Awesome Enemies: 14-year-olds

You ever played a game via the internet?

Of course you have, you're reading this on the internet and probably have cheeto-dust on your fingers. Either way, if you've played an online game- Halo, CoD, World of Warcraft, whatever- you've come across this awesome enemy. Well, I say awesome. I mean irritating as shit.

You turn on your console/PC/whatever and fire up your favourite game, select multiplayer and wait for it to load up. You get into a game and see the other players, and then you hear it: The cry of the 14-year-old.

Come back when you can vote, fatty.

You'll know it when you hear it- unlike the deeper cry of the common neckbeard one can determine the early-teenage gamer by their racially insensitive obscenities or overuse of expletives. You will then notice that their score is either obscenely low or disproportionately high. They ruin games- either by being homeschooled and playing for 17 hours a day while their mum brings them endless snacks or by not understanding that an 18 rating is there to prevent them from playing.

Last night one of them told me I "sounded like a fucking 40-year-old cocksucker" before moving on to kill absolutely no-one and blaming me, saying that I distracted him. Now, while I do admit that I have the voice of an aging homosex I do take issue with his claim that my mother was a whore and his utter lack of ability. Who's even letting him play these games anyway? We were on Grand Theft Auto 4- a game whose realism and violent content is infamous even among the deluge of ultraviolence this generation provides- and he was clearly in his early teens.

What kind of parent allows this?

Now, there's no such thing as a bad kid: Children are basically those blank clones from the Sixth Day, learning how to act from their environment. Now, put a kid into a violent environment, simulated or not, and they're going to learn to become foul-mouthed sociopaths whose only aspiration is to join the army so they can play CoD 'IRL'. My issue isn't even with the fact that they consistently ruin every online game that comes out. My issue is that their parents allow them to do so.

When I was a kid the violent games on offer were pretty much the weakest of sauce. The closest thing you got to gore was that Splatterhouse game on Mega Drive, and even then it was more comedic than immersive, and the violent content was pretty much restricted to stamping on goombas' heads. Nowadays there's far more emphasis on flying limbs, gibbing and realistic death. Not exactly a bad thing, in my opinion anyway- if films and books can do it then why shouldn't video games?

Oh, I know: Because parents don't have a clue what they're doing.

Violent subject matter is far better telegraphed in films and books because- let's face it- the majority of older people actually understand those media forms. Kids don't nag their parents for copies of H.P. Lovecraft books or so they can watch Hostel- they nag their parents to get them the new Call of Duty title and, like saps, parents comply. Why shouldn't they comply? It keeps the kid quiet (or at least out of their hair) and teaches them valuable life lessons like 'guns kill people' and 'the plot of a media product should come second to killstreaks'!

In actuality it diminishes the product for people who are supposed to have access to it, as well as desensitizing the kids to violence and exposing them to the kind of hooligans that actually play online shooters competitively. As one of these hooligans I can safely say that I wouldn't want a kid anywhere near me when the primal bloodlust of infinite headshots kicks in. It's just unpleasant for all parties.

Add to this the fact that one cannot legally punish outlets for selling 18-rated games to underage people (in the UK at least) as the BBFC is simply a guideline with regards to video games and you're stuck with a system which has a massive blind-spot to this issue. Kids love blind-spots, because they are ULTRA-MISCHIEVOUS and naturally rebel. I'm not trying to tell anyone how to raise their children here- far from it- I'm just saying that if I were a parent there's no way in hell I'd hand my son or daughter a tutorial in creative homicide.

When I'm a dad my kid's playing nothing but Mario. That'll learn him some morals without compromising the ethical obligation not to expose my kid to unpleasant, graphical killing.

Toby Ellis