Focus On The Family-Endorsed Game Gives Kids Brain Damage ?
One retort to this might be the claim " 'Left Behind: Eternal Forces' isn't that sort of game ; they probably were researching the impact "first person shooter" games had on kids' brains and the "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" is a game of grand strategy where players control armies and not individual soldiers." But such distinctions may break down in actual game play, and an otherwise enthusiastic reviewer writing about the LB:EH game for Wired Magazine wrote, in reference to a game feature called the 'prayer button' that recharges the spirits of game fighters after they kill : ""....In the thick of a really hectic Left Behind battle, I'd click the prayer button so instinctually that I pretty much forgot I was, well, praying."". Such decriptions indicate the distinction between the "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" game may be blurry. Moral positions at Focus On The Family seem a bit blurry of late as well : Since the Foley Scandal a sort of institutional Tourette's Syndrome (that one commentor called "mendacity as performance art") has broken out on the Christian right in repeated displays of hypocrisy and apparent moral relativism. In early October, in "Help, Help! We've fallen Into Moral Relativism and We Can't Get Up !" I described a Focus On The Family radio broadcast featuring James Dobson and Focus On The Family Vice President Tom Minnery, in which an obviously angry Dobson wondered what the Foley scandal had to do with him and Tom Minnery aired a rather suprising concern : "I fear that we're in a society in which you will be held to the standards which you claim." : scary indeed for those guilty of a wide gulf between words and deeds. Moving along - from Minnery's concern about being held to publicly professed standards and James Dobson's tacit agreement with that worry - to the antics of "Plugged In Online" : Early this December the Focus On The Family website "Plugged In Online" has enthusiastically endorsed the "Left Behind : Eternal Forces" video game allowing players to wage religious warfare against non-fundamentalist Christians on the streets of New York City as " the kind of game that Mom and Dad can actually play with Junior" [I characterized the product as a 'Satanic Role-Playing' Religious Warfare Video Game]. Plugged In Online now appears to have attacked its own endorsement by highlighting research showing that violent video games can cause brain damage in children, causing areas of their brains involved with self control to atrophy. In "Video-Game Violence Studied", Plugged-In Online staff wrote:
Research confirms what many experts have concluded for years.
Focus On The Family-Endorsed Game Gives Kids Brain Damage ? | 3 comments (3 topical, 0 hidden)
Focus On The Family-Endorsed Game Gives Kids Brain Damage ? | 3 comments (3 topical, 0 hidden)
|
||||||||||||
|