Boy Scouts Offer New Merit Pin -- for Video Gaming

[Charles]

A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous and kind - and completely addicted to Nintendo Wii.

BoyScoutGamingBadge.jpg (56.53 KiB) Viewed 285 times

The Boy Scouts of America - a group founded on the principles of building character and improving physical fitness - have introduced a brand new award for academic achievement in video gaming, a move that has child health experts atwitter.

"It could be quite visionary and exciting or it could be a complete sellout," said Dr. Vic Strasburger, professor of Pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.
"The devil is in the details," said Strasburger, who argued that teaching kids media literacy would be extremely valuable - as long as the games were free of the violent and sexual content that dominate so many popular titles.

"I don't see anything wrong with that as long as they're not playing first-person shooter games, violent games, games with a lot of sexual or drug content. The question is, who's going to supervise the scouts?"

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http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/04/28/bo ... y-critics/

[SNAKEBITE]

then make the badge about computer efficiency, not game play...I really don't know how I feel about that. kinda silly and lowering the bar...but that might be my age talking.lol

[paburrows]

Well yeah on one hand I totally agree with you Snakebite. Scouts is about getting out in the community and roughing it and growing up/becoming responsible. Although I remember as a kid I was big time into videogames (still am) and maybe something like that could be like a bridge or a gateway drug for lack of a better term to getting the couch potatos into the fellowship of a scout pack and into things that they might not have tried like camping etc. I mean Scouts is about way more then camping though with badges for Art, Geneology, Civic duty, etc, etc, etc. At the same time most of those awards actually help a boy to get out into the community and to make it and yourself a better person. So its a toss up on the benifits/detriments