Popular Twitch streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins has a few words of choice for parents in an interview with The New York Times: Listen to, and, more importantly, teach your kids.
Ninja asked the publication several questions about a number of things in his life, from his plans to switch to voice acting to his comments a few years ago about the fact that he did not play games with women. A question was mainly about the behavior of the children who visit his vivid dreams. Asked what could be done to mitigate the often infantile and provocative remarks in the chat, which inevitably lead to some form of derogatory or racial insults, Ninja said it all boils down to parenting.
“But it all comes down to parenting,” Ninja said. “You want to know who your child is? Listen to him when he plays video games when he thinks you are not. Here’s another thing: how does a white child know he has a white privilege if his parents never teach him or not talking about racism? ‘
Ninja further said that it is not his job to teach children about culture or topics related to race because his first instinct is to assume that he is getting married in the conversation.
“If they play and their first interaction with racism is that one of their friends says the N-word and they have no idea what it is – what if it was in my stream?” Vra Ninja. “Is it my job to have this conversation with this child? No, because the first thing that goes on in my head is: This child is doing this on purpose to troll me. If someone has a racial upheaval on someone else’s stream “That streamer could possibly be banned. It’s awful, but that’s the first thing I think of.”
At the same time, however, Ninja noted that the Internet’s illusion of anonymity does encourage people to ‘say what they want’. However, Ninja still thinks that parents should get involved.
“I do not think it’s games. I think it’s internet culture. People are behind the scenes. They say what they want and can get away with it. You have complete anonymity. Your information and data are precious and must remain private, but it is a shock that there are kids who can say racist things and be incredibly aggressive and threatening to women online and have no consequences, it would be great if someone said something threatening: ‘Let me look up the gamer tag of this dude this site ‘- if the law could do it, not a normal person – and then tree: ‘This is Jimmy. He said it. Let’s call his parents. ”