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Video games? Really?
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My cousin wrote this and I thought it would be good enough to post here.
I do not play video games and have nothing ageist anyone that does. I prefer to spend my time perusing other things.
In response to Friday's horrors in Newtown, CT, people in the media, and some I've seen on FB, have been referring to "violent video games" as a generic term, and talking about how they are "virtual basic training" for mayhem, as if they brainwashed Adam Lanza to kill two rooms full of kids and adults. Having played video games literally from the time they first hit the home market via "Pong" consoles, and having stuck with the hobby for well over thirty years, I have some thoughts to share.
First, not all video game violence is the same. The narrative context matters. Most games put the player in the role of the "hero" of the story, pit them against something "bad" or "evil" and call upon them to do virtual heroic deeds. That narrative arc is the same one that kids have followed since the dawn of time, with or without computers being involved. We played those same kinds of games outside in the front yards of our neighborhood, shooting pretend guns, throwing pretend grenades, fighting what we imagined to be the "good fight"...without a joystick in sight. And, yes, we also did that on our Atari 2600s, or our Nintendo Entertainment Systems. We imagined ourselves to be heroes engaged in feats of daring-do.
Now, there ARE games where the role you play isn't heroic, or doesn't have to be. Some games allow you to chose how good or how bad you're going to be (the Fallout series, for instance, or the Elder Scrolls games, or Infamous and Infamous 2). Others essentially give you no choice but to be SOME degree of bad, like the Grand Theft Auto series (GTA for short).
For the longest time, I absolutely refused to play any of the GTA games, because I don't like criminals, and don't personally approve of pretending to be a criminal. Certainly not with random bystander violence thrown in to boot. I did finally relent and snag a copy of GTA IV when it went on sale, because I wanted to see what everybody was so ga-ga about. I stopped playing after maybe ten hours. Just didn't like being forced to be a damned criminal. Plenty of gamers DO enjoy that, millions of them, in fact. But it's not my cup of tea.
The "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare" games that some have been name-dropping lately (they mostly just say Call of Duty, but those are the games they mean) put you in the role of a soldier, most of the time either American or British but sometimes a Russian soldier finding against an ultranationalist faction in his country. For the most part these games are another version of heroic roleplay, with the exception being one level that I understand is included in the second "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare" where you have to play along during a terrorist attack on an airport. That level was controversial, and the game gave the option of skipping it altogether. On the whole, however, the game wanted you to be the "good guy" shooting lots of "bad guys."
Now what does any of this have to do with a mass murderer like Adam Lanza? People say that video games indoctrinated him to do what he did...but have they pointed out any games where players are rewarded for shooting up a school? Have they shown you a popular series of games where rampages against the innocent are par for the course? Call of Duty: Modern Warfare isn't such a series. Grand Theft Auto could possibly be considered such, given the open chances to run people over, blow up their cars, etc. But if that's the case, and if those games are supposedly altering the thinking of the people who play them, we'd see MILLIONS of Adam Lanzas, because millions upon millions of copies of those games have been sold.
In tort law, when you talk about something being unreasonably dangerous, you look at the likelihood that a given harm is going to occur because of that object/thing, and you look at the severity of the harm, balanced against the social utility of the accused item. You also have to look at whether the harm in question was foreseeable to the people who made, sold, or used the accused item. (Naturally, there's more to it, but I'm not writing a Torts textbook here).
What is the likelihood of video games causing anyone to act out violently? The same as for heavy metal, or Dungeons and Dragons, or Marilyn Manson: virtually nil. Compare the number of consumers of those products, against the number of incidents. You can't even derive a useful percentage, it's so small.
What is the magnitude of harm? Tremendous, if we're really talking about mass murders like what happened in Newtown.
But was any of that foreseeable to the makers of the games? Is there any reason a game developer should be concerned that creating a vivid gaming experience will cause mass murder? I would say no. There's never been a proven correlation between the games someone plays and the actions they later take. Think of it this way: the video game industry generates more revenue than either Hollywood or the record industry. It's well past ten billion a year. Millions of games sold to millions of players. But how many mass killings? One, two per year? A handful more in a worse year?
When horrific incidents like the Newtown massacre take place, we want answers. We want to make sense of it. Blame the music. Blame Dungeons and Dragons. Blame video games. Point out that the killer was from some fringe segment of the population, the goths, the loners, the geeks, the recluses. Make sure he's seen as being separate and apart from the rest of society. Because if he's NOT, if in fact he comes from the very HEART of our society, from a town like ours, a family we can recognize as not too different from our own, that's a very scary thought indeed. And we don't want scary. We want easy. We want comforting. So we look for the scapegoat.
I'm a geek. And a gamer. And I've been part of the so-called "Goth" scene in my own way. Hell, for that matter, I listened to heavy metal in the 80s, and I played D&D. People like me aren't the problem. We're no stranger than any other group of fans, be they diehard sports lovers who know all the stats from the American League of the 1960s, or history buffs who have the timeline of the French Revolution memorized to the day, or music lovers that know all the backing band members from Muscle Shoals by heart. We're just...people. With highs and lows, and deeds both good and bad to our names.
I will not be scapegoated. I will not allow others like me to be scapegoated. Focus on the REAL problems, not the superficial stuff that you THINK is the problem.
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