The sales of video game consoles and CDs have increased with the end of the school season. Many families buy video games for their children as a reward for successfully completing the school year.
Parents, store owners and employees try to shift the blame on each other. Parents accuse video game stores of caring only about profit and selling violent games to children, which reflects negatively on their behavior. Store owners, on the other hand, are saying that supervision should come from parents. Their business is to sell what the customer wants.
Recently, there has been a noticeable increase in video games advertising from major shops in newspapers and magazines to attract the children. Summer season is considered a high season in selling video games, especially the violent ones. Flyers and brochures advertise violent video games with the story line, which describes “murder, blood and evil.”
Small video game shops advertise less. However, they also consider summer as a perfect season for selling video games, not preventing children from buying any violent games. Arab News interviewed several salesmen, the majority of them agreeing that many parents come with their children to the store and buy violent games.
Noura Abdul Aziz, a mother of three children, prevents her kids from playing violent video games after noticing that they became more aggressive and violent.
“I bought my kids video games to play with in summer, not knowing how the violent games would affect them. After a while, they started to exclaim things like ‘I’ll kill you!’ ‘I’ll destroy your life!’ and ‘I’ll explode the house!’ I could not believe that children pick up such words,” said Noura.
Therefore, Noura took the violent games away from her children and sent them to a summer sport club to learn sport activities, like swimming, football and other games. “Video games convert their physical energy into mental energy. I want them to learn how to compete with each other in sport rather than a video game,” she adds.
Najat Zahran, a mother of two, confirms that her son became more aggressive after using violent video games. “My six-year-old son asked me for a hammer to defend himself, because his brother had allegedly hit him. I was alarmed about what he said. It is a serious problem, because he learned that from the violent games,” said Najat.
Najat did not prevent her kids from playing those video games, but she started to observe their behavior closely. “I cannot prevent them from enjoying their time, but I can pay more attention to them,” she said.
Ahmed Mansour, a father of four, believes that video games do not harm kids as long as the parents are monitoring them. To the contrary, he thinks that video games make them smart.
“There are pros and cons, because these games help the kids to think, discover and depend on themselves to solve the puzzles. The child will use his mind to find solutions, and be more creative and clever,” said Ahmed.
He added that he does not mind letting his kids play violent games. He takes them sometimes to the video game shop to let them choose their own games, and even plays with them sometimes.
Arab News also visited stores in Jeddah and asked salesmen about selling violent video games to children.
Ahmed Saad, salesman at a video game store on Hail Street, told Arab News that summer was a good season for them to sell video games. Since the start of the vacation, many children had visited the store. Some of them came with their parents, who did not object to them buying violent games; others came alone to buy them.
Mujtaba, salesman at a video games store in Al-Rawdah district, said parents should monitor their kids and what they buy, instead of accusing shops of selling violent games to them. He said they treat children as their customers and “we sell them what they ask for.”
He said children were after the new hot games released this summer. “We do not care if they include violence or not: It is not our job, we offer our customers all sorts of games available,” he said.
