There is a media available today that is rife with extreme violence and sexually explicit content! The worst part about this content is that is it freely available to children of varying age. To test this, my 15 year old son walked into a store, picked up off the shelf, and purchased something with depictions of brutal murder and implied sexual depravity.
It was a book.
The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian was written in 1932 by Robert E. Howard. It depicts the very violent and graphic adventures of Conan the Barbarian, whom I am sure many of you remember from the popular films featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The movies, by the way, are also rated R by the MPAA. While I have not read the entire book, I did get through quite a few passages and found many scenes where Conan is viciously attacking various people, chopping of limbs and heads, graphic depictions of blood and violence, and the implied sexual demeaning of women. Now I know that this isn’t much to go on without reading the whole thing, but I am not here to review the book only to show that there are books that contain such things.
I am getting a little ahead of myself here. Let’s back up and see how this all started.
I am a gamer. I enjoy all kind of games. My current game shelf has everything from racing games to table tennis. Lately I have been playing the latest craze, Grand Theft Auto IV. Now, on top of being a gamer I am also a parent. My son, Andrew, is 15 now and has lived with me on a full time basis since he was 12. Because of the mix of the two I tend to pay attention to all the hype of “video games are a threat to our children!” Most of the time I laugh and point when people like Jack Thompson or Glen Beck get up on their high horse and bash developers of games because they are “murder simulators” and how games like Doom and GTA have caused the death of so many people.
Most of the time I laugh.
The rest of the time I am floored by the ignorance. I see the reports of school shootings and street murders and take note that the people that commit these acts were troubled to begin with. I look over at my son and wonder, for an instant, could he do something like that? Then I shake off the webs of deception and realize that, 1: I am a good parent that is involved with my child’s hobbies and activities. 2: I review many of the things he does to make sure they are appropriate for him. 3: I educate him on why certain things are not appropriate. This is called responsible parenting.
I picked up the book “Grand Theft Childhood”. This is one of the latest books on childhood behavior and violent video games. It’s not what you would expect though. This one, unlike all the ones that most of the politicians use, has FACTS! As I was sitting on the couch reading, I began to think about some of the different ratings systems that are in place. Movies have the MPAA, Games have the ESRB, and even many Comic Books had the Comics Code Authority. I looked over at one of the shelves and noticed a book that Sarah and Andrew had been talking about, “World War Z”. I know the basic premise of the book and new that it had a lot of violence and gore. (It is about Zombies you know). So I decided to test something. I walked over to the DVD shelf and grabbed a copy of “Full Metal Jacket”, from the game shelf I picked up “”, and the book “WWZ”. I trudged upstairs to where Andrew was reading a few comic books. (“Blue Beetle” I believe) I handed him the items and had the following conversation.
(handing game first)”Where is the rating on this game?”
(reading the front cover)”Umm, it’s M for Mature”
“And why is it rated that?”
“Because of graphic Violence and language”
“Ok then, (taking back game and handing movie) Where is the rating on this?”
(He pondered the box for a bit and found the rating on the back in small print) “It’s rated R”
“And why?”
“Well, since I haven’t seen it, I can assume that it’s because of violence and language”
“Good, now this. (hands the book) where is the rating on this?”
(This part threw him off as he scanned the inside and outside of the book) “Ummm there isn’t one?”
“Ok now, of the three of these things, which has the more graphic violence and language?”
“Hands down, the book”
Now, Andrew loves to read. He almost always has a book he is working on. There are times where he gets so engrossed in a book that he will zone out of reality for a while and even lose track of time. He tears through books very fast but can still spend hours upon hours lost in the story. This train of thought got me wondering. I know the guys at the local Game store and I know that they won’t sell anything to Andrew that is not age appropriate (or at least they check with me first). What about the local book store?
This leads us up to the experiment. I picked out the Conan book because I knew of the content of it. I also knew that the movie adaptation was rated R (even though it was barely adapted from the book). We located the book and I gave Andrew some money and told him to go buy it. I went somewhere else in the store so I could not be associated with him. I didn’t want to give the appearance that I was there and approving. Andrew walked up to the counter and bought the book with the sales attendant not even batting an eye at the content.
On the way home we looked through the book and noticed many illustrations of barely clothed women (angled as to not be too revealing), severed body parts and varying degrees of violence. Granted I had only read a few passages, the text was much more graphic than I had seen in some “Friday The 13th” movies. This was sold to a 15 year old.
Now I am not saying that we should be banning books or anything of the sort. All I am pointing out is that these political media junkies are wasting my time on my TV telling me about the horrors of video game violence and how these underage children are buying games that are rated above their age level. Meanwhile a child can go out and pick up any number of books that have the same, if not worse, content. Does this mean that we should start assigning a rating system to books? Of course not. We have the first amendment here which allows for the freedom of speech! This has worked for us for countless years/decades. As we have grown as a society we have seen countless efforts to ban various types of media and it always turns out the same way, the media grows into a part of our society whether we would like it to or not. Then some new form comes out and the efforts focus on that until the process repeats itself.
The media junkies will always be there. When the holodeck is created I am sure there will be a Jack Thompson Jr that will attack it because it “blurs the lines between reality and fiction” and he will proclaim “this isn’t the type of entertainment that we grew up with, this will be harmful to the children, and it’s not like the fictional games we knew like GTA”. I guess the real point I am trying to get at here is that we are at the next stage of evolution for media. When I was a kid, we had video games. It became a part of my life and carried with me into adulthood. It started small enough back when we had our atari’s and coleco-visions as kids and is coming to a head now. Now, the same people I grew up with are starting to make games tailored to me and my current age and it’s viewed as immoral. When I was growing up, Video games were something for kids and the adults didn’t really understand it. (Think back to when Rock and Roll was invented, kids understood, adults didn’t).
A long rant made short, we really shouldn’t be listening to the media junkies, but sadly, people will. We shouldn’t be banning and punishing, we should be learning and educating. We shouldn’t hide the games from our kids. We should be reviewing them and explaining why the child shouldn’t play it. Learn to find the games that kids should be playing, and play it with them. Does this mean I am going to let Andrew play GTAIV? Nope, but I will explain to him what it is in the game I find inappropriate for him and why it is as such.
When we got home, Andrew set out to read some of his new book. He came back downstairs in shock. He had only skimmed a few chapters but had already found a scene where Conan was attacking a ship and cleaving limb from limb. At the end of the encounter the ship’s captain, a female, came up to Conan, threw off all her clothes, and begged Conan to “Claim her with his fierce love”. This threw Andrew off and even raised the thought in his own head of “Should I be reading this?” It was right then and there that I knew I had done a good job. In educating him on what was appropriate and non appropriate, I instilled on him about what he should or should not be looking at. He set the book down and went back to his Blue Beetle comic.
I went back to playing Grand Theft Auto IV.
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