Agent 007, James Bond, deftly bungee-jumps down a thundering dam after felling enemies right and left and picking up the machine guns and hand grenades of his slain opponents.Ahhh, the video game. America’s new favorite pastime. Unrealistic and dangerously captivating influence, or just a hi-tech way for kids to have fun? Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog and Princess Zelda are beloved old friends to almost any kid who grew up in the 80s. I mean, come on, video games aren’t that bad. They foster a healthy sense of competition. They allow eager youngsters to form important social bonds while engaging in active group problem-solving strategies. They teach children important technical skills such as squishing evil animated mushrooms and shooting depraved minions who obstruct your path to the princess. And, lucky for us, there are plenty of new games every year so that we can continue this vital learning process well into our college years.Video games can be fun. There’s no denying it. But recently it seems like life has become one big video game, with no consequences and a reset button at your fingertips for whenever you mess up. Obviously not the greatest tool to teach budding young minds about the realities of life, and obviously not the most useful way to raise people who are patient, compassionate and non-violent. In recent years, violent video games, movies and television shows have become the target of angry parents who blame them for showing their children how to be violent. Kids who do bad things must be under the hypnotic influence of fake machine guns and violent action scenes, right? The plots of many video games and movies are to shoot as many bad guys as possible. This probably does affect young minds, as they are exposed at a young age to highly violent scenes and ultimately excited by them. Who can deny the thrill in your belly when you whop that bad guy?But where do you draw the line between admitting that TV and video games are not the ideal learning tools, and blaming them for the havoc your children wreak?We all remember the scandal over the movie “The Program.” You know, the two guys who lay down in the middle of a highway to reenact a scene in the movie. They ended up yanking the scene because the parents blamed the movie for their childrens’ accident.There’s also the famous Beavis and Butthead incident, where a young kid watching the show was inspired to set his home on fire, killing his younger sister.These seem like pretty clear cases of the media influencing the actions of impressionable young children. But if movies and video games are to blame for those incidents, shouldn’t we be able to blame everything stupid that people do on something they played or watched? Let’s take a moment to ponder several recent events. Some teenagers from Arkansas decide to steal 23 pounds of mercury from an abandoned chemical plant and contaminate half the town while showing their friends how cool it is to dip your arms into a tank of the stuff and watch it slowly drip off.This may not have been a highly intelligent maneuver. Excuse me, but this is obviously the influence of the evil chemist Dr. Mario. I hope that the parents of these kids, like the parents of so many delinquents before them, will realize they are not to blame. But adults are not immune from the television disease. How about the infamous skiing into trees incidents? Clearly a case of too much Sonic the Hedgehog. Or maybe Wiley Coyote? Or the Tasmanian Devil?The Unabomber? Simple. Bomberman.Major international conflicts and hidden land mines? Definitely Minesweeper.So where does it all turn ridiculous? Where do you accept the blame for your actions, and where is it appropriate to censor shows and games to stop people from doing silly and dangerous things? How do you admit that the brutal images children see every day affect their mentalities, and at the same time make people take responsibility for their mistakes? We can’t deny that the violence kids experience on TV and in video games doesn’t contribute in some ways to their stupid and dangerous blunders. But you also can’t deny that people will do dumb things anyway, and you can’t shirk the responsibility of raising children who know when to separate fantasy from reality. Most importantly, we all have to remember that we ultimately make our own decisions, and that life does not have a reset button.
Jessica Weeks is a frequent Lantern contributor who believes virtually everything she sees on television. She thinks this makes her a more discriminating human being.
