So in a major push in recent times, parents, government, and watch groups are putting pressure on the game industry to “clean up its act”. We see sites out there like GamePolitices.com where they rate the current trends in gaming and provide a letter grade on the quality of that particular rating. At this point, you might be asking yourself, what’s the big deal, let them go after the gaming industry. If you think that way, read on.

The big question here is who is responsible, the game industry or the parents, in making informed decisions on what their children should be playing or what they are involved in. This goes back to the age old questions of parents, such as:

- Education, are schools responsible for providing the sole, initial or foundations of education?
- Social skills, are schools also responsible for providing guidance and a mature and enriched environment to provide good social skills for children.
- Food, do advertisements on TV (TV that we let our children watch), influence or guide a child’s addiction to particular brands or products?
- Is the TV industry responsible for monitoring and having responsible viewing of shows?
- Is the movie industry responsible for what they put into movies and how they rate them?
- Is the music industry responsible for what they put into their music and how they are rated?

And the list goes on and on. If we are naive in thinking that any industry, institution or other party is responsible for influencing their children, I ask the questions:

  1. Why is it that you allowed your child to watch this?
  2. Why is it that your child believes this is acceptable?
  3. What measures were taken to instill positive behavior and acceptable uses? How is this reinforced, and is the family/home environment appropriate to continue this positive reinforcement (or is it do what I say, and not what I do).
  4. If you as a parent spent 1/2 the time on your children as you do blaming others for your short comings, then you probably wouldn’t be looking at who you should be going after next, as you’ll be too busy being involved with your children.

Let’s look at the education system for a moment, and then we’ll come back to video games. A lot of people would have you believe that the economy of scales within an educational institution are the sole reasons that children who attend that school are not able to score high, have a high percentage of graduates, high percentage of students continue on higher education, etc etc. While this is true that economy does make the world go round, it provides good salaries to attract quality teachers, facilities management, new technology, books, supplies, and other extra curricular studies, this is not the can do way to solve the problem. If it were then the Chicago school district should be doing wonders with the infusion of funds that it received, but instead it wasted them in blackhole projects and poor management of funds.

Looking at this from another angle, why is it that students of foreign origins have their children score higher, have a higher percentage of graduation rates, higher percentage of students continue to college and so on? Is it because they are smarter, harder working, genetically superior? If you believe this, then you shouldn’t read any further as you are probably the most gullible person on the face of this planet and have very low self esteem. The reality is that none of these are universally true (be it there may be certain individuals who are inherently smarter or more determined), but for the most part you have to look at it from a more holistic perspective. What about these children make them different than those who were born and grew up in America?

I would argue that there are a number of factors that can influence this, such as but not limited to:

  • Environment
  • Engagement
  • Involvement

Breaking these down, you can look at environment as being the conditions that a child lives and breaths on a day to day basis that can affect their abilities. Do they live in a house that values TV more than books? Or board games verses video games? Or junk food vs health conscious foods? The list goes on. As a parent, you have to consider that these types of things drastically affect a child’s perspective, and would ultimately affect their abilities, growth and development. Just like you would child-proof a house when you first get a baby home, or dog proof a house when you get a puppy, you have to idiot proof your house and environment by making sure you are conscious of the various things and activities that occur in the house and how they may impact your child’s development. Eat dinner as a family, discuss issues–anger is not a choice, understanding instead of jumping to conclusions, open discussions about the hard topics–drugs, violence, patience, and culture. These are just the tip of the ice burg, but can make a big difference in the way your child views the world and how they live in it.

In terms of engagement, let’s look at this like you would a business. You want to keep your employee’s engaged–this means that you have to understand where they currently are, what their strengths are and how you can interact with those strength themes to get the best results, have open discussions to assess their current involvement, put them into situations where you can observe them either taking on challenges or stumbling, rewarding success and correcting short falls. These are all fundamentals when you manage a group or team in a workplace.

Now this isn’t to say that you treat your children like employee’s but engagement is still something that can be cross-utilized. You have to be engaged with your children by knowing that they are doing, what they are interested in, how you can participate or guide them through situations. Keep in mind that engagement isn’t “doing” or isn’t “forcing” but pointing them in a direction and seeing where they go, all the while you walk with them along the way and act as guide posts that they can periodically go to and read from in order to make informed decisions themselves.

Involvement is just what it saids, but keep in mind this is not doing, this is just acting as a facilitator that can be used to provide two sides of a perspective, but ultimately allow the child to come to their own determination, fail and learn from their mistakes and provide a nurturing environment that does not create a threatening environment for them to now want to take a chance, but also does not provide too much of a cushion that they feel that they can take any amount of risk because you will always be there to catch them. It’s a difficult balancing act, takes a lot of time, and patience, but the rewards are great.

So with these three guiding principles, we can aim to achieve a better position in a failing education system, because we are no longer relying on someone else to take responsibility for success or failure. It is up to YOU to establish, provide, and see through any course of action because the excuse that someone else should have done something is not the norm, but the exception.

Why is this important. This is important as we look back on video games and the reaction of several self-proclaimed evangelists who seem to make it a mission to force the industry into more and more constraining boxes and less and less creative as they are always looking over their shoulder to see who might object, sue or otherwise degrade their game because of content or intended or unintended use. Games like Doom and Duke Nukem were pioneers in their day; however, when you have parents screaming that the reason their children took guns to school and pre-meditatively gunned down their classmates were in part due to their exposure to these video games is completely ridiculous. How can brief exposure to a video game be more powerful than a parents environment, engagement, and involvement over 14+ years? If they were so diligent in their efforts, this shouldn’t be an issue.

So what’s the answer? The answer is that parents need to not only rely on a quick reference guide that can basically summarize key components within a game (such as the ESRB), but parents should be playing the game themselves, watching videos of in-game play, talking with other kids on their reactions of the game, talking with parents about their involvement with the game, playing the game with their child or observing playing behavior with child and friends. Basically you have to put all the pieces together to be as informed as possible, but this isn’t just having information fed to you, but you have to do some (a lot) of the grunt work so do not think that this is an easy task. Each game has to be treated differently, and each game will require a considerable amount of effort.

Parents have become lazy folks, and this isn’t the fault of the industry. We continue to look for more and more simplistic ways of looking at a situation and sitting back while that solution is fed to us on a silver plater. Gone are the days that we take pride in the fact that we were involved and participated as this isn’t serving any instant gratification and let’s face it we are a culture that loves gratification.

The game industry has one purpose and one purpose along–create video games that generate revenue. They do this by creating games that serve nitch communities, specific genres, creative games, games that push the envelope. Just like you wouldn’t stifle the creativity of a great painter (hell we watch them get hyped up on drugs and marvel at the art that they produce), and yet what would painters or other artists produce, if they had people rating their art as being too riske or inappropriate, or instilling the belief that there is hate or other harmful idea’s that could be misunderstood by impressionable minds?

I think the answer is two fold, first it’s ridiculous to even consider doing something like that, and second the produced art is going to hit that glass ceiling. We are there with games, as the envelope rarely gets pushed nowadays in fear of backlash by the consumer market. People have rights, they have the right not to buy, they have the right to choice. But with rights come responsibilities, so we have the responsibility of being sensible, the responsibility of doing our own due diligence when it comes to ourselves and our children, and the responsibility to not blame others for our own short comings.

We should be comfortable to make mistakes and admit we are wrong, as this only leads us to do things better the next time. But our pride can sometimes get in the way of that, as we are creatures that do not like to be put into situations where we are embarrassed or humiliated. Video games can challenge our minds and we have yet to tap the incredible potential that games have to offer. Why don’t we stop blaming them for not controlling the content that they produce, and instead focus our attention on environment, engagement, and involvement.