Just quickly (as I’m attempting to move house this week): Family First NZ want GTA IV banned. What’s new.
National Director of Family First NZ, Bob McCoskrie, says it’s completely unrealistic to believe that young people will not be influenced in their attitudes and behaviours by constant exposure to this type of material.
Their press release quotes David Grossman, author of Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill, who suggests games like GTA are killing simulators. Grossman compares violent video games to the kind of simulators astronauts use to learn with:
?Certain types of these (video) games are actually killing simulators, and they teach our kids to kill in much the same way the astronauts on Apollo 11 learned how to fly to the moon without ever leaving the ground? The interactive quality, the intensity of the violence, the physiological reactions, all serve to connect the player?s feelings of exhilaration and accomplishment directly to the violent images of video games.
Thank god there’s no astronaut games for the Xbox. We’d have kids flying to the moon when they should be doing homework! Chaos.
NZ’s Chief Censor Bill Hastings says parents who allow their children to play a restricted video game are breaking the law.
“The racing game has been given an R18 rating for a good reason and parents should monitor what their children are playing.”
Expect two weeks of much the same coverage here.
