Paris, Oct. 27 (Nouvelle Solidarité) — The popular sovereignist weekly Marianne published a ten-page dossier in their Oct. 22-28 issue on the terrible dangers that violent video games represent to youth and to society as a whole. It seems that some people in France are using the opening provided by China’s action to try to get some regulations going as well in France.
Entitled “Ultra-Violence on Screen: Children Trapped, Parents Overwhelmed,” it first targets the Squid game, a South Korean production which is the latest violent game in vogue and the most played ever since the creation of Netflix. In the game, heavily indebted people are offered a real deal with the devil: They can fight to win a treasure of 45.6 billion to pay their debts, but out of 465 contenders only one can win and all those who lose are killed!
The school system in France realized things were getting out of control when in a kindergarten, a child sang the song of the video game and told the teacher: “If you lose, teacher, you’re dead,” to which another child added “guns come out of the walls and it’s all over for you"! The game is forbidden to those under 16, but as another schoolteacher reported from first graders in Toulouse, “half of the students had played the game, accompanied either by a parent or an older brother"!
In another article in the issue, Vilaine des Courrières reports what the life of a 16-year-old is today. Back home from school, he takes a rest, and goes to his Telegram messaging group where 30-second videos are downloaded one after the other. The first is of a cyclist falling down a cliff; the next of a naked woman raped by three men. And the last, of a country at war where an attacked person has dogs eating his genitals.… His sister, a couple of doors away, is doing the same and discovers her favorite animals, horses, being tortured by a man who was sticking metal nails under their skin… The less bad aspect of Squid, so-called, compared to those videos, is that Squid is fictional… Many videos are real!
“Since 2012, reports Tristan Mendès France, teacher at Paris University 1 and a specialist on digital culture, reports there is an increase in images of decapitations, hangings and executions,” images published by ISIS. “The specialized English site LibeLeak, which was publishing a lot of such images, would get 10 million views per month.”
“’Children who view those images of killings are plunged into a state of psychological agony, as if they had been present at the scene’ says therapist Hélène Romano. ‘The traumatic event experienced by those children will result in emotional dissociation, hypervigilance and social phobias.’ Michel Desmurget, a doctor in neuro-sciences and research director at France’s CNRS goes even further, and stated in another article that “such viewings can lead to actual injury to the brains of children.”
