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[PA Comic] Monday, May 6, 2013 - The Young
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Those are the only Slenderman-related thing that terrifies me.
I weep in the corner over the prospect that anyone finds them even MILDLY amusing, since they're all facecams of them screaming like a little girl when the tuxedo-wearing matchstick shows up.
C'mon, it's good times! I like to watch people freak out over Amnesia too come to think. ...so... yeah >_> . Watched a bunch of Lets Plays of that too. Funny thing is, I can't actually FINISH Amnesia myself though XD .
Think of areas in a neighborhood that are less savory for children. What do we do so that kids don't go there? Should we bulldoze the area so no one has access? Or we make rules for kids to follow and watch those kids to make sure they don't go? Or perhaps a third choice, tie a leash to kids so that they can't go anywhere without you. Most likely we go for the middle option. The first option lets no one have access; whereas the third option is completely controlling everything the child does. The middle option allows for the appropriate people to do what they want, while stopping most kids. It doesn't stop all kids, but that's where parents are supposed to step in. In the case of video games, parents have the power to keep games out of the home and use parental controls to block content. If there is a tool missing that would help, we should identify what we need and push for those tools to be included in the future.
Who here watched Fantasia growing up? Anyone?
Remember this guy?
You want to talk scary? What about his entire sequence? Summoning the souls of the dead, the damned, toying with them, making them dance for his pleasure, CRUSHING them, beaten back only by the tolling of the church bell as the dawn approached? Set to an incredible, dark musical score.
Fantasia was a *G RATED MOVIE*.
Kids can handle some scary stuff. You should be there with them when they handle it, but... they can handle, and *need* to handle and be exposed to, scary or sad or slightly upsetting things. Not all the time, and it has to be up to the parent, of course. It's gonna be different for each kid.
But heck, even our children's shows had some heavy themes growing up.
Off the top of my head:
Transformers Movie:
Or for us that were kids in the 90's, Transformers Beast Wars:
We could sit and argue all day about whether the game in question is in itself a ""problem"", but the general point is what matters. If a gamer/parent raises their eyebrows at hearing a child playing a certain game, it would probably be for the best that the parent at least knows what it is their child is playing in that case.
Kids just are not set it and forget it.
Ugh, I still hate walking alone at night because of that movie.
I used to live with someone who frequents 4chan. I quickly learned to NEVER google something that sounds like it could be an internet meme, or at least not first thing. Wikipedia it or ask a human, get some context for exactly how bad this thing may or may not be. I've dodged an incredible number of internet mind bullets by just being overly cautious.
And then the news posts from both of them this week also kick all manner of ass. Superb work all around.
Someone else posted an image from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. THOSE were some fucked up illustrations, but even as a kid, I enjoyed them, and I wouldn't say they're harmful or anything. Basically, I just don't think horror is inherently something to shield kids from past their earliest years. However, it is something to be cautious about, because kids have different tolerance for this sort of thing. One kid's fun is another's sleepless night, so kinda test the waters rather than let them dive in. Were I a parent of a 7 year-old, I'd let them play Slender if they asked, but I'd stay in the room watching how they handle it.
But yeah, spoiler'd. I totally get ya.
Like ~ that's actually the sort of horror we teach our kids anyway, for their own good.
I'm not quite sure I understand what you're saying, but I will say that I don't think that violent video games cause violent behavior but I still DO think parental guidance is an issue. You know the saying "ignorance is bliss?" It's sort of like that, I guess. There are countless things over the years that learning about felt like...a part of me died. It's more than just wishing you didn't know it anymore. It sort of crushes your spirit a little. And there are things that I don't wish to un-know, but still you are not the same person you were before you knew them. I know that my kids will have to encounter these things, and many of them they'll HAVE to know at some point, but that point doesn't have to be right now. And obviously the timing on introducing these things, and the way they are introduced, matters. I would much rather their reaction to something be wondering what the big deal was, than to be upset by it.
And then of course you have the fact that some kids (and some adults) can handle certain things better than others. On my 8th birthday for some reason my dad made me stay in the room when The Gate was on. I eventually couldn't take it anymore and left the room. I had trouble sleeping for weeks after that. I still do not and cannot watch horror movies. Actually I guess The Gate was released only a month before my 8th birthday, so it couldn't have been that year because it was on television. Must have been 9 or 10. Anyway. I cannot handle them but for some reason I read the wikipedia synopses for horror movies. I guess then I can hear about scary things in a more controlled manner.
I agree education is good. Especially things he was mentioning, like what kids can encounter on public servers, and in pub games on Xbox Live. I think some care needs to be taken when we tout this though because whenever we say we're going to educate people about something there's ALWAYS the implication that if they were educated obviously they would not be doing whatever thing it is they're doing. I mean, Gabe says "I want to scream at parents who let their eight year olds play Gears of War and Call of Duty on XBOX Live." And I bet that sentiment is not uncommon.
My kids play Halo. For a really long time my rule was firmly NO games rated M. But they were campaigning for it pretty hard because many of their friends play (or at least my older boy's friends) and he played at a friend's house once before I made it clear to him that the "no M games" rule extended everywhere. But I read about the games and I read some blogs from a gamer's perspective, not a freaked-out-Katie-Couric-perspective, and I remember one dad saying he'd always felt that the Halo games should have been rated T. So I let them have one and my husband played it with them, and he decided it was fine. You won't find them online though. Their profiles are still not Xbox Live enabled at all. They're not allowed online on the Xbox because it's a wretched hive of scum and villainy. On the other hand my 7-year-old nephew has been playing Left 4 Dead with his dad since he was pretty small. 4? 5? And you can't say my brother doesn't know what's going on since it's his game and they play together. Never in a million years would I even let my sons be in the same room as L4D going on, much less play it, but I don't think that makes my brother a bad parent. Just differences in what you're comfortable with.
Wii: 4521 1146 5179 1333 Pearl: 3394 4642 8367 HG: 1849 3913 3132
That may just be me - but that is the point, I think. I think focusing on the game used in example misses the greater message.
What if they look for similar games and find SCP Containment Breach? The first room in that game has a floor caked with blood, the ingame logs are full of details and the fact that one of them is a murderous cannibal who rots through solid matter, and if they decide to check out the SCP website- which the game has the URL of...
What about those facecam videos we mentioned, which would be the first place anyone would find out about Slender at all? Amnesia: The Dark Descent; blood, horribly disfigured monsters, LOTS of torture, naked dead bodies that do not go for the barbie crotch approach...
I'm not saying that every single thing that could be linked to internet horror or internet sex things or whatever is bad. The amount of innapropriate sonic fanfics out there I'm not even gonna try to contemplate but I'm not gonna take Sonic Generations out of a kid's hand. The fact is that Slender is so closely linked to that culture, and that culture is 90% blood gore sex because horror game writers think that's scary.
Congratulations. You are more of a wimpy coward than a 7 year old girl.
Congratulations on getting banned from the forums.
There's more to it than just what's on the screen literally. I wasn't scared by that piece when I was a kid because something about its lead-in made it more fantastical than grimdarkohshitscarytimes. Context is everything. It's more than just, "Fantasia had imagery of x!" The treatment matters a lot.
Edit - I'm not explaining this very well at all, I apologize, I'm going in and out of migraine hell.
Unmotivate - Updated May 17th - "Let's Complain About Nintendo"
The PA Forumer 'Lets Play' Archive - Updated March 25th, 2013
I agree 100%, but just in the defense of people who don't enjoy Lovecraft, to be fair, Lovecraft's cosmic horror hasn't aged well with the times. To paraphrase Yahtzee, by 2013 the fact that we're just a bunch of hairless apes clinging to a tiny spinning rock in an unimaginably vast and indifferent universe... is common knowledge. Back in 1920s this concept might've been truly terrifying and mind-blowing, but it doesn't surprise anyone now. Since then, Lovecraft's monsters have been reduced to a bunch of non-copyright characters, to be sold as ironically cute plushies.
I'm waiting for the Monsters, Inc. treatment of Slenderman; all nattily dressed in his little suit sauntering along with his goofy arms. He just wants a huuuuuuug...
Had the girl in the comic said "Draw the monster that I know hides under my bed," would this reaction be so extreme? Or is it because it's Slenderman, the great spook literally designed by committee as an urban myth?
For reference, a friend of mine has raised his daughter to love Cthulhu (She's three now). She has a little green washcloth with a stuffed octopus head, and cuddles it like nobody's business. Granted, I very much doubt she's been reading HP Lovecraft, but in her mind Cthulhu is just a big 'ol softie monster-face.
My Steam profile | My TF2 items
The point is, how would a kid come across something (meant to be) scary in the first place.
Unmotivate - Updated May 17th - "Let's Complain About Nintendo"
The PA Forumer 'Lets Play' Archive - Updated March 25th, 2013
Parents tone it down and tell that as a ghost story.
Kid reads memepool.
There's any number of ways that don't instantly assume that "bad parents" are thrusting their kids into inappropriate content.
My Steam profile | My TF2 items
the internet finds a lot of really gross stuff funny
i should know i am from the internet you can tell from my lack of use of the shift key
Just so. We've had a whole century's worth of horrors, discoveries, and alienation in between. While I've enjoyed some of Lovecraft's work, a lot of it just leaves me flat: "... and?"
It certainly doesn't help that the popular image of Lovecraft himself has become a parodic figure, a hopelessly sheltered, xenophobic, bigoted, and/or parochial New Englander and momma's boy terrified of brown people (gasp).
Steam: Megajoule
For a long time, this wasn't a problem. I watched Alien when I was four. Halloween, every Nightmare on Elm Street our video rental place had (not many it sucked), It, everything you can imagine.
Except Child's Play... for some reason I wasn't allowed to watch that, even though all the other 7 year olds at school had.
I watched all that and I slept like a baby.
Until suddenly I didn't. I'd spent all my most formative years filling my brain with horror upon horror, and then finally at the embarrassing age of twelve I developed an almost crippling fear of the dark. I couldn't bath without the radio or TV being on loud enough to distract me, as my brain feverishly tried to convince me Pennywise was on the ground, next to the bath, waiting for me. I couldn't sleep either, without curling my legs up as far as I could so Freddy couldn't slice my feet off.
I stopped swimming, because I couldn't handle being in the water... knowing that if I turned my back some nebulous thing would drag me under, never to be seen again.
I'm pretty sure if I hadn't been such a horror junkie, all that would not have happened.
Kid's brains are weird, and still in the process of being wired correctly. You can't tell that what isn't affecting them now, won't affect them years later. That's my opinion at least.
# paweaboo Talk about the animu's with friendly people on SLASHnet.
You shouldn't push it then. I think you are mature enough to choose your entertainment, if it pushes you in difficult to handle emotional state, then as you said, do something else.
I had a similar case with a friend which got into a similar state in WoW PvP (he exhibited in certain conditions some mental issues - conflict paired with stress among other things) otherwise he is normal. I just told him, "Dude, quit if it gives you problems." Of course some guild members which are sill geese and can't look past the next "raid milestone" got pissed.
I get what you're saying, @Dratatoo, but I've always paradoxically enjoyed horror (although not so much the downer everyone-dies-horribly stuff). Fortunately, I don't have problems with it very often these days--I'm on meds for other things that incidentally help with anxiety.
Before, if I got unnerved it would stick with me for a while. Now, I shake it off and move on--oh, game's creeping me out too much, time to do something else and go back to it later.
Instead of intense paranoia and sleeping poorly because my covers are a vice over my head for a day or three.
On my first day volunteering as a chaperone on a field trip we passed a toy store with a display of the Jigsaw Killer puppet from Saw. Suddenly a bunch of my first graders went into an in depth discussion about the Saw and Hostel series.
The overall thing that really shocked me was actually nothing negative but how behaved the new generation of kids are. I remember at that age it was like Lord of the Flies and bullying was rampant. It could be they have just gotten better at concealing it, but during my time only twice did another student hit another, and most citations were given for petty stuff like stuffing pencil lead down the drinking fountain spout.