Video Game Violence

At a certain time in the development of any new entertainment industry, Puritanical reactionaries can be counted on to come out of the woodwork and wag the finger of blame, transforming the next evolution in performing art into the latest pre-packaged excuse for the decline of Western Civilization. In Shakespeare's time, actors were barely tolerated, and before that were considered no better than prostitutes. When Elvis Presley began to appear on late night television, "concerned" citizens assumed that wantonness and debauchery would follow thanks to The King's reckless pelvic thrusting. Among the first initiatives of the Nazis, as they began to seize power in 1920s Germany, was to stamp out a thriving and energetic stage culture, ostensibly because of its bizarre jazz sounds.

Now that rock music and movies have become acceptable mainstays of popular culture, the self-appointed guardians of morality step into the breach once again to take aim at the latest easy answer for all society's ills: video games. Figures such as Florida lawyer Jack Thompson, who has led several widely unsuccessful anti-video game campaigns, are the screeching, spitting, fist-pounding demagogues who demand that society compensate them for their lack of modern understanding by indulging them in their petty contests against video games and the creative, talented individuals who produce and play them.

Thompson and his irrational posse conflate video games and violence with the same shallow ignorance that once caused people to connect masturbation and blindness. Any art historian will tell you that the images created by any society are a reflection of that society's values and norms, and do not come into being in a vacuum. Clearly, unexamined social forces are in play; the nature of video games is merely a reflection, not a causal agent.

Now, if we were to take a glance at video game history, you'd notice a distinct lack of major protests against video gaming's influence before the production of Mortal Kombat (1992) or The House of the Dead (1996). No one ever led a crusade to prevent Super Mario from jumping on turtles, or Link from slaying a dragon. It's wrong to assert that before this time, video games did not depict violence between human characters: this has been going on since at least the mid-1980s, with titles like Bad Street Brawler or Urban Champion, (both released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1986).

Knowing these two things, we can reduce the major assumptions of video gaming's foes to two possibilities: Either a) video games do not reflect the norms of society and are unreasonably violent, gruesome, and so on or b) semi-realistic visual depictions of totally unrealistic acts cause people to completely lose their ability to tell fantasy from reality.

It is intellectually untenable for anyone to state that the video games of today do not reflect western cultural norms. Foundational literature shows countless depictions of gratuitous violence against humans across every gradiation of the moral spectrum: Beowulf. The Odyssey. The Bible. Even today, war is a continuous social fact that claims thousands of lives every year.

Despite this, organized violence is still accepted by the majority as both heroic and necessary; at the very least inevitable. War is considered an essential method of problem solving.The U.S. Army has recently released a computer video game aimed at recruiting youth into the military, and not the providence of any feature of gaming itself. Anyone who claims that you can learn to fire a rifle by pressing a button has obviously done neither.

So this means that the average game player can't be trusted to distinguish reality from falsehood, right? Absolutely not. We trust people at 18 - my own age, perhaps the age of your children - to fight in wars, to consume poisonous substances at will, to operate dangerous equipment and vehicles. The assumption, therefore, is generally made that their psyche is in good enough shape to not be irreparably damaged by an encounter with fiction, no matter what form it may take. Clearly, these aren't the people for whom most of those who would see video games abolished cry so loudly... though I suspect some of them would take video games (among other things) out of the hands of grown adults if they could.

This leaves children as the benefactors of Jack Thompson's righteous outrage, and to that idea I direct a simple question: who is buying games for these children? Who's letting them spend time in front of a TV when they should be developing skills to cope with life as a human being? Only mature, involved, caring adults can impress essential facts of co-existence upon the young mind, and among the first is this: what goes on in your head is not the same as what goes on in the world around you. In times of regular anger or distress, there should be no question of violence. In cases where young minds are disturbed, it is the responsibility of elders to notice the signs.

Video games are rated for content in a manner very similar to movies, allowing parents to take a proactive role. To claim that a well-adjusted, well-rounded and well-balanced young person can be incited to violence by a video game is utterly incredible. Such a superficial argument is tempting only because it shifts the blame away from countless complex social and psychological factors. These produce changes in a person's behavior any reasonably involved parent should be expected to notice. Even in the worst case scenario, when violence does occur, blaming a video game is not any more sensible than blaming a book, a fortune cookie, or the victim. The core skills of understanding what fiction is and what our relationship to it should be are the responsibility of the parent to provide, not that of teachers or any government agency.

The idea that video games cause violence is as hollow and dogmatic as a fire and brimstone sermon, couched in illogical beliefs and promoted as the centerpiece of a retrogressive agenda. Those who decry video games as the next great evil should focus their feverish energies on addressing the attitudes and afflictions that contribute to violence of every kind, especially among the young: the aggrandizement of the physically strong and attractive, issues of inequality based on race, wealth, and social class, and much, much more. Mature, responsible people do not recourse to violence in the real world, and when violence occurs, placing the blame on an inanimate object is an injustice to all concerned. Don't let the Jack Thompsons of the world convince you otherwise.