A 15-year-old boy from Barrie, Ont. has run away from home after his parents banned him from playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
Brandon Crisp's parents argued with the boy after claiming he was "obsessed" with Infinty Ward's first-person-shooter. He was last seen riding from home on his black and yellow mountain bike on October 13. Because running away from your Xbox will help you to play it.
"Over the last couple of years, Brandon has become less involved in sports and extremely involved in 'Call of Duty 4.' They have found him waking up in the middle of the night playing it," stated Sgt. Dave Goodbrand. "Since that day he left home and has not been seen."
I'm not quite sure how one can become obsessed with CoD4 over the past couple of years, considering it was released last year, but whatever. I'm not the policeman here.
Police have been keeping tabs on Crisp's Xbox Live Gamertag, but apparently he is yet to log onto Xbox Live. It's obviously a tragedy he went missing -- since he's clearly missed the World at War beta.
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Contest:
3:24 PM on 10.21.2008
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They deserve each other.
Wait, whut?
UAV IS ONLINE
Well, if he runs over 26 miles, he'll probably gain a level.
Occam's Razor begs to differ.
Bwahahaha...
I gave up on Cod4 after about 30 hours of online play, cheaters got boring.
I heard on the news last night that police are investigating someone he met online playing COD4 and speculating that he may have been lured away from home. Don't look at me, I haven't logged on for months!
The kid's dumb because you can't play COD4 in a forest.
Like parents, like child.
Maybe the kid realized Roid's will fucking kill you, aye?
Props to the parents for not being as retarded as the kid. Maybe he was adopted or something.
I live about an hour away from where this kid ran away (Toronto, Ontario) so its been all over the local news. Anyway, they think he might have been abducted by some sort of child predator he met online. He ran away (less than 5 km) where his bike was abandoned and they think he got kid-napped. I understand getting a little pissy and taking a bike ride to get away from retarded parents, but if the kid's been abducted, I say there's not really too much fault on the kid or the parents. Keep a look out for guys with mustaches...
If I was this kid's father, I'd be happy that my son had interests that keep him away from drugs and alcohol, with the reasonable expectation that he'd cart his ass outside and get some sun every once in awhile. And if he does at least occasionally engage in healthy outside activity, as the case appears to be with this child, then I wouldn't stress the fact that he's not out there playing as much as he once was, or more importantly, as much as I feel he ought to be. Being a responsible parent is one thing, but projecting yourself onto your child is another. Furthermore, interests shift, and while it might not require any physical exertion, I'm of the opinion that videogames are just as valid a hobby as those that call for kids to run up and down a field and toss a ball around. If the kid found something of worth in the hobby, and it's not adversely effecting him academically, then why should the length of time he spends playing be a point of concern?
Then there's the issue of just how much play time constitutes obsession in the first place, and whether or not it's even an issue at all in the absence of any negative effects. They say that they found him getting up late at night to play, but they don't address how much time he spent playing per day on the whole, or whether or not his play time had an adverse effect on his life. Were his grades slipping? Was he acting anti-social at school, ignoring or shunning friends so that he could rush home to play games? Was he becoming violent and withdrawn? The parent’s chief concern appears to be that their kid had become less involved in sports than he was before he began to play games, and to my mind, that would be far less important to me than those other concerns. More to the point, I wouldn’t stress the situation in the absence of any evidence that I ought to be concerned. At any rate, I know I’d mention that shit first if any of it led me to take away my kid’s XBox, which in turn led him to run away. So I really have to wonder if the problem was all that big before they decided to make it a problem.
So no, they're not bad parents because they took the kid's XBox away. They're bad parents because it appears to us that they blew a minor issue out of proportion, all because the child wasn’t meeting their expectations, and that in doing so, they drove the kid away. Yes, part of that is the kid’s responsibility, but most of it lies in the laps of the parents, who obviously never took the time to curtail the kid’s overinflated sense of self-entitlement. Now we might be wrong on that point, but we can only work with what they give us, and like I said above, their chief concern appears to have been that the kid was less involved in sports than he once was. At least that’s the only concern that they talked about. Woah, his interests are shifting! We better assume the worst! And anyway, it’s easier to close our eyes and remain ignorant about the hobbies our son enjoys than it is to get involved! Which, not coincidentally, also makes us bad parents! Had they got involved, they might have been able to set guidelines for how long he can use the XBox, or when. And in the case of a further lack of self-control on the child’s part, they would have known that the XBox has parental controls that enable parents to curtail their child’s play time. One way or the other, this wouldn’t have come to a head if they had taken a more active role as parents, instead of waiting for the situation to turn sour before getting involved. They’re bad parents because their way of dealing with a 15 year old is to pack his bags for him when he threatens to run away. And while this is a leap for sure, they’re bad parents because they’re sending the message to their son that the things he is interested in are of no value, because hey, they never said much to establish that his usage was really excessive, or that it was harmful even if it was. All I get from this is that they don’t understand videogames, which led them to devalue it as a hobby, and their lack of understanding led them to alienate their son. I doubt they’d have been up in arms if their child was reading books all day, getting up at all hours of the night to read War and Peace. Hell, they’d probably applaud his dedication! I might be completely off-base, but all this shit is what makes them bad parents to me.
By the way, I'm pretty sure that you don't actually have to be a gamer in order to use games to entice children. The way I see it, it probably just represents a means to an ends for that sort of sick fuck. A tool of the trade, in other words. I don’t think it’s a leap to believe that.