Video Game Store Clerk Gets All Sanctimommy On Parents Buying Their Kids Violent Games

I don’t want my kids exposed to misogynistic language or racial slurs (even if they are said between people of the same race in a friendly manner) or media that depicts the objectification of women or extreme violence. Which is why I don’t let them watch Fox News. BOOM. No, seriously, video games ARE problematic. We have discussed this at great length here on Mommyish because a lot of us parents are gamers and video games are, scientifically proven (by me) to be fucking ridic awesome fun. I have expressed my own concerns about letting my 11-year-old play Grand Theft Auto V and the new Saints Row – and we all know how that turned out, with me being the DAMN PRESIDENT WITH HAIR CURLERS IN MY HAIR, BOOM again, and I think that most of you Mommyish readers, if you do allow your precious snowflakes to play violent video games, you are shadowing them the entire time. PROOF:

There’s a big difference between some clueless jerk parent who doesn’t research video games before purchasing them for their kids and a parent who knows full-on that when they buy their kid a game like GTAV, they will be exposed to massive amounts of random violence and scantily clad ladies who they can also punch in the head.

Which is why this open letter on Kotaku seems so…. sanctivideogamestoreguy’y to me:

Last week my store sold over a thousand copies of GTA V, at least a hundred of which were sold to parents for children who could barely even see over my counter.

Over the years, I have watched the size, story, and graphics of games evolve to provide better player immersion and realism. This is true for all kinds of games, including M-rated games.

When I recite the phrases from the ESRB ratings box on the back cover of an M-rated game and it just goes right over your head I feel the need to be more specific. So I mention things like a game having a first-person view of half-naked strippers or that the game has a mission that forces you to torture another human being.

In response, I often hear things like, “Oh, it’s for my older son” or “All his friends already have it.”

Then I wonder to myself how often the youngest child watches the ”older son” playing and if ”all his friends” were to jump off a cliff”¦ I don’t tell you these things because I don’t like your parenting style. It is because, when I look at little Timmy there in my store, I can’t help but picture him as the little boy sitting across the table from my daughter in her first grade class.

The thing that video game store dude isn’t realizing here is that a lot of us are Moms of Little Timmy and Timmy isn’t being raised as some future douchebag dudebroâ„¢ of ‘Mericuh. We are teaching little Timmy that he should never use words like “bitch” and “slut” to describe women. We are talking to little Timmy about how guns are extremely dangerous and that they should never be handled by anyone other than an adult, unless mom or dad are with little Timmy and they are at a shooting range or on a hunting trip. A lot of us parents of Little Timmy would never even own a gun.

Yeah, there are parents out there who, as video game store dude describes, just buy their kid any game and shove them in the basement with a case of Mountain Dew and have no idea what these rated M games entail, but there are just as many parents who are playing alongside our kids and explaining to them why certain behaviors shown in the game are wrong and not cool and our little Timmys fully understand the difference between video game violence and reality violence, and these same little kids care a lot about violence in the REAL WORLD, and do everything in their power to be kind little humans who have empathy for others, would never bully anyone, and who would never even consider picking up a firearm.

For every shitty gamer parent who buys their kid a rated M game and pays no attention to what their kids are playing, there is one who does. But thanks for the concern troll, dude. Or, as this commenter said: