How Harmful is the Widespread Use of Playstation and PC Games?

Wandering around my local DVD store the other day, I was concerned and disappointed at the poor selection of material available. Most of the movies were of the ‘schlock’ variety – awful productions reliant on the quantity of violence, sex, bad language, generally poor or non-existent acting, and poor photography. Granted, many of them contained wonderful computer-enhanced scenes and computer graphics, but in the main the story content was poor in the extreme; they were in fact the sort of movies that I would happily ignore.

While searching the shelves for something worth viewing, the owner of the store was sorting out his material and re-displaying many of the items, and we got into an interesting conversation. In passing, I mentioned my disappointment that the majority of the stock available was designed for the severely mentally handicapped, relying far more on its sensationalism than on its actual content; I went on to say that it was really a shame, when there was so little of interest available on any of our television channels, to see that his stock was just as bad, if not worse. I was most interested by his reply: he told me that, in his opinion, one of the main reasons for the delinquency and general violence of our youth was the fact that they are brought up on a diet of blood and guts on the television, and that so many children are now the proud owners of Playstations and similar products, which tend to raise the level of tolerance for the very violent and often almost obscene acts – a tolerance which, in previous generations, was altogether missing.

Now, make no mistake, I am a great fan of ‘shoot-em-up’ games and often rely on these as a means of taking out my own frustrations at the end of the day. However, unlike many of our children, I consider these to be simply entertainment and the acts they depict to have no bearing on our life today. Unfortunately, were I four or five years old, I could well believe that the world is indeed made up of violence, hatred, gratuitous sex, and I would happily go forth, armed with a knife or a gun, and wreak my own havoc in order to see my will prevail.

The generation we are at present educating has no idea any more what a good book is – in fact they wouldn’t know one if it hit them on the head in the middle of the street. Many of these children are unable to read anything other than the most simple matter, and, confront them with anything meatier, such as Kipling, Carrol, or Milne (authors who were old friends to me at that age), and they would turn their backs in disgust. They are going to become adults who have little or no respect for the value of human life, their levels of tolerance to horror and bloodshed will be so affected that they will scarcely hesitate before pulling the trigger for the slightest reason. We are already seeing it in our schools, where many pupils come armed, not with books, but with weapons; we see it in our suburbs and we see it on our roads, where the slightest lack of concentration can lead to a very ugly incident of what we now know as ‘road rage’.

In making technology ever better, ever faster, ever more accessible to everyone, we are becoming the authors of our own downfall. The old stories, once so popular in the movies, no longer have a following. Today’s generation is not interested in seeing films like ‘Brief Encounter’, ‘Out of Africa’, ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’, and similar, because these movies require simply too much concentration and are therefore not seen as relaxation in any way. No, our children want to see Chuck NorrisChuck Norris, the Rambo movies, Men In Black, and much worse, and they mistakenly believe that the world is indeed like these films.

Perhaps this is the world into which we are now moving. However, I am grateful that I was brought up on a diet of silly things like ‘Alice in Wonderland’, ‘Winnie the Pooh’, and ‘The Just-so Stories’ because they have formed a platform on which to build greater and more complicated works, which, as an adult, I have appreciated and often thoroughly enjoyed. I am always thankful that my early education was handled with care and sympathy and that I was taught right from the beginning by someone who knew exactly how a child’s mind should be moulded in order to create the final adult. My generation were never exposed to gratuitous violence, sex, or any kind of questionable stimulus until we were old enough to make up our own minds whether or not we wanted to see these things, or to be a party to them.

So, parents, do yourselves a favour: remove the nasty games, the unfettered access to the computer, put on the parental control mechanism on your decoders and guide your children in the right direction, or face the consequence of a generation that has no finer feelings, and which resorts so quickly and easily to death and destruction when in earlier days a few harsh words would have had the same effect. In this country (South Africa), at the time of THE STRUGGLE, children marched down the streets shouting ‘Liberation before Education’. It is a frightening example that we can show the rest of the world that we now have an entire generation of unemployed and unemployable people, whose only desire is to sit and wait for the state to look after them, and who will leave a legacy of nihilism and lack of care for their race, their families, and their neighbours. Your children may also become a ‘lost’ generation.