The Effect Of Play On Our Young And Change On Our Elders

6 Pages 1555 Words

The Effect of Play on Our Young and Change on Our Elders

It has been argued that video games are ruining today’s youth; that video games are taking away the imagination of children and planting violent seeds into their brains. But who exactly is making this argument? Its not the people who play video games, it’s the people who ban video games, and the parents who have never tried what they are so quick to mark as evil. This suggests that these concerned parents are afraid of change more than anything. They fear what is unknown and new to them because they don’t understand it, or more importantly take the time to understand it. The parents of American children in current times (especially conservative ones) are quick to blame anything they can for the actions of today’s youth. Listening to one of these finger pointers would lead you to believe movies and video games have come to life and forced kids to maim and kill. Somehow it doesn’t seem likely that world violence is caused by a few images on a screen.

In the not so distant past, there weren’t any electronic devices built for fun, but as technology exploded in the past one hundred years radios, televisions, computers and much more have changed that. The parents today that weren’t exposed to video games growing up are only in their late thirties and early forties, so you can see this huge wave of gaming in the past fifteen years is quite new and unfamiliar to them. They grew up playing almost exclusively outside, but they also grew up in a much less violent world, with less abductions, and street crime. Child abductions and street crime didn’t start when video games hit the street, the boom in America’s violence came when the drugs of the late sixties and early seventies hit the street. The reality of is that video games and television are an alternative to playing outside, not a replacement. Ted Fishman, a father worried about the safety of his child in th...