The video game industry is very responsible of ratings with their video games. This proposal is rediculous. If you as a parent are not responsible enough to safeguard your child from things you do not want them to be exposed to at an early age that is noone's fault but your own. Because a video game visually exposes you to violence is no reason to ban them. If thats the case let's ban action movies too. While we're at it, let's ban history classes too. It is not ethical to try and place a ban on such a thing that is occuring everywhere. Children don't get violent because of video games. They get violent because of the way they are treated and raised. This is a way to divert problems that are initially caused by the shortcomings of the parents themselves raising their children.
On another note, Granted that I am a gamer I am not biased to just this side. I do agree that children of a certain age should not play certain games because of their content. But this is my responsibility to my children not the government's responsibility. For all of you that want to argue the point that they can't regulate what goes on in other homes, that is a tedious issue and hardly matters. If they are exposed to it once so what. Its not going to be the last time they are exposed to violence and they're not going to turn into a demon seed because they saw it so give it a rest.
Video games give people more than anyone cares to admit. I'd like to share an article with you all that are willing to read it about a couple statistics of people that play video games. All rights go to www.economist.com
Science and technology
BabbageIn praise of video gamesWhy World of Warcraft is good for you
Sep 13th 2010, 15:40 by N.L. | LONDON
VIDEO games have been blamed for the ills of the world. Parents worry that violent games make their children antisocial, violent, shallow, and obese, and are breeding a generation that cannot sustain their concentration. Screen time is routinely limited, much to the chagrin of their keyboard-pounding offspring.
Help is at hand in the form of a new study from cognitive scientists at the University of Rochester. As we report in this week's issue of The Economist, this suggests that video gamers make faster and more accurate decisions. The work is published in Current Biology. What was particularly interesting was that the faster reaction times of the video gamers could be acquired by non-video gamers in 50 hours of training over a few weeks. But for the benefits to accrue, they had to play a particular sort of game.
Only those who played fast-moving action video games such as "Call of Duty 2" and "Unreal Tournament" saw an improvement in their decision-making skills. Rather ironically, players of "The Sims 2", a game where one has to decide how to organise an entire simulated world, did not benefit this way. Those trained with action video-games were 25% faster at coming to a conclusion, and answered just as many questions correctly.
The scientists conclude that video-game players develop an enhanced sensitivity to what is going on around them, and this may help with activities such as multitasking, driving, reading small print, navigation and keeping track of friends or children in a crowd. The precise neural mechanism for this effect is still unknown. What is known, however, is that people make decisions based on probabilities, which are constantly being calculated and refined in their heads—something called “probabilistic inference”. The brain collects small pieces of information, eventually gathering enough to make an accurate decision. When driving a car, for example, these many probabilities will be collated to make decisions such as whether or not to brake. The more efficient one is at collecting visual and auditory information, the faster a person can reach the threshold needed to make a decision.
Of course, parents can take heart from the fact that while the study does suggest some benefit in action video games, it does not imply that one must do nothing else. Nor, indeed, does the study compare the benefits of training on action video games with those of other activities that involve switching off the computer and getting a life.