From BoingBoing...
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This is a picture of my amazing youngest son Evan. He's 13, he's holding a game controller and looking at a glowing screen and he's doing what he does a lot of -- diving into digital realms of adventure.
His latest favourite game is Call of Duty - which he plays on-line with his friends. Evan's wanting to play C of D was something of a challenge for us. It's rated T and he's only just a teenager and point and shoot first person games worry me some. Evan is relentlessly reasonable sometimes -- he outlined why he wanted to play the game and he was pretty upfront why he knew my "parent-sense" would start tingling. So I had to be reasonable too. I looked at the game. I've done a lot of research for military museums so I could tell that the content was accurate -- but there was lots of shooting and blowing things up. But there was a fair bit of that during World War II. So it was undeniable that Evan was experiencing history and there was this teamwork factor...
So we compromised. Well, sort of.
I asked Evan to google the Geneva Convention. Then he had to read it and then we had to discuss it. This we did. So the deal is that Evan has to fight according to the rules of the Geneva Convention. If his team-mates violate the Convention then play stops and Call of Duty goes away for a while.
We'll see how it goes, but Evan keeps his word. Especially about his games.-------------------------
There are a lot of things I love about the story of Evan and the Geneva Convention. For whatever reason, game controversy tends generate a firestorm of attention, particularly when it comes to the Media, Politicians, and certain watchdog groups. We try to ban them. Censor them. Plaster them with ratings and fine retailers for selling them. And in the process, we fail to sit back and look at whats really going on, and what kinds of opportunities we are missing out on, both as parents and educators (something I've written about before).Hugh Spencer, the author of the BoingBoing piece, could have taken the game away because of its violent content (which clearly made him a bit uneasy as a parent). He just as easily could have looked the other way and done nothing at all (a much bigger problem with game violence, that for whatever reason, rarely enters the discussion).
But he did neither. He took an active role in the things his son was doing. He investigated the game content objectively. He thought about what he could do to help allieviate some of his concerns. He leveraged the power of a popular game and web 2.0 technology. And he created not only a family opportunity for discussion, but a powerful informal learning moment.
I havent played the newest Call of Duty myself, so I can't speak to how exactly abiding by the rules of the Geneva Convention (which, if meory serves, deals with the treatment of Prisoners of War) applies to its gameplay. But regardless - my kudos to Hugh Spencer for treating games, parenting, and learning with the thoughful attention they deserve.
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