He won 52 combo meals from Chick-fil-A in a tournament. He's putting food on the table! Am I the only one that read the article, and I don't mean the blog post. The one that talked about how he's being home schooled with a tutor? I mean I did and it didn't stop me from posting outrage because it's fun.
Back when I worked at Toys R Us I had similar experience yet opposite reaction.. I was covering the video game section for the game guy's break. A mom comes up with a GTA: SA (this was around the time it came out) or VC. She had a 9ish year old son with her. I kinda looked at her, looked at the kid and asked the mom what she knew about the game. She said "All I know is he wants it..." I proceeded to explain how you steal any car, kill people, run people over, pick up hookers, etc. and explained it was aimed at people more my age. Her eyes went wide and she said "Well he's not getting THAT!" The little kid shot me daggers with his eyes. and She made him put it back. I smiled to myself. Kid no way am I letting someone your age get away with pulling this crap if I can help it.
If he's getting homeschooled then grats to him, I guess. The crossover of videogames and real life and lifestyle is a frightening thing. Clearly a plot by the La Li Lu Le Lo.
It's not inappropriate. The way kids are babied these days is inappropriate. If I had kids I would let them play GTA and watch R rated movies. Movies/games have no bearing on how good of a parent you are.
Somebody please slap these people in the face with a beach sandal. Whenever I read about bullshit like this I feel like 10 people are tap-dancing over my neck, simultaneously, trying to hit my jugular vein.
I have the newspaper for this since I also live in Raleigh. If he actually played a real guitar I think it'd be more impressive
Movies and games influence you a lot. I'm not saying that you shouldn't let them play some Halo or something, but GTA is pretty extreme and if you let preteens(whoa, haven't said that in a while) play those games and watch those movies then it just leads to something bad
Well it's a damn good thing that you don't have kids then. When I came out of the womb the first thing my parents did was sat me down to watch SUPER ZOMBIE CANNIBALS EAT DUDES AND HAVE NASTY SEX XXXVII. I TURNED OUT JUST FINE! Therefore so would everyone else if the same thing happened to them.
After reading the article, it sounds like the kid really wasn't doing at all well in high school anyway, especially socially, and tutoring is working very well. As long as he's still getting his education I don't see where its any different than kids who get tutored instead of going to high school so they can do things like acting, rodeos, chess competitions, etc. Well, aside from the fact that most things like that do lead to an actual career... --Moony
ITT: jealousy, suckers, "wont somebody PLEASE think of the children!!!" and pitchforks. Really. Its high school. The only thing High School ever did for me was give me a diploma and make it so I don't have to take a foreign language in college. It was nearly a complete waste of time. I am now turning straight aces at a university. Yeah, it would have been awesome if I could have simply played games all day and then read a book and take a test whenever I had to. QFT! And its funny that if it were a sport or something everyone would be fine with what the parents are doing. (Special note: Video games are a sport if you live in Korea (or at least Starcraft is)) But the headlines implied something different! Lets all just RAGE about it anyway with our torches and pitchforks! Critical thinking FTL, but what do I expect in the age of Fox News "Journalism"? You fool! Everything is a plot by La Li Lu Le Lo! The economy, the government, "bad" parenting, those hard to open packaging that electronics are often placed in, everything!!!
He's not even a "pro gamer" he's a "pro Guitar Hero" which means that, outside of one game series whose time will pass sooner rather than later, he's got nothing. I've got nothing against having him home school'd, but doing so, for his quest of becoming a "guitar hero" rather than a better education? That's pathetic.
That's the thing. Pro-gamers are skilled at more then one game. Heck, even way back when in the days of arcade pro gamers, it was a single pro gamer who held the record for Pac-man, Centipede, Spy Hunter, and a few other games. Getting high score in one was a news story, getting a bunch of them got him income. I saw an interview somewhere on the web with him not that long ago, and he talks about all the work he did back in the day figuring out the programming to exploit it to get the scores that got the income, not that he had set the top score on the Pac-man arcade machine. It's nice that he's home schooled, but it's not the education, it's nurturing the idea that he'll make a living playing Guitar Hero that's wrong. It reminds me of an old Far Side cartoon:
He's still getting an education so I don't see the problem. Sure he will have to learn social interaction diffrently. Perhaps the school enviornment wasn't for him. Guitar Hero may be more of an excuse to home school than anything else. Lots of kids never go to a physical school and do fine.
Except he doesn't have an "exceptional skill", he's beaten a few people online and won a few local tournaments for a video game, that by the admission of a real professional gamer, will never amount to a real payout. On top of that, this real professional gamer, someone who's been doing it for years and probably spent more attending these contests then he's actually won, admits that there's very little chance of someone actually making a living from this type of situation. I will admit that it's not taking him out of school that was the main problem, he was put in a catholic school and that probably was the heart of the issue. It's that if anyone believes that this "talent" of his will lead him somewhere, especially his parents, well they're just a bit off. They could have at least tried public school, as that would help him become more sociable without the strict requirements of a catholic school weighing him down.
