Can violent video games teach important life lessons?

I've got here a video of an adorable three-year-old girl playing Skyrim.

Let me summarize what happens in that video, for people who prefer text to video.

The parents of this three-year-old let her play Skyrim, because she just likes to walk around and jump in puddles, and stuff. In the process of doing so, she wanders into some NPC's house, whose line of dialogue is, "You need to leave."

Being a three-year-old, she shouts, "NO!" at the NPC and laughs. He keeps repeating "You need to leave," and she keeps yelling "NO!" and laughing. After a few iterations, she makes the same decision most gamers, and three-year-olds, would make, and says, "Sword him!"

So she does. She swords (well, axes, actually), the unarmed NPC, and happily calls, "We did it!"

Then . . . things deviate from her plan. The town guards arrive, and, well. . . At the end of this, she comes to a very important realization: "People don't WANT to be sword."

All I'm saying is that, if Saddam Hussein, Momar Ghaddafi, and Mayors Michael Bloomberg and Jean Quan had had the same realization when THEY were three, our world would be in a better state.

"People don't WANT to be sword." And, if you DO sword people even though they don't want to be sword, there are consequences.

A slightly unsettling thought about the new Muppets Movie

So, I'm just basing this on the trailers, as I haven't seen the movie yet. But they create a new Muppet for the movie -- Walter. Walter and Gary (Jason Segal) are brothers (adopted), and Gary, Mary (Amy Adams) and Walter are the trio that drive the plot.

So, what do we know about Walter, so far? Apparently, he's a basically human-like muppet who's been raised in a small town, maybe a little naive, a nice guy, and sort of on a voyage of self-discovery. In trying to reunite the Muppets, he's looking to find his purpose . . .

And I was just sorta thinking . . . ( Read more... )