Zefir

Fear works in a different way. It needs less triggers. Imagine a situation in the far away past of humanity: you are on a hunt in a jungle. Noise everywhere, everything living and moving. You notice a different sort of movement in the corner of your eye, getting closer. If that person wasn't sensitive to danger, he would probably day. Fear is your alarm, telling you that something's wrong, that you better get ready for something. It's not as clear as someone insulting you. Danger might be anywhere, and you got to be ready for that far more than to fight for dominance in the tribe or stuff like that. The parents thing is a big one. But that's a deeper problem. No bad substance or specific group of people. Good families don't have time to care about their children as much as they should. They prioritize work above family, often because of rational, logical reasons: "I got to feed my family" "If I won't work now, we won't have a roof under our heads and kid won't get proper education" etc. You could call it the plague of current century or so.

It depends how very young the kid is. Sure, let's say- a 5 year old watches a violent scene on TV. He probably knows when someone is hurt, and may not yet understand that people on the screen aren't real, and the recording of it isn't real either. Let's actually start talking about adults. If a grown man sees a real life equivalent of carnage in a normal shooter, he would go insane. Soldier in his lifetime kills less people than a kid in a single game. Violence affects everyone, regardless of age. However we can distinguish reality from fiction. We had books, paintings, plays, movies, and now games. None of those mediums warped our minds, made us sick. That's because they affect 2 senses at most. We KNOW that they aren't real because at the moment of watching/reading we sit in a comfortable position, in our houses, where nothing is wrong, not FEELING anything outside what we IMAGINE. Imagine the different levels of immersion: I- A kid is told that in World War II died over 60 million people. Kid doesn't give a damn, those are just numbers. Why not billions? Those are bigger. II- Kid is shown pictures from the war, all the dead bodies, crying mothers, sheer ruin and destruction. Kids uses his imagination and yeah, that would suck, being there. III- Kid goes to a place that had been ravaged by war a long time ago. Marks still remain, that black mark on the wall? It was a person who got burned alive. Chills run down the spine. A real life ghost story. IV- Kid goes to war. Sees soldiers raping women, killing children, houses burning, sheer madness and destruction of war. If he survives, he won't need an explanation, why war is bad. He will know it, feel it. I had the same reaction when told about the war. Seriously, millions dead in numbers didn't make an impression on me, but hearing of decapitation, rape and piles of dead bodies of a thousand civilians in a single village? That I still remember. Sorry for the rant but seriously: reality is reality, fiction is fiction, we know the difference, and kids know that too. Taking it away without anything in exchange is not going to make thins better. Sure we know that stuff is needed, but it's not enough. It's going to keep some parents at bay, but kids? They won't really know why it would be bad for them. We need to talk about that, just like smoking or drinking- it's bad for you, especially when you are under 18, but if no one bother to explain the effects of it on you body and mind, you are going to try it out of sheer curiosity, or preference, or rebellion or anything really. Bad stuff is out there, in the world. Not outside the border, in some 3rd world country, but here in our neighborhoods. Kids will bump into that when they go to school, or into their friends houses. They will interact with that like it's airborne. If they won't protect themselves, then no one will, no one will be able to.

Kids don't take that kind of violence too seriously. In games it's part of play, imaginary, not real. Killing somebody in game is like pointing pistol-fingers at somebody, saying "pew-pew" and then declaring him dead. For many kids it is cool simply because they are used to awesome heroes beating the bad guys senseless. There isn't much coolness in preventing a conflict and being polite to people. Sure, those people are nice but can they punch a guy through a skyscraper and then land a car on them? Or beat up an entire army with nothing but a gun? I don't think so. Confronting kids with actual, real life in-front-of-their-eyes violence is whole different ordeal. They can distinguish play from actual, serious fight. Well, at least to a degree. Though I have to agree horror are scary regardless of age, and younger kids might take some mental scars from watching them, even if at the time they didn't feel any fear at all. I did play games like GTA in my childhood, however grabbing people out of their cars and driving them over wasn't taken seriously, since they weren't real. Even riding as a pimp was simply another taxi mission with beating up guys. The same goes for shooters. Yes, you shot guys, but then you died and respawned and they did too. Also they too didn't show much of intelligence or any sign of being "real" more than an action figure. After 16, age restrictions lose most of its sense. Sure, things like porn is still for adults only. But rating a game like that because there's actual gore or saucy scenes will only act as a forbidden fruit to take as an act of rebellion, or simply because of the value it gains from being prohibited. If parents don't want their kids to take that kind of games/movies, then they should first explain it to them. Perhaps even show what do they mean, so kids themselves understand. Still, it's just my opinion. Research out there show mixed messages when it comes to effect of video games on children, though they probably don't take seeing material of inappropriate age as a big factor. We have an entire generation of gamers, many of them growing up with violent video games. Does it make a difference, if we replace blowing up robots to shooting people? They still are but a fantasy to children, who never seen a wound outside a minor cut or had a big chunk of skin on their leg ripped off.