Sunday, February 15, 2015

The Open Letter to League Players Analysis: Addressing A Possible Household Issue

The following video is my response to a recent post known as "An Open Letter to Parents of League of Legends Players" (along with the response from an author of the Penny Arcade comics, not to mention the immense amount of responses on Reddit). I personally felt the issues addressed were a big enough deal to talk about:
Here are some points I made in the video or that I might've missed or not made clear:

  • I am not a parent. Take everything written here and said in the video with a grain of salt as I'm mostly making points through my own reasoning and experiences of being parented.
  • The letter should not have mentioned in-game statistics at all. The issue of pulling one's kid off the game immediately is more about the the lessons taught to the kid. These lessons are time management, which would be taught in either the scenario of punishing the kid now or later, and responsibility, which would be taught by punishing the kid after because in that scenario the parent is showing compassion for others involved when it comes to punishing their kid. If the kid is punished during the game, disrupting their play, it has a possibility of teaching them to be less compassionate towards others (particularly online, which is a problem as it is) and that it's okay to shirk responsibilities if they believe they need to do something else, which can translate to some very unfortunate real life scenarios.
  • Riot definitely should implement a system that punishes leavers more (maybe I'll write this article later) and other people in-game less. It would allow other players to freely leave and join another game, though their time will end up being wasted a little bit. This would lessen the impact of negatively teaching your kid to be less compassionate towards others (particularly online).
  • I have recently seen a counterargument to the delayed punishment (or gratification) tactic where it doesn't really teach the kid anything because kids have a tendency to live in the moment. This may be true but it's also worth mentioning that using delayed punishment and making it clear as to why the punishment is happening actually teaches the kid that living in the moment isn't necessarily a good behavior to practice, which an important life lesson in itself.
  • Making the message that people (children) should be happy their parents raised them devalues the fact and sounds rather snobbish. It ignores the fact it was initially the choice of the parents to have the kid(s) and thus that means they were at least (hopefully) aware of the responsibilities of raising said kid(s). By having to acknowledge the fact one essentially also kind of absolve themselves of any responsibility for raising the kids because it passive-aggressively presents a possibility of having never had kids. Also, when one has to lord their parental authority through this manner of direct acknowledgement, it strongly hints at issues such as an insecurity of one's parenting ability to handle a situation in other ways.
    • Note that this does not mean that kids should not appreciate what their parents have done for them (at all). Parenting is pretty hard work that I cannot fathom doing myself. It's more the parent having to force that fact down their kid's throat to assert superiority that I have a problem with.
On another note, there will probably be another rant video coming soon.

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