It’s Easy to Blame The Games
I am struggling to say this in the nicest way possible.
Brandon Crisp was a fifteen year old boy who ran away from home after his parents took away his xBox priveleges. About a month after he was first reported missing he was found day from injuries sustained while falling out of a tree. Today is his funeral.
It is beyond tragic as the entire thing was completely preventable. The Crisp family however needs to learn to stop blaming.
At first it was the inability to just deal with the fact that the kid ran away. They were utterly convinced that Brandon was “lured” away. They demanded that Microsoft hand over information on their customers. Microsoft did get personally involved and offered an award for any useful information handed over to the police but when is came down to it of course the accusation was completely unfounded.
Then of course the school got in on the action, the principal of St. Joseph’s High School stating that:
“Students are so tech literate, and they’re ahead of us, as adults, but I think also with it comes another factor that they may not always be aware of — dangers,”
McCann said the school has ordered several educational programs on consumer technologies — like text messaging, social networking and online gaming — for administrators to preview.
I think parents and teachers do need to be tech literate but this has absolutely nothing to do with what happened here. The parents decided their child was playing too many games and so they took away the games. No tech knowledge necessary. My father always told me I read too much while growing up, now he never took away the books but he did kick my ass outside.
The truth is however is that there is no difference between the way that Brandon used games and I used books. It’s escapism pure and simple. The only difference is the fact that games are new and scary, the media loves to harp on the fears of parents. Are our collectives memories really that bad? This is the TV addiction of the past.
Everyone is afraid to say it, so I’ll say it: The kid threw a temper tantrum. The reaction was no different than taking away a two year old’s favourite blanket. No different than the reaction of thousands of teenager and children who are being grounded, or being denied phone priveleges, or being told “No, you can’t go to that party.” The outcome was just taken to the extreme.
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