This morning I was reading yet another pointless article by John Dvorak, this time about the horrors of realistic videogame violence. As computer and videogame graphics get more realistic, Dvorak wonders,
My concern is for the mental health of the game players after years of being subjected to visual images that are just plain disturbing. Game technologies are improving the graphics to such an extreme that what was once a cartoonish image is now a photorealistic nightmare. That can’t be good.
Translation: when I was a kid, we didn’t have them fancy computer graphics.
But the interesting thing is watching my daughter grow up and how she handles violent media (which is impossible to avoid, even if we wanted to). We watch a lot of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer at my house, and initially I was worried that the show would be too scary for a 6 year old, but she seems to get off on the strong female character kicking butt. Never had a nightmare nor does she act out the violence — she seems to have a good grasp of the difference between make believe and real life (and obviously, Buffy’s about on the outer limits of what we’ll let her watch).
The thing that gives her nightmares and sends her into fit is the one channel that I never even thought about — the Weather Channel.
One night my wife left the TV on the weather channel, and the next morning Emma got up long before any human has the right to and switched on the TV. That was the day, unfortunately, that there were those flurry of tornadoes, including one that hit Tennessee where here aunt lives.
Now she pretty much is obsessed by the weather channel as well as completely freaked out by the slightest indication of a storm. A couple weeks ago my wife and Emma were out planting flowers. That evening it started to rain and we had some lightning. Emma woke me up around 2 a.m. to suggest very urgently that we needed to bring the plants inside so they wouldn’t get hit by lightning.
She’s a bit behind in her reading skills due to her ADHD, but she will proudly come in and tell me that the Weather Channel just said today is going to be partly cloudy (of course that was as likely for Montana as for Michigan).
So, like Dvorak I’m concerned about the long-term effect of hyper-realistic images on my child. But in my case, it’s Doppler radar images rather than monsters that is my big concern.