Kids are making friends in the Arab world - via Call of Duty | Hacker News Reader

Kids are making friends in the Arab world - via Call of Duty

scottbraddock.com

54 pointsbenwerd26 comments

Whilst obviously I see it as ultimately down to parental discretion and judgement, I just don't understand the mindset that sees a parent buying their 12 year old child COD Black Ops.

That was my first thought as well. The games are rated 17+ for a reason: graphic violence and strong language in a "fun" context is not something I would want my 12-year old experiencing for hours on end.

Why are you letting your 12-year old play video games 'for hours on end' to begin with?

I used to play 18 rating games when I was 10 because I bought them (UK legally enforced rating system FTW), when 3/4 of the games I was killing zombies with green blood and my parents didn't see much difference between what I saw in video games and what I saw on TV.

Incidentally I'm literally talking about Carmageddon (released 1997) and Star Ship Troopers (released 1997). The former was rated 18, the latter was rated 15 in the UK. The former involved killing Zombies and destroying cars. The latter involved human-on-human violence, people being ripped limb from limb, aliens being mutilated and tortured, a cow getting ripped to pieces, and multiple scenes with full-frontal nudity. Also released that year was Titanic, which again had a nude scene and a sex scene, it had a suicide attempt, a suicide on screen, it had someone killed with blood while trying to escape a sinking ship, it also dropped the F-bomb and a dozen shits amongst other swear words; it was rated 12 in the UK.

I'm sorry, but the themes in video games (at least when I was growing up) tended to be more child-friendly than most of the movies children were permitted to see or we allowed to see by their parents.

If you don't want your kids playing violent video games, then don't let your kid play violent video games. You have zero justification to impose your rules and values on anyone else.

I also find it very foolish that you cannot see that video games are rated insanely over the top with almost no common sense applied "because they're interactive".

Honestly, I think your 12 year old likely has received more life-time emotional and mental damage by being in school surrounded by other children than they ever would being exposed to violent video games. Also note that it's a very limited subset of gamers that only play FPS games.

> Star Ship Troopers > human-on-human violence, people being ripped limb from limb..

> Titanic > a nude scene and a sex scene, it had a suicide attempt, a suicide on screen, ..

You seemed to complain that the rating organization requires older age on the viewers of Star Ship Troopers than Titanic. Do you really consider these two scenes as being equally bad for the kids?

Moreover, I bet that being immersed in an interactive scenario and controlling parts of scenes is more captivating and can influence you more than merely watching something passively. Not to mention the number of hours kids typically spend playing such a game is vastly higher than what they spend watching a movie of the same level of violence/nudity.

As for real-life violence, I do not think "people being ripped limb from limb" is a usual happening in any school playground.

I was playing Goldeneye on N64 when I was 9, yet I have to agree, AAA shooters these days are something else...

I played CoD4 for $$$, (playing on international teams), traveled to more than 6 different countries to play tournaments, and after a while nationality really did become irrelevant.

A similar thing happened in my own family a while back. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226987

Do you think it's possible to have such a game with out mortal combat as the central theme and still make a big impact in the gaming world. Cooperative but not cooperating to kill the other team?

Sports games. I had heard that the killing aspect could have been been removed from the game in Germany for legal reasons. Bullets were to be replaced with paintballs and killing with simply eliminating opponents. They never ended up passing the law banning violent games though.

Both my kids spent considerable time "role playing" and focusing on non-combative activities like chatting and trying out different variations of character choices so I'd say the answer is definitely yes, especially if the game builds on age-appropriate social curiosity or borrows from familiar cultural elements. My daughter especially loved things like playing "barbie" by showing us different combinations of clothes she obtained and playing pranks like walking around cities dressed as an NPC, hoping to fool other players with emotes.

Worth noting is that "kill the other team" is a blanket term that encompasses many different levels of violence. Yes, in some games you do actually kill people, but there are so many variations - in platformers you often just jump on their cartoon heads, in strategy games it's more about conquest, like playing Risk.

Looking through my own gaming library, there are a lot of completely non-violent games where you could class it as "mortal combat" - for example in Osmos you play a single-celled organism (sort of) trying to survive by absorbing those smaller than you and avoiding those bigger than you.

There are many games out there less violent than Call of Duty that kids could play to bond or make friends, but they get overlooked because they get lumped into a category, and then the media parade the most extreme examples from that category in front of us.

Thanks. Now Glenn Beck's gonna have "Call of Duty" up on his blackboard screaming "Islamic terrorists groups are now recruiting American children!"

I'm a case of this. I met these motherfuckers from Turkey and Bahrain through the community surrounding that little flash game "n". Also several (?) people from Finland, a guy from Bulgaria, and another from Singapore.

Odd. The context of the article and the rest of what you wrote, I would have expected a word like "friends" or phrase like "cool guys" in place of the vulgarity.

Did you dislike these people?

perhaps it is subculture-appropriate slang for 'cool guys'?

duh - I'm from Bulgaria, I worked on Call of Duty - Black Ops - and there are 3 more bulgarians that worked on it :) - all of us programmers - two leads.

We have scandinavian folks, not sure whether specifically finnish, and we do have folks from Singapoer

Having played my fair share of COD, MW2 and Black Ops I would unfortunately say that the 'Make a friend outside of the US' vs. 'Screw you towel-head' ratio in general does NOT provide a base for improved foreign relations or 'bridge building'.

Glad that it does happen though.

Ugh not to mention the constant stream of gay slurs and swastika emblems.

What's the problem with swastika emblems?

Do you live in Germany?

It's not a swastika emblem which is quite common it's the red, black and white Nazi Swastika which symbolizes extreme hatred and violence.

You don't have to live in Germany to be affected by it, I'm sure quite a few of us have grandfathers who are no longer here because they fought against the hatred and violence which the Nazi Swastika now symbolizes.

I'm not for or against nazi symbols.

But I believe the future generation needs to be told exactly what happened so that history does not repeat it's most horrific moments

But my first question was simply legal. I was tasked for few days to write a tool that reextracts textures from all Black Ops SKUs and verify that we did not accidentally ship illegal content for say Germany. Each country is a bit different - allowing certain things, not others

I for one am glad that Germans take nudity so natural, unlike here in US where violence is taken so natural (my experience)

I don't know how to say this nicely, but nobody seems to care about displaying the Soviet flag, though they killed a lot more. Maybe it's just time to bury the hatchet.

Although I would typically be the first to attack any positive mention of the Soviet system, the number of people who died under Soviet regime (yes, it was probably larger as you mentioned) is mostly due to the extreme power wielded by Stalin during his time at the helm. After Stalin's death, the communist party tried to distance itself from the crimes committed by him. So it's a bit unfair to compare fascism to communism -- you should compare fascism to stalinism instead. In addition, even if you compare fascism to stalinism (both very scary systems), fascism looks a bit worse, not because of the number of people who died, but because unlike stalinism which was mostly a culture of fear, fascism was really a culture of hate all the way down the hierarchy.

Yes... Also this "road" can lead us to US slavery period... Should we prohibit from display all flags, emblems from that era?

Not sure how you can draw that conclusion from what I said. The USSR flag, while it is a flag of an oppressive totalitarian regime, does not carry the symbol of hate meaning as much as the Nazi flag does (and probably not even as much as the confederate flag is). My argument was to say that even though a lot of people died during the Stalinist era, I do not consider the USSR flag to be at the save level as the Nazi flag, and I would not treat the two in the same way.

I was referring to the user-generated emblems, not the standard game art.

I'm tired of listening to American kids using near-constant racial slurs and using a Nazi swastika as their emblem.

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