Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Shifting Blame
My issue with morality in advertising is not so much that it should be super regulated or that the impact is unquestionably the cause of negative societal qualities, but rather how the advertisers, entertainment industry, and news media try to shift blame and responsibility. I am very sick of hearing that the responsibility is on the parents. In today's society, it is very unfortunate that many working families have to decide between employing both spouses to ensure say a child's future education, or choosing short term care and oversight - possibly limiting the child's future opportunities. Our middle class is no longer in any shape to have one spouse with an average job carrying the flag of the burdensome American Dream. These people are not bad parents. We will not be bad parents when we are forced to make the same decisions. But when I come home while my dad is at work and my mom is cooking dinner after a long day herself, it is always a bit horrifying to see what is being indoctrinated into my nine year old sister from the internet or the television. Moreover technology such as site blocking and monitoring or channel control is often more in favor of the under 10 generation than our parents.
Given these circumstances I believe that is everyone's duty to be careful of the messages they put out. Personally I am a big fan of video games such as Halo, Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, etc (if you aren't familiar these are all pretty violent). I may even concede that age requirements should be slackened because i believe i could handle some of those titles at say age 13. However, explicitly vulgar material such as sections of grand theft auto could easily be informed to the buyer. For any such product (this technique probably wouldn't work with cigarettes) the seller should be required to ask the buyer who the game is intended for (as many Christmas shopping grandmas may have no idea what the hell a video game is) and then inform the buyer that it cannot be sold in such cases. If the buyer lies and says a false age, then the moral fault is clearly on them, but at least there is some more accountability. This can be applied to movies, magazines, etc.
I love rock music (remember the Beatles and Elvis?), I love counter culture, I see the parallels of breaking down barriers. However the moral decay of our country can not be ignored. News media should not necessarily use what sells (war, murder, etc) with graphic depiction while ignoring other issues completely. Why not just report the facts? Excessive visuals and descriptions desensitize us or put violent ideas into our heads in the first place. This kind of regulation does not destroy free will or keep people ignorant. People would then understand when violence is truly necessary.
The means for such action is really unimportant. In general, ask yourself: Is better for morality to be solely the responsibility of parents... or everyone? It's really that simple.
(posted for Lennon Pukowsky)
I think the shifting of the blame that you mention here is quite fair. It's not really a shift of blame, but a shift of responsibility. The people that develop and produce the video games have every right to do create these games. There is a system in place known as the ESRB system... it tells you what age the games are appropriate for. Outside of a few scandalous things that leak through (the hot coffee would be the most glaring one), all content in a game must be made known to the people that give the games the ratings. It is then up to the retailer not to sell the games to people that are under age.
This is where the responsibility is shifted to the parents. You listed 3 game series: Grand The Auto, Halo, and Call of Duty. The ESRB rating for all Halo games is M, Grand Theft Auto varies between M and T (and the pre-rerelease version of San Andreas re-labeled as AO), and all of the Call of Duty games are rated T.
What this essentially means is that there is content within the games that parents may not want their children under that specific age to play. If there is a ratings systems for these game - that is supposed to be legally enforced as well - then the parent had to purchase the game, and was aware of the type of contents in the game as well. Here's the description on the ESRB label for Call of Duty 3 "Blood, Language, Violence." I consider that to be both descriptive as to why the game has that label and general enough to be mass-applied to many games.
Now, I've assumed that the parent would have to be the supplier for the game. This is certainly not true, as you mentioned it could be the young person's grandmother buying the game. Again, it is her responsibility to look at the little box on the back of the game and see what types of possibly offensive content is inside before she purchases this for her 12 year old grandson. I should think that she knows her grandson well enough to decide whether or not he is mature enough to handle that type of content.
On top of all this... there is hopefully some amount of involvement between parents and their children's lives, at least in terms of what is going on in the child's life. If video games are a large part of a child's life, then the parent should know what types of games his or her child is playing. As a little closing anecdote, several years ago (I believe around when I was in 8th grade), there was a segment on the news that said you're a good, involved parent in the life of your child if you can name at least 2 of his or her friends. I found that ridiculous, if you think that that's asking too much of the parent because of extremely pressing circumstances (which I find to be so extreme that they are perhaps almost unreachable to a standard family), then I suppose we are on different thought patterns here and will not be able to agree on anything, since we are likely arguing for conclusions based on extremely different premises.
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