Yep. Which is why this entire article and all the drama on the net this week about parents buying this game for kids is so idiotic and irrelevant. A parent is required for the purchase of a game. Period. If a parent has deemed it appropriate for their kid, that is their business. If they simply don't give a fuck, that's their business. If they -- for whatever reasons -- don't want to buy it for their kid (including "because video games are dumb and I want my child reading and not playing games"), then they can choose not to buy it.

Instead, what we have is a bunch of people telling parents who are legally and ethically responsible for the care of their children, that they are wrong for making choices that they would not make for their own children. This is dangerous territory that completely violates the premise of our whole society (in the US) and it has to be very carefully and thoroughly justified when we make that sort of determination on behalf of parents. Things not like games and books and music and art, but like refusing medical care and opting for prayer or determining that children should be beaten or otherwise abused/neglected.

"Get back to me when you've been addicted to meth for a decade and spent twenty years recovering from it and then you can tell me how bad drugs are!"

Anecdotal commentary from parents can be insightful, but it's kind of (pardon me for saying this) -- dumb -- to making being a parent a requisite for having any sort of informed or valid opinion on things involving parenting or children.

You don't understand. Only people who have undergone the process of fuckign and then squirting out a fleshy bowling ball can have any insight on things. This act of birthing makes them veritable saints. Unquestionable experts in the field of all things involving children and parenting. Nobody else has ever been a parent or helped someone else raise a child or been a child or had their own parents and therefore nobody else's input can possibly be valid!

"You haven't squirted out a child, therefore all your insight and thoughts are irrelevant and inaccurate..."?

Spoken like a man who has clearly never been trapped under incessant nipple-bombardment. Come back home in your late teens or early twenties and spend the rest of your life coping with a handful of nipples in your leg and then maybe you can speak from a place of understanding.

*gasp* Misogynist! *gasp*

Maybe they have enough experience and faith in their child such that they know nothing that would be rated-M could be something they would be concerned with their child playing?

I got my first library card at the age of eight and the entire library system was my playground. My parents understood that there were wonderful things and horrible things contained within the shelves of hundreds of thousands of books, but knew that there was nothing ever committed to a piece of paper that in and of itself would somehow damage or corrupt me. Therefore, I did not need to have each and every book (or any book) vetted before I acquired and consumed it.

That such a parent has come to have a blanket-response/acceptance to M-rated video games does not necessarily mean they give no shits or that the shits they do give are uneducated and uninformed (even if they don't' know the particular individual specific content of one title).

A vampire? I hope you responded with "mom, he's not a vampire - he's a cartoon. he doesn't exist".

I haven't been a teenager in quite awhile and a pre-teen in even longer. I can't believe how patronizing we have become, as adults, toward people of those ages. It's like we legitimately believe that a twelve year old sees pro wrestling and thinks it is real and doesn't understand that someone can get hurt from it or that because people fire guns on the A-Team and nobody ever dies from it, that they can go blasting fools in real life with the same lack of consequences. That we actually believe this is how children think makes *us* the idiots; not them.

(And, yes, there are some kids who have hurt other children emulating fake wrestling or using a gun -- there are also adults who put on Nikes, purple robes, and ate poisoned apple sauce in their bunkbeds so they could be saved from the end of Earth by being whisked away to a space ship hiding behind a comet... so I don't know what that actually proves).

Thing is, your mom certainly knew better, but she was pummeled into believing you were a stupid malleable lump of crap by the media and politicians and idiots peddling parenting books.

Yeah, I don't get these people who go around saying "I don't want my teenager playing a game where you go around murdering cops and fucking prostitutes and killing them!".

I've only played about twenty hours, so far, but I haven't killed any prostitutes. Haven't fucked any, either. Haven't killed a cop, either.

If I give you a pen and pad of paper and you draw swastikas and piles of tortured dead bodies, that's a *you* think; not a pen-and-paper-induced thing. Part of being a parent is determining (and not having others determine for you) whether your child is that kind of person or not and, if they are, if this is the kind of thing that would impact them negatively, as a result.

I really don't see why any of this is a huge deal. Games have ratings and stores voluntarily enforce those ratings such that you need an adult to purchase a game for you. If an adult is okay with what their child watches or plays, then what fucking business is it if someone else's? I'd have a hard time giving GTA V (more-so than any previous game in the serious) to someone under, say, fourteen -- but someone else who knows their child well may feel differently (in either direction) and that's completely acceptable.

When I was a little kid, my parents basically said that if I wanted to look at porn, I could just ask. If I had questions about any sex stuff or anything, I could just ask. Of course, I didn't do that -- it was less awkward to sneak around and get that stuff than going to my parents . . . . but my parents knew me and what was appropriate for me and acted accordingly. Others might find such an approach horrifying and sickening (especially since we're talking about boobies and not cutting someone's head off or something, which is totally okay)... and they can choose not to be that open with their kids.

Exactly. Because someone who *is* a parent mentions it immediately, incessantly, and uses it to justify any idiotic bullshit they want to spew. Mind you, however, that they'll gladly dismiss the "well, if you haven't done it, you can't speak about it" thing when it comes to them discussing shit they haven't done.

Whatever. My dick grew a new zipcode, just like the smiley guy on the infomercial said it would.

Funny how it's only people who don't believe who are classified this way. Stop being intolerant of my intolerance, you jerks!

Don't forget aliens, abductions, UFOs, ghosts, men in black, shadow people, a world underneath the crust of the earth, a civilization on Mars, ESP, telekinesis, vampires, etc.

The difference between adults and children are that a greater percentage of children -- over adults -- are willing to ask "why?" and "is that real?!" about everything. Adults assume that children will mindlessly accept and adopt what they consume, because so many *adults* do.

Davinci Code references a lot of existing landmarks, artifacts, organizations, people, dates, and events, too. So what?