Yes, you read the headline right! On October 9th, several leaders from both church and charity groups in England had a round-table discussion with The Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association and came away with the conclusion that, in fact, games can have a positive impact on people’s lives, especially children’s.
Several interesting points were brought up in the article (found here):
- That children now see gaming as an everyday life activity, as evidenced by average TV watching going down from 3 hours a day to 2.5 sinced 2001.
- That parents can make their own decisions based off of the ratings given to games by the PEGI rating system.
- That the industry’s job is to make the ratings and inform people, but to still let parents make the decisions.
- Gaming (especially social video games) can be used by teachers and parents to help talk about boundaries and learn what is acceptable socially both in games and in the real world.
- Games can be used to open a dialogue between parents and children (talking about the type of games the children are playing, for example.
- Parents need to be engaged as well to ensure their kids stay safe in the evironment of online gaming.
What I really liked about these points is that it is clear where these groups believe the responsibility of the industry ends and the responsiblity of parents again. Especially in the United States, where game companies and the like are sued time and time again because someone’s thirteen-year-old got a copy of Grand Theft Auto and the parents were shocked by the violent contents, it’s refreshing to see groups outside of the industry saying that parents have a responsibility when it comes to their children’s gaming, too. I believe it’s important to understand that the industry can only do so much to help parents choose the right games for their kids.
That the roundtable legitimately saw games as tools to help children about socially acceptable behaviour was fascinating, as well. I hope in the future that more people will begin to see games for the educational tools that they can easily be, and not just as wastes of time or trivial pursuits.
Lastly, this article gave me hope that with a clear dialogue between the industry and family interest groups, a productive line of discussion can be started that is in everyone’s best interest, thereby benefiting everyone, gamer or not.
Today’s photo is by flickr user gailf548. The original photo can be found here and is used under the Creative Commons License. It should also be noted that I was linked to this story through Kotaku.
