use rather strong language in the show. But that's because they cannot get sued for calling someone an a..hole, but they could if they called someone a liar or a scam artist.
Instead of fixing real problems or taking the time to understand a situation people hide behind sensational statistics which usually end up being irrelevent.
Some "children's play" articles I found interesting from Psychology Today:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/reclaiming-childhood/200906/stop-fretting-about-childrens-play
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200810/the-varieties-play-match-the-requirements-human-existence
This one is rather so as it refers to a book about children playing during the holocaust.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200812/the-value-play-iii-children-use-play-confront-not-avoid-life-s-challenges-
from the last article:
"In play, whether it is the sweet play we like to envision or the play described by Eisen, children bring the realities of their world into a fictional context, where it is safe to look those realities in the eye, to confront them, to experience them, and to practice ways of dealing with them. Some people think that violent play creates violent adults; but in reality the opposite is true. Violence in the adult world leads children, quite properly, to play at violence. How else can they prepare themselves emotionally, intellectually, and physically, for reality? It is wrong to think that somehow we can reform the world, for the future, by controlling children's play and controlling what they learn. If we want to reform the world, we have to reform the world; and children will follow suit. The children must, and will, prepare themselves for the the real world in which they must strive to survive. Let's try to make that word, in reality, not in pretense, as happy a one as we can."
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