Crossplay Mailbag: Should We Let Children Review 'Grand Theft Auto'?

OK, OK, hear me out. HEAR ME OUT.

My fondest GTA memories are being part of the high school variety show and bringing my PS2 backstage to play GTA 3 with everyone for hours. We’d pass the controller and see how long people could go without dying. Credit: Take-Two

Welcome back to the Crossplay mailbag!

It’s true that VICE, as a company, was pretty bad. (Such as the whole lack of severance thing.) My co-workers were not! They often showed me great generosity and empathy, to the point that sometimes I had to tell them “hey, I’m cool.” This was never more apparent than when my kids would get sick. Nobody I worked with had kids, and so they had no context for what life is like when, out of nowhere, a child becomes ill.

(This happened the morning I’m writing this! My youngest woke up with goobers in her eye, and while I can’t prove it, it’s probably pink eye. She’s got an ointment.)

Anyway, I’d tell my work Slack channel a sickness had come up and it was like I’d announced the world was ending. “It’s cool, man, take the day! Do what you need to do!” It was lovely and touching and too much! I mostly needed to organize a schedule with my wife, so we could both accomplish our jobs. That usually meant going out of pocket for an hour or two to get the kid checked out, and probably only being around half the day. But I was lucky to be in a place where people tried too hard, you know?

Friends of mine have had much worse experiences. Earlier in my career, a colleague with a young child was regularly and publicly guilted by an editor whenever an unexpected sickness or other randomized kid event came up. It made them feel awful, to the point that they would make up excuses for an absence when kid stuff came up.

Onto the mailbag, a feature I’m going to open up once a month to folks who aren’t paying. Next week? A celebration at the end of the month seems like good timing.