Anyone think a video game might be a small contributing factor here given what the mother said (in the title of my post)? Modesto Eight-Year-Old Steals Teacher's Minivan:
An 8-year-old boy swiped his teacher's car keys and took her minivan for a joyride, cruising safely home and into the record books as the city's youngest auto thief, police said.
Since no one was hurt, it's kind of funny. But scary since I have 6 1/2 year old (who, by the way, is not playing Grand Theft Auto yet, but he does like Unreal Tournament 2004).
And yes, I dugg this.
Videogames ain't brain pollution
I was just commenting on something similar to this over at Gameology. The context there was a racist FLASH game that has players gunning down immigrants. This case is a bit different, since we are talking about very young kids, who we all know are very impressionable. I used to tell my little brothers stories about what terrible supernatural things would happen to them if they approached my computer without my being in the room. Of course, my parents used a similar fabrication to keep my behavior in check (i.e., God is watching you all the time, and will punish you far more severely than we will if we catch you doing wrong).
If you tell kids that it's great fun to steal a car and go for a joyride, and don't let them know that anything bad will come of this, they'll more than likely want to do it. The fact that this message is being sent via a videogame is incidental.
I think that your playing UT 2004 with your son is overwhelmingly positive. UT 2004 isn't particularly gruesome and feels, to me at least, more like a LaserTag or Paintball game than a killing spree. There is also a story behind the game that explains why these people are battling each other. It's not very realistic, but then again, the game is called UNreal.
That said, I'd tend to trust a parent's instinct more than some silly pop psychologist. If the kid is going around saying, "Dad! Wouldn't it be even more fun to kill people for real?" Then it's probably time for a chat (and probably also time to switch back to Blue's Clues).
I remember distinctly one time my father becoming involved in something like this. I was playing the original Bard's Tale on my Commodore 64. My dad watched me play for awhile. At that point in the game, I was trying to gain experience points by killing monsters in the town. Some of these creatures were roaming the streets and would attack my party whenever I encountered them. However, I had also discovered that I could just enter the houses and likely find more monsters there.
My father noticed this and asked, "Why are you breaking into these houses? That's not the right way to behave." I tried explaining that these were monsters, but he didn't buy it. The simple truth was, I was behaving no better than the monsters by attacking creatures that hadn't attacked me first. At any rate, I wasn't allowed to break into the houses anymore.
Lesson learned? Sure. Even trolls have rights!
kids games
I'm not too worried about Ian playing first person shooters. It's not first person we used to experience as kinds prior to video games where we played with toy guns, facing off another real kid. LOL
I like the LaserTag/Paintball analogy. In the past, Ian's played with the AI while I hung with him and we'd take turns playing the character. Now that he's a little older, I'm going to setup two computers playing over a LAN so we can play as a team against the bots.
Good analogy about the houses. I took away the Hulk game for GameCube for the time being because Ian thought it was fun this past Xmas to smash the innocent bystanders in addition to fighting those attacking him (which, by the way, the game does not reward and even penalizes).