We're already too late! (A response to "It's time to start preparing... Ryan will come knocking sooner or later...")

by Craven Wolf 

I agree with Ender wholeheartedly. (I just needed to throw that out there. Now I'll get to the point.) First-Person Shooters are not the only target of the "beleagured parent". I'm not sure if any of you watch the news with any consistancy, (I know I don't) but if you happened to be watching 60 minutes(?) during September(?) of 2000, you may have caught a rather lengthy report on the stabbing murder of a young teenage boy's sister in her bed.

Disgusting by itself, but this not the end of it.

They reported that the boy had a bizarre fasination with knifes, guns, and assorted other things that go *BANG* and cause people to go *SPLAT*. Having once been a pre-adolesent boy myself, I don't find this very farfetched. Young men, and even some older ones, have an innate urge to make noise and prove their 'manliness'. It's simple instinct, dating back to the days when man hauled his wife around by her hair and beat his chest to show off. (N.B. The origins of man and his treatment of woman is NOT the point of this editorial, so don't get off on a huff.)

Parents these days seem to forget that things do not change so quickly as they would hope, and all children go through the same set of phases at one point or another in their life. All young boys like to play Police officer, Soldier, or Cowboy. When we were growing up, this was cute. When THEY were growing up, it was perfectly normal. In fact, parents would worry tremendously if little Johnny wanted to play with dolls instead of daddy's trusty S&W .44 calibur revolver. Our parents bought cap guns (okay, so mine didn't. I bought my own.), squirt guns, and things like that so that we could play with them in a healthy environment (i.e. cries of "BANG!BANG! I got you!" "No you didn't!" "Yes I did!", ideally, for children are apt to do such things), and grow out of violence as quickly as possible.

And for the most part, we have, haven't we? Do you still walk around pretending to be a famous sharpshooter on the open range? Do you still pack a loaded squirtgun? Ai Gods, I hope not. We've learned we don't need such tools and dreams. Granted, we still like to play videogames, but when you put the controller down, do you dress up like Duke Nukem and go around shooting the neighbor kids?

I'm slipping into a new subject now, so I'll try to jump back to the case at hand: RPGs as targets for parents.

In the report, they claimed that Final Fantasy VII (a favorite subject here, I might add) was one of the boy's favorite games. They said he played all the time, knew all the characters names, and could repeat the plot almost word for word. So can I. So can most of you. Sounds like a big fan, or normal RPGer, right? Not in this case. In this case, it was this familiarity with the plot that 'drove him to kill his sister'. They cited the Aeris death scene as evidence, that he saw Sephiroth slay the sweet, innocent one standing in his way, and get away scot free. And that that lead him to murder his sister.

Disgusting, is it not? Both the crime, and the accusation, I mean. How can anyone be so narrow-minded as to assume that all videogames (and, henceforth, the children who play them) are bad, simply because of the actions of a statisticly insignifigant number of twits randomly spaced throughout time and geography? Why are the things so clear to us (games=not real, people=real, hurting game people=good-ish/bad-ish, hurting real people=super duper bad no questions asked) so foreign to those "in charge"? We all know the difference between an RPG and reality, don't we? You didn't play FF7 through to Meteor's summoning, then see a lunar (solar?) eclipse block the sun for a few minutes, and freak out on people with a sword, did you? (Oh my God! That comet's headed for the sun! Sephiroth's here! The sun's gonna blow! We're all gonna die!!) That would just be bad taste.

I'm not certain I had a point to make with all of this. This was kinda written in haste, and straight off the top of my head. I know I'm just re-hashing all the points countless other authors have made in the past, but I thought it about time I threw my two cents into the mix.

On a more positive note, from one perspective or another, the boys who were charged with the murder were freed, after a 'disturbed' recluse was found sulking in their neighborhood with the girl's blood on his sweatshirt. Last I heard, he was arrested for her murder, and introduced to Bubba. You all know Bubba, right? The 300 pound dude that all prisons seem to have a version of?

Yeah, the frisky one. I heard they've gotten real "attached" to each other. I hope to see you at the wedding.