What.
Ok, before I start tearing this person apart, let me closely analyze her opinion to see if she has any valid points at all.
I truly believe that video games were created by Satan to turn otherwise normal children into his drooling, glassy-eyed stooges. After my son plays them at his friends’ houses, he comes home irritable and testy for the rest of the day.
Hmmm, that's um... Interesting. Um. Moving on.
Even though his skin is normally mocha-colored, after a day spent in a darkened room with a controller in his hand, he comes home with a sickly pallor.
That sounds more like a skin condition than the fault of video games to me, I mean, true, I'm not the most tan guy around, but nobody has ever said I look sickly. Moving on further...
And it seems, where we live at least, that middle school boys can’t do anything in packs except play video games. So, without them, they inhabit our house for only nanoseconds before they want to leave.
Must... Not... Nerd rage...
My anti-video game attitude was only reinforced recently, when I read a story in the Boston Herald about a mom who was so frustrated by her son’s obsessive video gaming that she finally called 911.
Apparently, her 14-year-old had become so fixated on “Grand Theft Auto” that he refused to stop playing it. The trouble in her house started after she woke up at 2 a.m. and found her son playing the game on his bedroom computer.
In case you’re not familiar with “Grand Theft Auto,” this is a socially conscious educational game, in which players portray criminals and earn points by stealing cars, killing people and destroying property.
Alright screw being open minded, this is stupid.
The boy was so into a game of GTA he stayed up until 2AM playing and the mother couldn't get him to go to bed? And then she called 911 EMERGENCY? That is not an emergency. It is not, at all, in any way, an emergency.
And clearly this is the games fault and not the fault of oh, the mother?
Let me just say anyone who digs for 5 minutes into the RATING SYSTEM for video games knows how it works, since it works exactly the same as movies.
E is for EVERYONE
T is for TEEN
M is for MATURE
This is not a difficult concept, but since parents don't take an interest in what their children do or play, they blame everything on video games. GTA is a MATURE game. And if her 14 year old boy wasn't MATURE enough to handle it, guess what? That's not the games fault. And calling the cops on your son for staying up late? That's absurd. The woman who did that is an example of the idiocy in America today, and anyone defending her should be cast out from our society like a leper.
You are not helping. You think you are helping, but you are wrong. The kid should not have been playing an M rated game, if he wasn't MATURE enough to play it. Which he clearly was not, not that his mother was very mature, calling the cops on her son staying up past bedtime. You know what? Kotaku covered that story, let's see what they say about it:
Of Grand Theft Auto, Mejia insists she "would never buy that kind of video." Noooooo. "I called (police) because if you don't respect your mother, what are you going to do in your life?" I dunno, lady. Have you talked to your doctor about safe, effective, fast-acting kick his a*s? Mrs. Good used that. When I was exactly that age, too.
That was written by Owen Good of Kotaku.com. I like this person. This person is not an idiot. In fact, this person is an intelligent, reasonable human being. Unlike the mother of the child who was playing GTA.
By the way, someone bought him the game, because you have to be over 17 to buy a MATURE game.
Let's move on back to the crazy lady:
On one horrible afternoon that scarred me for life, I even saw a kid walking out of the public library playing a Nintendo DS.
Hahahahaha- Oh wait you were serious?
So that scarred you for life did it? One, isolated incident, that you have no frame of reference for? I mean seriously, was he with his mom? Maybe his mom had him run in and return some books, and told him not to check anything out? I don't know what happened, and neither do you, so shut up.
This is where it gets really good.
Here’s my question: When do kids ever think these days? When do they ever have brains free from electronics long enough to ponder the universe? To think of things that might someday lead them to a cure for cancer?
Braid.
World of Goo.
Portal.
If you can beat any of those game, and tell me you weren't THINKING... You're lying. It's just not possible. I mean, for crying out loud, World of Goo is a physics simulator!
Portal causes you to have to develop entirely new ways of thinking to solve the puzzles! That's why the tag-line was "Now you're thinking with portals."! You had to FIND NEW WAYS OF THINKING!
Braid has some of the most brutally difficult puzzles I've seen in a game, and like Portal, you have to form new ways of thinking, just to get a single puzzle piece!
Not only that, but the stories for these games can (and are) be broken down! Here's an example of something from Portal, about GLaDOS, one of the best characters in a video game EVER!
Braid is either about saving a princess, or someone who worked on the nuclear bomb depending on how you interpret it!
Games don't keep kids from thinking, they MAKE THEM THINK!
If Sir Isaac Newton had been playing a DS, I’m sure he never would have noticed the apple falling from the tree, so he never would have formulated the theory of gravity.
First of all, the apple and the tree thing? Common belief is that it never happened.
But like one of the commenters on that Kotaku post said, Issac Newton was pretty much a rebel without a cause back then, breaking all the rules, to prove new theories! His mom wanted him to be a farmer!
So you know what? Keep it up. Keep your son off the games, see how that goes for you.
Oh but this isn't over is it? Nooooo. You couldn't be beat. So let's see what you did? You posted this.
Anyway, after much soul searching and meditation, I’ve had a divine revelation that I am wrong.
Satan did not invent video games.
Lord Voldemort did.
What better way to turn children away from good magic and into the dark side, than to put them in a darkened room for hours every day with a joystick and a big screen, where they practice killing things for fun?
He loves the deathly pallor of the video game addict, who has forgotten what daylight looks like. He loves the isolation you feel, because you need nothing but a video screen and a controller to feel content.
Soon, he plans to take advantage of this and become the controller, and then good luck trying to find Harry Potter to save you.
I thought gamers were supposed to be the ones who couldn't separate reality from fiction?
I think I know where I went wrong, looking at this post now. I was under the impression that I was reading something by someone without any form of mental disease. I see now I was wrong. With that, I honestly can't see myself even trying to explain why this individual is wrong anymore, because I feel sorry for her. Seriously, there must be something wrong with this persons mind.
I thought at first she was using that as a metaphor for something else, but I have poured over it, and it's just nonsense.
By the way, in all of the former games I mentioned, you don't kill a single human being. No humanoids in fact. There's no killing at all in Portal and World of Goo, but I'll admit, you can jump on strange monsters in Braid.
She goes on to mention a guy who left his Girlfriend in labor to play video games, and yeah, that guy is a complete moron for sure, but video games or no video games, YOU CANNOT FIX STUPID.
Then she makes fun of how no video games are educational because one is not educational. Based off that though, no movies are educational (I'd hardly call ALL movie educational, so therefor, none of them are.) no books are educational, (I can't say I learned all that much from Harry Potter, so clearly none of them are educational.) and of course, nothing is educational. (I'd hardly call that joke I made last week educational, therefore no speech is educational.)
In fact, she contradicts herself, saying that the internet can be educational if used as a resource tool. After all, I wouldn't call, oh, let's say Vgcats.com educational. So apparently, according to her own words, Wikipedia is not a valid form of learning either.
So just remember, according to "Marla Jo Fisher" we are currently living in a backwards society with no form of learning. She sounds like a good mother to me.
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