Jo Frost is the Supernanny. Basically, she takes unruly kids and the parents they walk all over and turns them into rule-abiding, behaved families. This woman does not sugar coat the truth, she tells the parent exactly what she sees and advises them on how to fix it.

The first episode of her new show Jo Frost: Extreme Parental Guidance, centered around an issue that has plagued poor parents for about 30 years now… violent video games and their effect on children.

She, along with a doctor, conducted an experiment. 40 boys were asked to play a game for 20 minutes. Half of them played a football game, the other half played a FPS war game, then they had to watch some violent news footage and get their heart rate monitored.

The boys who played the FPS shooter didn’t react as much to the news footage as the boys who played the (probably) Madden football game. According to Jo, only 20 minutes of a violent game was enough to desensitize the boys to violence in real life and perhaps make it easier for them to commit violent acts of their own.

Later on in the program, the boys were being questioned by the doctor. He knocked over a cup of pencils (accidently) during their conversation about the games to gauge how empathetic each child would be to the plight of the perilous pencils now rolling around on the floor. Forty percent of the boys who played the FPS shooter picked up the pencils, thus showing that not only were they desensitized to violence, they were desensitized to being helpful… and less empathetic, I suppose. Eighty percent of the other group cleaned up the mess.

If I were to apply the results of this study to my own life, I would be a war monger. I have played hours and hours of Gears of War Horde with two of my favorite guys, and delight in the dismemberment of my enemies. I have Fairytale Fights, self described as Ultra Violent but cute!, sitting next  to my 360 calling over to me. I  giggled when I threw bodies around in Bioshock to stun/kill enemy splicers. Hey, guess what. I hate killing spiders and most insects, unless they’re out to get me. I hate hurting people, unless they’re hurting me, and I cherish the life of myself and those around me, and would never, ever willingly take one.

Like the source article says, correlation is not validation. These kids were placed in a clinical environment and then questioned. This would make anyone uncomfortable, so the results, in my opinion, are skewed. We knew nothing of the children’s family and social life, which is a large impact on anyone and shapes the person and his or her behavior.

It’s really easy to blame problems on something else. Until parents, guardians and people in society that blindly agree with the “video games are evil!!” sentiment really look into the issue for themselves, this opinion will  float around and people like me will keep on writing about it, and railing against it.

In 20 years a real study might come out that validates the video games = evil people idea. If that happens, I will eat my words. And then probably go play a FPS shooter, or something.

[source]

We started to play and I got off to a rough start. For the first few minutes as each character I was trying to get my bearing and figure out what button did what. The Predator, Alien and Marine each have a different control set up. The Predators and Marines are somewhat similar, but the Alien is almost completely different. Fast forward to my third match, I’m now used to the level, the controls and the limitations of each character.

I hate to admit to this, but I’m going to put it out there: I used more profanity in a half hour then I have in all of 2010 playing that game. I was frustrated at my lack of skill and the fact that everyone in the match, save for Mike, was killing me from behind.

Written in my Livejournal:
I hate Xbox Live players. Mike told me to get the AVP demo so we could play the multiplayer/death match option, so I did, and it only reinforced my disdain for the players who either a) kill you from behind and b) squat in one corner and wait for everyone to walk by.

My preferred style is to face characters head on, but I will go back and forth between Sneaky and Gladiator depending on the style of the game. The innate nature of the Aliens and Predators are to be sneaky. One can be invisible; the other can crawl around on ceilings. I should have expected to get stabbed in the back or grabbed from behind, it’s what they do.

And I did, just a little bit, but after a while it got excessive. What really got to me was this: I was obviously the inexperienced player, I was obviously the dumb one in the group… and in a kill all death match, I was the easiest target. How is that any fun for the experienced player? Do people like a challenge these days? I get the feeling that they don’t.

I can admit I’m not very good at games like AVP. I still have fun playing them, in the campaigns, but I won’t be joining anyone on Live. It just means there will be one less extremely inexperienced player for the others to swarm. I will watch people play, though. I will be the backseat player that sometimes tells you what you need to do because you’re missing something. (And I’ll try to be as nice as possible about it, because that can get annoying quick.)  I will watch Mike and others play on Live, since they are actually good at it, and I’ll cheer them on and point out the stuff they missed when running down a hallway.

Maybe one day I’ll get over myself and join the millions of people on Live and suck and just not care. For now, I have things in life that overshadow the need to get my butt kicked by everyone in the AVP death matches.