There’s a new video game on the market.  Teens and preteens downdload it for free from the Internet. The game involves solving math problems. But these are not the sort of math problems you come across in a textbook: instead, they revolve around the high finance of drug trafficking.

You do your accounting according to what quantities of dope you buy and sell. Buy low, sell high, push enough to make a profit. With sufficient transactions you can buy a super trench coat with lots of inside pockets to hold the illicit substances. Here’s the zenith: the target market is schoolchildren. This is enough to make me miss Barney, the purple dinosaur.

What’s the allure? I asked fifteen year old who attends my daughter’s school.

“Allure? I guess making money is the allure. And I like being involved in a secret trade/business thing.”

What are her thoughts on pushing to kids?

“It undermines the extreme consequences of using drugs and it narrows it down to just being about money.”

But when the makers of this game see how many are playing it, it encourages them to keep making games like this, I tell her.

“It’s not the game makers that are corrupting the youth, it’s the youth that wants to be corrupted. And it isn’t about spreading the so-called ‘happiness’ of drugs or anything, it’s about making money and staying away from cops. And you can get a monkey, or a pea shooter or bananas for the monkey to shoot at the cops!”

A banana!  Well, that explains it.  OK. How does it start?

“You start off indebted to this Mafia guy, I mean he has an Italian accent, and he always asks, ‘Where’s my money?’ And he like f–ks you up if you don’t give it to him. In the beginning, however high your debt is, this is what you pay. Your debt also goes up as you move around. You can fly places but that’s more expensive. So I don’t do that. You start out with $5,500 debt and $2,000 spending money. You want to deal the higher quality drugs. You make more money that way. Ultimately you want to deal coke, because it’s most expensive.”

She seems to understand market management better than I did at her age. And it goes on.

“You’re going to quote me, I know it. But I guess people want to read negative things the same way kids want to do negative things…I mean, we’re supposed to, like, detach from parents and all, right?  But just so you know, I never buy heroin. It’s against my, like, policy. I have good values from, like, my parents and stuff.”

This is what makes a mother proud in 2007?

From what I’ve read and heard,  drug laws themselves have, supposedly, pressed the drug business into the young hands of the very population we aim to protect. “A policy of Prohibition insures that these substances will be sold in our schools, on our playgrounds and in our streets.” DRCNet Assistant Director Adam J. Smith said. “I worked with teenagers in New York City for over a decade and doubt that there were any who could not get access to illicit substances. In fact, often the dealers themselves were underage. The very policy that is supposed to protect our children has had the effect of pushing the drug trade into their hands.”

Um, does this mean we ought to just sell it over the counter like Anacin? 

In any event, the black-market trade has segued into mainstream American video games.

The question is, who invented this game, and moreover, who makes it available to the general public?  Who marketed it?  A sixteen year old computer whiz wearing Nikes?  Pull the other one.

Anything for a buck.  And I mean anything.  Instilling values is a thing of the past when money and media join forces and create techno-moguls at the expense of our kids.  Well, not all the kids.  There are, apparently, a few who have, “like, good values,” from the diligent parents who bother to teach them, like, good grammar, another antiquated concept.

Next thing they’ll report is that such games make out high school students score higher on the SATs.  Higher.  Yes, well….

 

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