Buzzin Games

I wrote quite a flippant piece about this for Tech Digest yesterday, but I think it needs a little more exploration.

Basically, ABC 17 news had this inflamatory article about sexual predators in games like Animal Crossing. There’s a lot of lovely, lovely misinformation in there, but two pieces stand out: firstly that your child can just run into complete strangers online. In fact Nintendo’s overly-complicated friends code system makes that impossible – you have to approve every single person to visit your town, and if you’re worried about your children you have the ability to vet them.

Secondly the wonderfully offensive quote from the leader of the Mid-Missouri Internet Crimes Task Force, who states “There is no reason an adult should have this game.” Wow. Just wow – so, according to him if you meet an adult playing Animal Crossing, they’re a sex offender. That’s amazing.

As I said in the article yesterday, I have enjoyed Animal Crossing from time to time. My girlfriend loves it, many of my friends play the game and they’re all the same as me – mid twenties. For God’s sake, Nintendo’s own Animal Crossing UK advertising campaign is based around women in their mid twenties enjoying the game!

The annoying thing is that there are cases of sex offenders using online game systems to groom their targets, but Nintendo are about the most careful to give parents control. A sensible article with instructions to parents would have been a good thing – this is baseless rubbish, which only adds to my growing pile of scorn for the mainstream press’ attempts to understand gaming culture.