I tried some online racing on GTA V but tearfully withdrew when some pre-pubescent teenage American promised to papercut my nipples.

You get a better class of sledging in WoW. It’s how I stay current on the preferred way to insult one’s peers.

GrahamS a lot of stuff you see on those films you can skip past, and most people do

You’re just repeating what I’ve already said… he ain’t listening 😆

I’m just saying that modern games are reaching photo-realistic levels of detail and can feature incredibly graphic and brutal violence, which is often framed in stories with very dubious morality. To my mind that makes them a very different beast from running around a playground shouting “bang-bang”.

What you choose to do with that information is entirely your business
THIS you can do many things with the war games that are reasonably realistic and never ever entered my mind when playing soldiers as a child.

DezB I didn’t see how anything you said was a rebuttal of GrahamS’s points. Are you saying that the violence is not in fact in the game, or that it doens’t matter that it is?

I’m listening just fine. You said stuff like that wasn’t in the game. It is.
emsz agrees it is, but says you can choose to skip a lot of it while you are playing. That’s fine too.

Again, I’m not questioning your parenting DezB. I was just trying to challenge your assumption that these games are just the same as playing “Sojjers” in the schoolyard. I really don’t think they are.

Ok, I’ll spell it out: They are not in the bits my kid plays. He plays the running around shooting bits. He SKIPS OVER (or just doesn’t load/view/whatever) those bits.
I have sat there while he is playing the game and he just runs around shooting.
All his mates (with XBoxes) have GTA5, by the way. He doesn’t, so I do exercise some parental control. Just a little bit though eh.

Ok, I’ll spell it out explain myself properly

Thanks.

Do you always watch him when he plays? Is there any chance he’ll end up watching that stuff without you knowing?

Yes, there’s a chance of him doing lots of things without me knowing 😆

I’m going to show him that video later, to check if he’s seen any of the bits in it.

GramhamS I dunno if you play stuff but you can load up different sessions on these games so you can just play the running about shooting people stuff, my brother plays the training sessions on MW like a million times a day, he’s NEVER played the mission as they’re “well dull”

So you can play COD or whatever and never see the cuts

DezB I dont care what you do with your kid. I am , as you are, simply expressing my view on these games.

GramhamS I dunno if you play stuff

Yeah I wanted to point out, if I sound like one of those hand-wringing “video games are evil murder simulators” nutters, I’m not.

I play games myself and I don’t have a problem with adult content in them.

Personally I don’t skip cutscenes. But I’m one of those gamers that enjoys the story/setting/universe and likes to explore the details. (and get my money’s worth!)

From what I gather the CoD single-player campaign missions are fairly dire though, so that probably has more to do with people skipping them than any keenly established sense of moral self-censorship in teenagers. 😀

you can just play the running about shooting people stuff, my brother plays the training sessions on MW like a million times a day, he’s NEVER played the mission as they’re “well dull”

To be honest, I’m not sure that skipping the “well dull” story, plot and context to jump straight to the killing people bits is really that much better.

But at least that is like playground soldiers 😀