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My Four-Year-Old Son Plays Grand Theft Auto

109 points by kingsley_20 16y ago

moxiemk1 16y ago
This speaks to why people are afraid of Grand Theft Auto: it isn't intrinsically bad; it can sometimes, however, speak a lot about people playing it. Even more so, though, it also speaks a lot that about our society that it places a lot of value on decisions people make _in a game_.
- ebtalley 16y ago
  and its a lot easier to express criminal behavior within the game without any repercussion, coupling that with a young mind that hasn't grown the mental aptitude to distinguish could lead to some ugly mishap's. We have a separate child's court for all of the above reasons.
mkramlich 16y ago
I think the author is dangerously naive because young children, much more so than adults, have a hard time distinguishing between the real world and one's imagination. For them, the border is much more fluid and harder to see. And it's not like we're talking about a 14 year old playing D&D here with heroes and castles and dragons, oh my, but rather a 4 year old with cops, hookers, pimps, drugs, car chases, mugging and vandalism.
- xenophanes 16y ago
  How do you know you aren't just a child with an overactive imagination who think's he's an adult? Since you say a child couldn't reliably tell the difference... It's really dehumanizing to take a very large group of people and basically say they are incapable of decent thought like you and need to be controlled. [edit: added the word "reliably"]
  - tptacek 16y ago
    My guess is that the answer to your rhetorical question is "science".
    - xenophanes 16y ago
      Which science?
      - tptacek 16y ago
        Developmental psychology. Avoid exposing preschoolers to violent media and video games. It's correlated with increased aggression and poorer judgement. It's also --- and here I'll have a harder time citing sources --- cruel. I felt bad for the little boy when he felt bad about "running someone over". There was no reason to expose him to this kind of emotional confusion. It is not "dehumanizing" to suggest that a 4 year old doesn't have the same cognitive function as a 14 year old.
        xenophanes 16y ago
        Even if I accept that it's correlated, that doesn't mean the exposure is bad in any way. Games can be correlated to aggressiveness but also reduce aggressiveness. Correlation isn't causation.
        CamperBob 16y ago
        It's correlated with increased aggression and poorer judgement. And for the love of Dr. Spock, don't let them play Cops and Robbers, either!
        tptacek 16y ago
        How peer-reviewed were Spock's conclusions?
      - mkramlich 16y ago
        We don't even need to cite "science." Just having been a child at one time, and now an adult, and seen and interacted with children, should give plenty of experiential evidence consistent with my original comment's claim. This is really not rocket science or esoteric: it's actually pretty much part of everyday common sense for a lot of adults, especially for anybody that is a parent or who has taken care of children professionally. No academic paper citing is needed.
- Tichy 16y ago
  What exactly is the danger, though - that the 4 year old will try to steal a police car the next day? I think there are lots of different studies. One I heard about years ago was that kids tend to have an individual level of violence in stories/movies that they want to tolerate. So it is questionable if the kid would seek out the violent situations. After all, he was not playing alone. Sure, in GTA you could probably walk into a brothel and meet prostitutes. But so you could in the Real World TM. Perhaps like in the real world, not much bad stuff would happen in GTA if parents are watching.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    No. The danger is that the child is going to: * Be harmed emotionally by the events, possibly in subtle ways; for instance, the child will have nightmares. Will nightmares permanently damage the kid? No. But neither does stubbing your toe. You don't wish that on a kid either. * As a result of that, or because of learning the wrong message from the experience, the child will act out in ways that will (a) harm other kids and (b) (more importantly) get the kid into needless trouble. No, he's not going to go steal a car or run over an old lady. Nobody is saying that. But I'm going to stick up for the original poster who, like me, was apparently made queasy by the idea of exposing a FOUR YEAR OLD to GRAND THEFT AUTO. Freely admitted: my first reaction to this story was, "aw, that's so cute." The negative stuff crept up on me.
    - abstractbill 16y ago
      I don't disagree with your overall point, but I think you picked a bad example. While I wouldn't wish for my kid to stub a toe at any given moment, I also wouldn't want her to grow up without the experience of toe-stubbing - it teaches a valuable lesson (be careful of where you put your feet!).
      - tptacek 16y ago
        Life is going to deal out enough stubbed toes without us having to arrange for the occurrence, right?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
jcl 16y ago
As a side note, I was really disappointed that Rockstar omitted the ambulance and firefighter missions in GTA IV. The ambulance missions were one of my favorite parts of the pre-GTA4 games -- challenging and well-rewarded. (Edit: ...and, as the article shows, these missions are some of the only pieces of the game that could be played entirely ethically -- which may be why they were removed. I'm surprised no one's created a similar driving-and-saving-lives sandbox game outside of GTA, although the taxi minigame is similar to Crazy Taxi, which may be where GTA got the idea in the first place.)
- dantheman 16y ago
  GTA is quite an old franchise, GTA 1 & 2 were both top down games. You could drive a taxi/bus and pick up people. The game was really quite fun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_2 Free download from rock* http://www.rockstargames.com/classics/ http://www.rockstargames.com/classics/
  - GFischer 16y ago
    Thanks for the link, didn't know they were downloadable for free! (huge props to Rockstar). I loved GTA2, never played 3 and beyond because I was always behind the tech curve for the moment (and fairly busy with studies).
- shrikant 16y ago
  Pretty darn old, but there was one such: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter
  - robgough 16y ago
    I loved the demo for that game, but could never actually find it for sale anywhere!
Jun8 16y ago
What the ... This is truly unbelievable. If the kid wants to drive cars, there are tons of games available (my three year old loves one such game on iPad). And you can't argue that it isn't "intrinsically bad" either, a lot of stuff that is OK for grownups (alcohol, nudity, coke) may be bad for kids and may cause permanent psychological damage. Do you want to risk it?
- jcl 16y ago
  Granted, drugs can hurt kids, but I'd be surprised to find that nudity has ever been shown to cause permanent psychological damage; otherwise we'd never have made it out of the trees. Do you have any references supporting that view?
  - tptacek 16y ago
    My understanding --- which I can't in any way back up --- is that exposure to nudity was pretty much the norm for most of human history, in that families lived together in single rooms. It's the (accidentally or otherwise) killing people part that bothers me about this. I've studiously avoided exposing my (now 10.5 and 8.5 year old) kids to sexual material because it's unpleasant for me to have to deal with the questions (though the boy's pretty much already gotten the details formally now). But violence still bothers me.
    - ahlatimer 16y ago
      I find it odd that sexuality and nudity are considered to be the worst things you can expose to a child. Violence, up to a point, is tolerated, but any display of sexuality is seen as adults only. Speaking directly of GTA, yes, there was some outcry over the violence contained, but the hot coffee mod received far more attention. I've met a fair number of people who've had sex, and have had it myself, and I can't say that many have been seriously emotionally damaged because of it [1]. I've also met a few people that have taken the lives of others [2]. The damage done to someone by them killing someone else is miles away from the damage done to someone by having sex (if there even is any). [1]: Excluding a few people I've met who have been raped. [2]: I used to work for the military.
yread 16y ago
I always thought it was kind of obvious that the rating for the games meant without adult supervision. When you sit behind your kid and take care of him and stress the difference between real life and game (and do not let him play for 20 hours straight) then almost any game would be ok.
- frossie 16y ago
  When you sit behind your kid and take care of him [...] then almost any game would be ok I agree about your larger point (there is a huge difference between supervised and unsupervised play), but no, almost any game would not be okay for a four year old. Four is a pretty critical age - kids start grasping the concept of death for example - and really, there are a lot of games that are developmentally completely inappropriate for this age. The sad thing is that it came down to "my kid liked driving the car". If there is one thing the gaming world isn't short of, it's kid-appropriate driving games. Kids grow up so fast - why rush it? Let them play the kiddie games now, there will be lots of time for GTA later.
  - Splines 16y ago
    > If there is one thing the gaming world isn't short of, it's kid-appropriate driving games. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a current gen sandbox driving game that is suitable for children. I think the only one I can think of off-hand would be Test Drive: Unlimited (which is a great game, btw, and probably more suitable for the child in this article). There's probably more Need For Speed games or Mario Kart clones that I can think of, but very few driving games that are not focused on winning a race. Thinking back a few years, the Crazy Taxi-type games are also good for children, although a good representation from the genre hasn't really been seen.
    - frossie 16y ago
      Yeah I agree there aren't many sandbox driving games per se, but many race games have open modes, or modes that can be played as open (eg. the Crash Team Racing time trial modes). The problem I have with GTA is not that the Kid! Is! Ruined! by playing it in the context described, but that once you give it to them you can't take it away - and in another year or so, that kid is going to figure out that there really is a way to properly play the game. But yes, there is the bigger problem of many gamers wanting to introduce their kids to games and there isn't a whole lot of really optimal material out there.
ericd 16y ago
How is this Hacker News? This belongs on Reddit.
- kingsley_20 16y ago
  I thought it was an interesting insight into a real child's mind, as opposed to the usual fearmongering that goes with such games usually. I thought it was cool that the child used his will against the overwhelming thrust of the game in an unconscious manner and won. If it is possible for the negative images and activity have a negative impact on his future life, then I'd argue that his actual heroic actions inside the game portend well for his future.
- tptacek 16y ago
  I won't cry if this gets flagged but I like any HN discussion that touches on parenthood, because it's another experience besides coding and entrepreneurship that I might share with people here.
  - shrikant 16y ago
    ..and provides for a classic hackers' sparring session: hands-on experience in one corner vs. those who've read all about it in the other.
- johngunderman 16y ago
  I think the conversation about this post is considerably more interesting and enlightening than what you would be likely to see from the same post on reddit.
  - ericd 16y ago
    I agree, the conversation was fairly interesting, but the problem with the news feed widening its focus is that the site becomes interesting to a wider variety of people, with a tendency to regress towards the mean.
minouye 16y ago
So when he turns 8 and starts wasting innocent bystanders for fun, do you take the game away?
- chrischen 16y ago
  I thought the point of the article was that the kid didn't waste innocent bystanders. In fact, he apologized for it when he accidentally did it. I'm sure if he keeps playing it one day he'll do the missions and be exposed to the bad stuff, but by then I'm sure he'd be able to distinguish between game and real life.
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    He didn't waste innocent bystanders during the particular play session(s) the blog post was documenting. True. But that's irrelevant and distinct from the notion of whether he will be more likely to do it at some future point in life, or do other related actions which result from a lack of empathy for other human beings, or a lack of understanding of negative consequences, or the permanance of harm in the real world. I hear a lot of black-vs-white arguments in debates around this issue, but the problem is that it's not about black or white states or actions. Yes, having a 4 year old play GTA will not instantly turn him into a monster. And a kid can become a monster without ever playing GTA. Neither of those data points disproves a range of other possible negative effects that have shades of gray impact in the real world.
    - chrischen 16y ago
      > He didn't avoid these things because I told him he counldn't try them. It just never occurred to him to commit these acts. Does the game cause kids to go bad or is the game simply a litmus test for evil? The little baby kid didn't waste bystanders because the game doesn't tell you to do that. Perhaps your first instinct is to kill innocent bystanders when you think of sandbox style worlds... but for this kid apparently it's not. Even if it was, the game wouldn't be at fault. I'm pretty sure even if he did the missions, and understood the dialogue, he wouldn't be made to do such things because the missions don't usually have you kill innocent people.
CamperBob 16y ago
I'd sure like to see some peer-reviewed scientific literature, where the peers in question aren't all members of evangelical Christian pressure groups, that documents the 'harm' done to young children by media. If children are that easily traumatized, how can any child grow up to become a healthy adult in a real war zone?
- tptacek 16y ago
  See upthread. The Department of Psychology at Iowa State and Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health aren't evangelical Christian pressure groups. Let's not bring culture war into this. Oh, the answer to your second question might be sometimes they can't.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  I don't think they can grow up in a war zone and not being screwed up if the war is real enough (the US is technically a warzone with Iraq, but it isn't something that is ever going to matter).
kingsley_20 16y ago
I posted this here because I think the actual actions of the child, against overwhelming odds, are probably a more credible indicator of its future than any images of filth he may have encountered. If you believe that playing this game and seeing hookers and blow will turn you into a delinquent, then what this kid did should turn him into IronMan.
WalterGR 16y ago
I found this article incredibly disturbing. Instead of plowing into the rear of the car ahead of him, he swerved to the right and popped up onto to sidewalk. In doing so, he accidently ran over a woman walking towards his oncoming car. He was incredibly ashamed of himself and profusely apologized. I was an extremely sensitive young boy. This would have been deeply affecting to me at the time. “It's okay. It's only a game. It's not real”, I reassured him. After a few minutes of me explaining the difference between a game and real life, he felt comfortable enough to continue playing. Dear god. I really hope the scene played out like: - Child was disturbed - Father was reassuring - Child continued playing entirely of his own volition And not like: - Child was disturbed - Father was reassuring and encouraged child to continue playing, because it's okay to kill people in a game - Child continued playing
- JoeAltmaier 16y ago
  I understand you completely. I was chilled when I read "Its okay. It's only a game." Its true of course, but probably beyond a child's reasoning. Imagine "Its only baseball, cheat all you want". But here, its running over people.
sigzero 16y ago
I think he is an idiot. What a way to ruin a child.
sliverstorm 16y ago
To those of you who are all for this kid playing GTA- Would you feel differently if this was Manhunt 2? Or would that be totally cool as well.
miguelpais 16y ago
Much is said about protecting children from video games, but what about other mediums (mainly TV, given its exposure)? Any station can air some movie at 4pm featuring the good cops shooting the bad guys. Or, for instance, it is easy to be watching some news report at dinner and being exposed to something beating the horror or gore movies by points. Aren't kids exposed since birth to the notion that violence becomes acceptable if against the bad guys? Where goes the moral of don't to others what you don't want to be done to you? Even some very successful animated movies like Lion King end up with the bad guy being killed. Either intentionally or not, kids end up satisfied that the bad guy had what he deserved and that all become happily ever after. I'm not for one side or the other, I just wanted to raise some questions to see what you guys think. I don't think video games are bad for children, but I agree they have to be picked appropriately for their age. But I also think we end up avoiding violence in the obvious places but letting kids completely exposed to it in another ones.
- ErrantX 16y ago
  > Any station can air some movie at 4pm featuring the good cops shooting the bad guys. Here in the UK there are actually quite good limits on that. I'm not sure you would, say, ever see Starsky and Hutch (the film) on at 4pm. > Or, for instance, it is easy to be watching some news report at dinner and being exposed to something beating the horror or gore movies by points. Honestly; I'd say that could be beneficial more than damaging. I wouldn't, obviously, recommend showing it to kids. But if they end up watching something bad at least it's real and real people have probably died. Surely that sends the right message ("hurting people is bad")
  - miguelpais 16y ago
    > Here in the UK there are actually quite good limits on that. I'm not sure you would, say, ever see Starsky and Hutch (the film) on at 4pm. I'm from Portugal and here is quite usual to see some Mission Impossible, van Dame or Schwarzenegger movie on at 4pm. Actually, most of the movies aired at Saturday and Sunday afternoons are something like PG-13. Since here there are only 4 broadcast conventional channels, and many people don't have cable, it is quite easy for kids to be exposed to such movies.
singlow 16y ago
Does everyone here believe this guy? The guy spins a good tale, but I seriously doubt this happened. It is at the best an elaboration.
mbubb 16y ago
I think about this all the time. 2 boys 3 and 6 yrs old. I cringed a bit when I saw the title because it made me think of the term 'alterna-dad' and of a style of parenting in which children become accessories and 'buddies' to their extended adolescent parents. Sport matching mohawks, etc, etc. But the article was nothing like that. It is short but the feeling I got was of true exploration and of forging a real relationship. (Another HN post of the past few days talked about how you have +/- 10 yrs to connect with yr kid). It also reminded me (as other posters noted) of that SouthPark where they all play WOW and meet Randy in game. Or the classic 'Chinpokemon'. Two really well done episodes - in both cases parents wade through unfamiliar territory to meet their kids and understand them better. Not simply ban the game. There is danger in letting your chidren do certain things. The impulse to bubblewrap them is strong. I catch my breath everytime they do things like walk with me out on our balcony (17th floor), ride the scooter in the skatepark, climb on the rocks in the park across from our apartment, etc. But I consciously hold myself back - watching them but not rushing in to stop them. This week end my 3 yr old got punched full in the face by a 5 yr old. I held back for a count of 10 to let him deal with it as he wanted to and then comforted him a bit and broght him back so he could feel safe playing around this kid. The point is to show them experientially that you trust them - and that you are in the background to help them if things get scary. I felt that vibe from this writer and applaud that. In truth I have no idea of what I am doing. I use my intuition as a guide and hope I am right. What he says about the ESRB is spot on. If - as a parent - you need a school, govt agency or rating agency to tell you what is safe for your kid - then you are screwed. You need to go through it with your child and see for yourself. You can get good advice from individuals - teachers, other parents, certain writers - but not from agencies and bureacracies. As a parent dealing with impact of media in general is a challenge. For the past 2 yrs we went off cable tv and started to rely completely on the internet/ public library/ netflix for movies etc. I have held off on getting Wii/ x-box, etc in favor of PC based games. They have both watched tons of anime and comics (particularly stuff like Miyazaki Hayako (sp?) and the Avatar series). They both love Futurama - which might be too adult at times for them. I will have to explain 'death by snoo-snoo' one of these days. My older son has learned to really enjoy some of the games that an Ubuntu distribution has to offer - things like Wormux, OpenSonic, BattleTanks. He has looked over my sholder as I have played some of the Doom emulations on the android or the Quake-like games on Ubuntu. From hacker news I found out about the Wolfire free bundle and he fell in love with the Samorost series. He cried when it was done and drew a big picture of what he thought the next episode should be. More recently on my wife's computer (WinXP) I downloaded Steam and setup the free version of Portal and bought a Tower Defense game to play. Every time we take the subway or wait somewhere my wife and/or I whip out the gPhone and let the two of them play android games. We try to limit this to certain times of the week etc. because of the vague fear that media will completely saturate their lives. It is not the violence alone that gives me pause. I knwo experientially how absorbing a good game is (thinking of days past playing Half-Life or Diablo, etc). I want them both to enjoy good media and I am loosely overlapping anime, movies and games because I feel like there is power in the imagery of soemthing like Half-Life or Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke" which affects you deeply. What often pisses me off are crappy movies in which the point is simply to sell a lifestyle. I hate movies like "Shark Tales" or "Madagascar" and I cant say exactly why. There are funny bit parts but the whole thing feels like it is in the service of what the philosopher Adorno referred to as the "Culture Industry". I find those movies more disturbing than somethign with more overt violence. In a very interesting way I think this goes back to Plato and his fear of 'poetry' by which he included dramatic arts. It was the fear of the power of images. We have reached the point where video games and anime have reached a complexity and depth of imagery that they have a life of their own. I know myself that these things affect me differently. I am trying to see through my sons' eyes to see how they are affected. At times it feels dangerous - like letting them speed ahead on their little bikes on the city sidewalk - but what this guy is doing is right. Watch them in the background, ready to bolt after them - let them know that you trust them and that you are there to help deal with the scary parts - let them experience it and learn from them as they reflect their experience back to you. Plato on images: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/ Culture Industry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry

109 points by kingsley_20 16y ago

This speaks to why people are afraid of Grand Theft Auto: it isn't intrinsically bad; it can sometimes, however, speak a lot about people playing it. Even more so, though, it also speaks a lot that about our society that it places a lot of value on decisions people make _in a game_.

ebtalley 16y ago
and its a lot easier to express criminal behavior within the game without any repercussion, coupling that with a young mind that hasn't grown the mental aptitude to distinguish could lead to some ugly mishap's. We have a separate child's court for all of the above reasons.

mkramlich 16y ago

I think the author is dangerously naive because young children, much more so than adults, have a hard time distinguishing between the real world and one's imagination. For them, the border is much more fluid and harder to see. And it's not like we're talking about a 14 year old playing D&D here with heroes and castles and dragons, oh my, but rather a 4 year old with cops, hookers, pimps, drugs, car chases, mugging and vandalism.

xenophanes 16y ago
How do you know you aren't just a child with an overactive imagination who think's he's an adult? Since you say a child couldn't reliably tell the difference... It's really dehumanizing to take a very large group of people and basically say they are incapable of decent thought like you and need to be controlled. [edit: added the word "reliably"]
- tptacek 16y ago
  My guess is that the answer to your rhetorical question is "science".
  - xenophanes 16y ago
    Which science?
    - tptacek 16y ago
      Developmental psychology. Avoid exposing preschoolers to violent media and video games. It's correlated with increased aggression and poorer judgement. It's also --- and here I'll have a harder time citing sources --- cruel. I felt bad for the little boy when he felt bad about "running someone over". There was no reason to expose him to this kind of emotional confusion. It is not "dehumanizing" to suggest that a 4 year old doesn't have the same cognitive function as a 14 year old.
      - xenophanes 16y ago
        Even if I accept that it's correlated, that doesn't mean the exposure is bad in any way. Games can be correlated to aggressiveness but also reduce aggressiveness. Correlation isn't causation.
      - CamperBob 16y ago
        It's correlated with increased aggression and poorer judgement. And for the love of Dr. Spock, don't let them play Cops and Robbers, either!
        tptacek 16y ago
        How peer-reviewed were Spock's conclusions?
    - mkramlich 16y ago
      We don't even need to cite "science." Just having been a child at one time, and now an adult, and seen and interacted with children, should give plenty of experiential evidence consistent with my original comment's claim. This is really not rocket science or esoteric: it's actually pretty much part of everyday common sense for a lot of adults, especially for anybody that is a parent or who has taken care of children professionally. No academic paper citing is needed.
Tichy 16y ago
What exactly is the danger, though - that the 4 year old will try to steal a police car the next day? I think there are lots of different studies. One I heard about years ago was that kids tend to have an individual level of violence in stories/movies that they want to tolerate. So it is questionable if the kid would seek out the violent situations. After all, he was not playing alone. Sure, in GTA you could probably walk into a brothel and meet prostitutes. But so you could in the Real World TM. Perhaps like in the real world, not much bad stuff would happen in GTA if parents are watching.
- tptacek 16y ago
  No. The danger is that the child is going to: * Be harmed emotionally by the events, possibly in subtle ways; for instance, the child will have nightmares. Will nightmares permanently damage the kid? No. But neither does stubbing your toe. You don't wish that on a kid either. * As a result of that, or because of learning the wrong message from the experience, the child will act out in ways that will (a) harm other kids and (b) (more importantly) get the kid into needless trouble. No, he's not going to go steal a car or run over an old lady. Nobody is saying that. But I'm going to stick up for the original poster who, like me, was apparently made queasy by the idea of exposing a FOUR YEAR OLD to GRAND THEFT AUTO. Freely admitted: my first reaction to this story was, "aw, that's so cute." The negative stuff crept up on me.
  - abstractbill 16y ago
    I don't disagree with your overall point, but I think you picked a bad example. While I wouldn't wish for my kid to stub a toe at any given moment, I also wouldn't want her to grow up without the experience of toe-stubbing - it teaches a valuable lesson (be careful of where you put your feet!).
    - tptacek 16y ago
      Life is going to deal out enough stubbed toes without us having to arrange for the occurrence, right?
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

jcl 16y ago

As a side note, I was really disappointed that Rockstar omitted the ambulance and firefighter missions in GTA IV. The ambulance missions were one of my favorite parts of the pre-GTA4 games -- challenging and well-rewarded. (Edit: ...and, as the article shows, these missions are some of the only pieces of the game that could be played entirely ethically -- which may be why they were removed. I'm surprised no one's created a similar driving-and-saving-lives sandbox game outside of GTA, although the taxi minigame is similar to Crazy Taxi, which may be where GTA got the idea in the first place.)

dantheman 16y ago
GTA is quite an old franchise, GTA 1 & 2 were both top down games. You could drive a taxi/bus and pick up people. The game was really quite fun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_2 Free download from rock* http://www.rockstargames.com/classics/ http://www.rockstargames.com/classics/
- GFischer 16y ago
  Thanks for the link, didn't know they were downloadable for free! (huge props to Rockstar). I loved GTA2, never played 3 and beyond because I was always behind the tech curve for the moment (and fairly busy with studies).
shrikant 16y ago
Pretty darn old, but there was one such: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter
- robgough 16y ago
  I loved the demo for that game, but could never actually find it for sale anywhere!

Jun8 16y ago

What the ... This is truly unbelievable. If the kid wants to drive cars, there are tons of games available (my three year old loves one such game on iPad). And you can't argue that it isn't "intrinsically bad" either, a lot of stuff that is OK for grownups (alcohol, nudity, coke) may be bad for kids and may cause permanent psychological damage. Do you want to risk it?

jcl 16y ago
Granted, drugs can hurt kids, but I'd be surprised to find that nudity has ever been shown to cause permanent psychological damage; otherwise we'd never have made it out of the trees. Do you have any references supporting that view?
- tptacek 16y ago
  My understanding --- which I can't in any way back up --- is that exposure to nudity was pretty much the norm for most of human history, in that families lived together in single rooms. It's the (accidentally or otherwise) killing people part that bothers me about this. I've studiously avoided exposing my (now 10.5 and 8.5 year old) kids to sexual material because it's unpleasant for me to have to deal with the questions (though the boy's pretty much already gotten the details formally now). But violence still bothers me.
  - ahlatimer 16y ago
    I find it odd that sexuality and nudity are considered to be the worst things you can expose to a child. Violence, up to a point, is tolerated, but any display of sexuality is seen as adults only. Speaking directly of GTA, yes, there was some outcry over the violence contained, but the hot coffee mod received far more attention. I've met a fair number of people who've had sex, and have had it myself, and I can't say that many have been seriously emotionally damaged because of it [1]. I've also met a few people that have taken the lives of others [2]. The damage done to someone by them killing someone else is miles away from the damage done to someone by having sex (if there even is any). [1]: Excluding a few people I've met who have been raped. [2]: I used to work for the military.

yread 16y ago

I always thought it was kind of obvious that the rating for the games meant without adult supervision. When you sit behind your kid and take care of him and stress the difference between real life and game (and do not let him play for 20 hours straight) then almost any game would be ok.

frossie 16y ago
When you sit behind your kid and take care of him [...] then almost any game would be ok I agree about your larger point (there is a huge difference between supervised and unsupervised play), but no, almost any game would not be okay for a four year old. Four is a pretty critical age - kids start grasping the concept of death for example - and really, there are a lot of games that are developmentally completely inappropriate for this age. The sad thing is that it came down to "my kid liked driving the car". If there is one thing the gaming world isn't short of, it's kid-appropriate driving games. Kids grow up so fast - why rush it? Let them play the kiddie games now, there will be lots of time for GTA later.
- Splines 16y ago
  > If there is one thing the gaming world isn't short of, it's kid-appropriate driving games. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a current gen sandbox driving game that is suitable for children. I think the only one I can think of off-hand would be Test Drive: Unlimited (which is a great game, btw, and probably more suitable for the child in this article). There's probably more Need For Speed games or Mario Kart clones that I can think of, but very few driving games that are not focused on winning a race. Thinking back a few years, the Crazy Taxi-type games are also good for children, although a good representation from the genre hasn't really been seen.
  - frossie 16y ago
    Yeah I agree there aren't many sandbox driving games per se, but many race games have open modes, or modes that can be played as open (eg. the Crash Team Racing time trial modes). The problem I have with GTA is not that the Kid! Is! Ruined! by playing it in the context described, but that once you give it to them you can't take it away - and in another year or so, that kid is going to figure out that there really is a way to properly play the game. But yes, there is the bigger problem of many gamers wanting to introduce their kids to games and there isn't a whole lot of really optimal material out there.

ericd 16y ago

How is this Hacker News? This belongs on Reddit.

kingsley_20 16y ago
I thought it was an interesting insight into a real child's mind, as opposed to the usual fearmongering that goes with such games usually. I thought it was cool that the child used his will against the overwhelming thrust of the game in an unconscious manner and won. If it is possible for the negative images and activity have a negative impact on his future life, then I'd argue that his actual heroic actions inside the game portend well for his future.
tptacek 16y ago
I won't cry if this gets flagged but I like any HN discussion that touches on parenthood, because it's another experience besides coding and entrepreneurship that I might share with people here.
- shrikant 16y ago
  ..and provides for a classic hackers' sparring session: hands-on experience in one corner vs. those who've read all about it in the other.
johngunderman 16y ago
I think the conversation about this post is considerably more interesting and enlightening than what you would be likely to see from the same post on reddit.
- ericd 16y ago
  I agree, the conversation was fairly interesting, but the problem with the news feed widening its focus is that the site becomes interesting to a wider variety of people, with a tendency to regress towards the mean.

minouye 16y ago

So when he turns 8 and starts wasting innocent bystanders for fun, do you take the game away?

chrischen 16y ago
I thought the point of the article was that the kid didn't waste innocent bystanders. In fact, he apologized for it when he accidentally did it. I'm sure if he keeps playing it one day he'll do the missions and be exposed to the bad stuff, but by then I'm sure he'd be able to distinguish between game and real life.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  He didn't waste innocent bystanders during the particular play session(s) the blog post was documenting. True. But that's irrelevant and distinct from the notion of whether he will be more likely to do it at some future point in life, or do other related actions which result from a lack of empathy for other human beings, or a lack of understanding of negative consequences, or the permanance of harm in the real world. I hear a lot of black-vs-white arguments in debates around this issue, but the problem is that it's not about black or white states or actions. Yes, having a 4 year old play GTA will not instantly turn him into a monster. And a kid can become a monster without ever playing GTA. Neither of those data points disproves a range of other possible negative effects that have shades of gray impact in the real world.
  - chrischen 16y ago
    > He didn't avoid these things because I told him he counldn't try them. It just never occurred to him to commit these acts. Does the game cause kids to go bad or is the game simply a litmus test for evil? The little baby kid didn't waste bystanders because the game doesn't tell you to do that. Perhaps your first instinct is to kill innocent bystanders when you think of sandbox style worlds... but for this kid apparently it's not. Even if it was, the game wouldn't be at fault. I'm pretty sure even if he did the missions, and understood the dialogue, he wouldn't be made to do such things because the missions don't usually have you kill innocent people.

CamperBob 16y ago

I'd sure like to see some peer-reviewed scientific literature, where the peers in question aren't all members of evangelical Christian pressure groups, that documents the 'harm' done to young children by media. If children are that easily traumatized, how can any child grow up to become a healthy adult in a real war zone?

tptacek 16y ago
See upthread. The Department of Psychology at Iowa State and Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health aren't evangelical Christian pressure groups. Let's not bring culture war into this. Oh, the answer to your second question might be sometimes they can't.
tomjen3 16y ago
I don't think they can grow up in a war zone and not being screwed up if the war is real enough (the US is technically a warzone with Iraq, but it isn't something that is ever going to matter).

kingsley_20 16y ago

I posted this here because I think the actual actions of the child, against overwhelming odds, are probably a more credible indicator of its future than any images of filth he may have encountered. If you believe that playing this game and seeing hookers and blow will turn you into a delinquent, then what this kid did should turn him into IronMan.

WalterGR 16y ago

I found this article incredibly disturbing. Instead of plowing into the rear of the car ahead of him, he swerved to the right and popped up onto to sidewalk. In doing so, he accidently ran over a woman walking towards his oncoming car. He was incredibly ashamed of himself and profusely apologized. I was an extremely sensitive young boy. This would have been deeply affecting to me at the time. “It's okay. It's only a game. It's not real”, I reassured him. After a few minutes of me explaining the difference between a game and real life, he felt comfortable enough to continue playing. Dear god. I really hope the scene played out like: - Child was disturbed - Father was reassuring - Child continued playing entirely of his own volition And not like: - Child was disturbed - Father was reassuring and encouraged child to continue playing, because it's okay to kill people in a game - Child continued playing

JoeAltmaier 16y ago
I understand you completely. I was chilled when I read "Its okay. It's only a game." Its true of course, but probably beyond a child's reasoning. Imagine "Its only baseball, cheat all you want". But here, its running over people.

sigzero 16y ago

I think he is an idiot. What a way to ruin a child.

sliverstorm 16y ago

To those of you who are all for this kid playing GTA- Would you feel differently if this was Manhunt 2? Or would that be totally cool as well.

miguelpais 16y ago

Much is said about protecting children from video games, but what about other mediums (mainly TV, given its exposure)? Any station can air some movie at 4pm featuring the good cops shooting the bad guys. Or, for instance, it is easy to be watching some news report at dinner and being exposed to something beating the horror or gore movies by points. Aren't kids exposed since birth to the notion that violence becomes acceptable if against the bad guys? Where goes the moral of don't to others what you don't want to be done to you? Even some very successful animated movies like Lion King end up with the bad guy being killed. Either intentionally or not, kids end up satisfied that the bad guy had what he deserved and that all become happily ever after. I'm not for one side or the other, I just wanted to raise some questions to see what you guys think. I don't think video games are bad for children, but I agree they have to be picked appropriately for their age. But I also think we end up avoiding violence in the obvious places but letting kids completely exposed to it in another ones.

ErrantX 16y ago
> Any station can air some movie at 4pm featuring the good cops shooting the bad guys. Here in the UK there are actually quite good limits on that. I'm not sure you would, say, ever see Starsky and Hutch (the film) on at 4pm. > Or, for instance, it is easy to be watching some news report at dinner and being exposed to something beating the horror or gore movies by points. Honestly; I'd say that could be beneficial more than damaging. I wouldn't, obviously, recommend showing it to kids. But if they end up watching something bad at least it's real and real people have probably died. Surely that sends the right message ("hurting people is bad")
- miguelpais 16y ago
  > Here in the UK there are actually quite good limits on that. I'm not sure you would, say, ever see Starsky and Hutch (the film) on at 4pm. I'm from Portugal and here is quite usual to see some Mission Impossible, van Dame or Schwarzenegger movie on at 4pm. Actually, most of the movies aired at Saturday and Sunday afternoons are something like PG-13. Since here there are only 4 broadcast conventional channels, and many people don't have cable, it is quite easy for kids to be exposed to such movies.

singlow 16y ago

Does everyone here believe this guy? The guy spins a good tale, but I seriously doubt this happened. It is at the best an elaboration.

mbubb 16y ago

I think about this all the time. 2 boys 3 and 6 yrs old. I cringed a bit when I saw the title because it made me think of the term 'alterna-dad' and of a style of parenting in which children become accessories and 'buddies' to their extended adolescent parents. Sport matching mohawks, etc, etc. But the article was nothing like that. It is short but the feeling I got was of true exploration and of forging a real relationship. (Another HN post of the past few days talked about how you have +/- 10 yrs to connect with yr kid). It also reminded me (as other posters noted) of that SouthPark where they all play WOW and meet Randy in game. Or the classic 'Chinpokemon'. Two really well done episodes - in both cases parents wade through unfamiliar territory to meet their kids and understand them better. Not simply ban the game. There is danger in letting your chidren do certain things. The impulse to bubblewrap them is strong. I catch my breath everytime they do things like walk with me out on our balcony (17th floor), ride the scooter in the skatepark, climb on the rocks in the park across from our apartment, etc. But I consciously hold myself back - watching them but not rushing in to stop them. This week end my 3 yr old got punched full in the face by a 5 yr old. I held back for a count of 10 to let him deal with it as he wanted to and then comforted him a bit and broght him back so he could feel safe playing around this kid. The point is to show them experientially that you trust them - and that you are in the background to help them if things get scary. I felt that vibe from this writer and applaud that. In truth I have no idea of what I am doing. I use my intuition as a guide and hope I am right. What he says about the ESRB is spot on. If - as a parent - you need a school, govt agency or rating agency to tell you what is safe for your kid - then you are screwed. You need to go through it with your child and see for yourself. You can get good advice from individuals - teachers, other parents, certain writers - but not from agencies and bureacracies. As a parent dealing with impact of media in general is a challenge. For the past 2 yrs we went off cable tv and started to rely completely on the internet/ public library/ netflix for movies etc. I have held off on getting Wii/ x-box, etc in favor of PC based games. They have both watched tons of anime and comics (particularly stuff like Miyazaki Hayako (sp?) and the Avatar series). They both love Futurama - which might be too adult at times for them. I will have to explain 'death by snoo-snoo' one of these days. My older son has learned to really enjoy some of the games that an Ubuntu distribution has to offer - things like Wormux, OpenSonic, BattleTanks. He has looked over my sholder as I have played some of the Doom emulations on the android or the Quake-like games on Ubuntu. From hacker news I found out about the Wolfire free bundle and he fell in love with the Samorost series. He cried when it was done and drew a big picture of what he thought the next episode should be. More recently on my wife's computer (WinXP) I downloaded Steam and setup the free version of Portal and bought a Tower Defense game to play. Every time we take the subway or wait somewhere my wife and/or I whip out the gPhone and let the two of them play android games. We try to limit this to certain times of the week etc. because of the vague fear that media will completely saturate their lives. It is not the violence alone that gives me pause. I knwo experientially how absorbing a good game is (thinking of days past playing Half-Life or Diablo, etc). I want them both to enjoy good media and I am loosely overlapping anime, movies and games because I feel like there is power in the imagery of soemthing like Half-Life or Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke" which affects you deeply. What often pisses me off are crappy movies in which the point is simply to sell a lifestyle. I hate movies like "Shark Tales" or "Madagascar" and I cant say exactly why. There are funny bit parts but the whole thing feels like it is in the service of what the philosopher Adorno referred to as the "Culture Industry". I find those movies more disturbing than somethign with more overt violence. In a very interesting way I think this goes back to Plato and his fear of 'poetry' by which he included dramatic arts. It was the fear of the power of images. We have reached the point where video games and anime have reached a complexity and depth of imagery that they have a life of their own. I know myself that these things affect me differently. I am trying to see through my sons' eyes to see how they are affected. At times it feels dangerous - like letting them speed ahead on their little bikes on the city sidewalk - but what this guy is doing is right. Watch them in the background, ready to bolt after them - let them know that you trust them and that you are there to help deal with the scary parts - let them experience it and learn from them as they reflect their experience back to you. Plato on images: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/ Culture Industry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry