Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 is the best selling XBOX 360 First person shooter game of all time. With the war today and the gun violence on the streets some would say that video games like Call of Duty are a little over the top and to realistic. The graphics of these new games on HDTV's are almost life like. The game has rating of 17+ on the box but who says a little kids brother or sister will not buy the game for them. When I was younger my parents would not let us have shooting games like Ghost Recon and especially not Grand Theft Auto because they new that the game had a lot of drugs and gangs related to it. What my parents did not know was the my best friend down the street had the games and we would go play them there. I know when I play online with people all over the world that many of the people I play with are probably not even in high school yet or at least they do not sound like it. I am a 21 year old college student. So I can differ from what is real and what is fake.
In the beginning of the game before you even start playing the game asks you if you would like to skip a few levels that you may take offense to. When you have to ask some one if they want to play a level or not because it might be offensive, I believe they should have realized they pushed it to far when they had to put a warning on it. The level they ask if you want to skip is, you playing a Russian guy and you are with a couple other Russian men with large machine guns. You walk in to an airport and the objective is to kill everyone. There are police shooting at you that you need to kill and people crawling on the ground that you have shot. The Game itself was actually banned in Russia. When an entire country bans a game you probably offended them. Say for instance a person buys the game that lost a family member in the Columbine shooting or the 9/11 attacks, and has never heard about what the level is and decides to play the level. The warning just asks whether you want to play. It does not tell you what the level is. This person may take a serious offense to this.
There needed to be some sort of explanation of what the level deals with and what the objectives are in the on the warning message.
Yes, it is a video game and the label says 17+ and Mature but the game and the XBOX do not know who is playing the game. Younger children play this game possibly thinking war is cool and when you get shot you come back to life with full health and ammo. If parents are going to let their kids play these games I believe they need to have a talk about what is real and what is fake and how war is not a fun thing.
We as people often look to deep in to things even as young adults and even older adults we look to far and try and find a different meaning for things like movies and video games. I can not speak for the programmers of this game but I think they were just trying to make a good video game and I believe they succeeded but pushed it a little far. I try and enjoy movies and not look for a bigger meaning in it. Little kids look at this video game and see shooting people and being shot as fun and they can be influenced by this very easily. They need to be taught to not misinterpret Video games for real life.
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