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Sims creator Will Wright: Video games do no harm to children

October 26th, 2007 by tim finin

The British Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Department for Culture Media and Sport have commissioned an independent report on the effects of violent games and the Internet on children. The effort is lead by Tanya Byron, a British psychologist and TV personality. The study has a web site where people can enter their views.

Today’s Guardian has an interview with Sims creator Will Wright that focuses on the same issues:

Q: We’ve just started a government review in the UK into the affect of games on children. Do you think attitudes are starting to be a shift?

Wright: I think there’s always been a generational divide between people who play games and people who don’t. As people get older you see more and more parents that played games as they were kids now playing games with their kids. In some sense I think the cultural acceptance of games is inevitable just because people are going to have grown up having this technology. As you get a broader set of people playing games, you get a broader set of games to appeal to those people. I think that’s the slow, inevitable process going on here. It goes in fits and starts over time â€“ if there’s a school shooting, it’s a case of ‘did they play games or not’: you don’t really hear much about what movies they watch or what books they read. But 50 years ago that’s exactly what you heard, did they read To Kill A Mockingbird or whatever it is. They would blame social ills on anything that was at hand. (link)

There’s lots more in the interview, including Wright talking about what games he plays.

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