Mum’s Army

I’m of the firm belief that my employer has access to a range of books with titles like “How to de-motivate your staff” and “How to make a bad situation worse”. For the time being I won’t go into a full list of their actions (not whilst I remain employed there at any rate) but one cute move is to block pretty much all the gaming websites I have in my bookmarks. That’s quite a lot of sites. I appreciate that web access and the means to use it are by no means a given right for me to complain about. However, in the context of keeping your staff happy and motivated it does a lot of good.

Somehow, a site that has slipped under the radar is GamesIndustry.biz. A fantastic, British-focused site with good articles and informed commentary. Thank heavens for small mercies.

A recent article “Videogames’ worst enemy is lazy parenting” responds to the actions of women’s magazine “Take A Break”, their readership group entitled “Mum’s Army” and the group’s belief that violent videogames should be banned.

The article goes on to make the distinction that many measures have been taken by the games industry to inform the concerned parent of a game’s content and to control what degree of access their child has to it. Age ratings, content description, in game warnings and hardware with parental lock out controls are just some of thse measures. It appear’s that Mum’s Army believes that if the content is ‘out there’ then they have no means to intervene before it hits their child’s retinas than an outright ban.

The article is worth a read – whatever side of the fence you happen to sit on.

I can’t help conjuring up a mental image of Johnny-12-year-old playing the 50 cent game in the front room, gazing transfixed at the pixellated thuggery on screen whilst his mother is sat on the sofa behind him engrossed in Take A Break magazine.

My opinion is that these sort of parent needs to stop taking a break from parenting and to start taking it seriously.