Nick Floyd
We covered a lot in this segment: Violence, what it takes to make a great game and even story telling. It was amazing with a great end cap at 1:21 – no spoilers for those who want to watch VGTM. To start it off just right they posed a question for us to lean into: Some video games are violent, but do they cause violence? I am going to dodge the philosophical debate by simply telling you what my kids said. Interestingly, in our household, we typically do not play games that are rated any higher than ESRB E10.
courtesy: VGTM 2014: Pitfall!
There response… “We’ll I am sure some people will play games and act it out but then we’d ask, where were their parents, why did they think that was ‘OK’?” It seems that a moral basis could be abstracted from the environment, my family grounds ourselves in God and what he says about – do to others…, yup that’s from the bible among many many others.
We never had to directly teach our kids what violence is or that hurting others is “wrong” that came built in, we also didn’t have to teach them to lie or hit – unfortunately that came as part of the package as well. All this to say, is that as parents we should be teaching and training our kids because the fact is that it is not “if” but “when” they face things in life that can hurt them the question on every parent’s mind should be what can we do to help prepare them?
Next up was the work and effort that goes into building a game. Which was nothing short of extraordinary. One guy stated, I have seen games take up to 1000 man years to develop, create art, music and design! Both my kids and I simply could not wrap our heads around what that even meant – basically some games take the equivalent number of years for a Twinkie to expire!
There are innumerable things that go into making a game and the kids knew some of these because of our adventures a few years ago with making one. Needless to say the gaming industry is not for the faint of heart and it might make you question everything about your nerd-life balancee.