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Virtual Violence

Media have gotten the idea that if it walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.  First person shooters (FPS) like Doom have been the fodder of the media for the outbursts of mass shooting sprees.  In the opinion of the experts and people that have some sort of expertise in the high calibre weapons field, the high exposure that our children have received with the video games has made them increasingly more violent and that it's the video game industry's fault.  That is a bogus and unfounded statement from shock media and media overhype and the common people buy it hook, line and sinker.  Video games may have become more realistic, if anything, but they have not scientifically proven that violent video games cause children to become more violent than they already are. A ratings system has been developed, but the way a game is rated is completely objective and definitions are not standardized.

The unfortunate thing is that the ones who are in charge are actively trying to change the system so that their perceived danger never materializes. During his Vice-Presidential campaign in 2000 and his current Presidential campaign, Democratic Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman had made it and is making it a concern that the video game industry is doing a poor job of policing itself. He was quoted as saying on the 2000 campaign trail that if the “video game makers don’t clean up their act, (I) firmly believe it’s the government’s responsibility to step in and pass new laws regulating the games industry and other media” (“Lieberman's Gameplan” Oct. 2000 40).

But the disturbing thing is that when Lieberman made that statement, he was only exposed to one genre of video games: fighters. He is basing his entire initial stance on one type video game. Fighters and FPS games are completely different in their psychology. In a fighter, one’s mentality is to produce some sort of combination that will disable and defeat your opponent. With the exception of the blood, weapons and flashy effects, a fighter resembles an actual sport— boxing. We as a society look at boxing as a pure sport in which one combatant tries to prove his endurance while also defending himself against another pugilist. But to the average young person, to achieve a fraction of what athletes do in real life, or simulate in games, physical training is needed.

What’s so different in Doom is that the training to shoot someone or something is actually the game itself. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman contends that video games are teaching young children how to kill through video games.  Some of the techniques that soldiers use in battle are actually used in some FPS games like SOCOM US Navy SEALS. He claims that in military and police training, the cadets are trained reflexively to point and shoot their target.  “Now, if you're a little troubled by that, how much more should we be troubled by the fact that every time a child plays an interactive point-and-shoot video game, he is learning the exact same conditioned reflex and motor skills?”(Grossman Saturday Evening Post July 1999, 68).

Given, some military stratagems are programmed in some FPS games, but it doesn’t mean that a young child that plays that game constantly isn’t going to spontaneously pick up an assault rifle and start shooting people. In fact, it doesn’t guarantee that anyone from any age group is going to snap and go crazy. “Among 8- to 13-year old boys the average (of console and PC video game use) is 7.5 hours per week (Roberts, Foehr, Rideout and Broadie, 1999)” (Anderson and Bushman, 354). That statistic has been used several times by experts, but that doesn’t say anything about violence. One that hasn’t been mentioned is that of fourth graders, 59% of girls and 73% of boys say their favorite games are violent ones (Anderson and Bushman 354). This statistic is also misleading. All it says is that that percentage of children like violent games. It is almost saying that this percentage of people prefer one type of ice cream over another one.

Experts have convinced most people that there is a link between choosing violent games and being violent. Aaron Hardin was a 16 year old boy when he shot his brother over a video game, which happened to be violent. The chances of a person playing a violent video game being violent are the same as a nonviolent person playing a violent video game. Is it a proven fact that constantly playing a violent video game leads to real violence?

“Playing violent video games can increase aggressive behaviour, says Craig Anderson (Iowa State University of Science & Technology, IA, USA). The effects may be even more harmful than exposure to violent television and films, he adds, ‘because video games are interactive, engrossing, and require the player to identify with the aggressor’” (Larkin, 1525). This professor says “can” not “does”, and that small verb can makes a big difference. He is saying it’s possible that it can happen but not a sure thing.

Some of this information is also misleading: “In the second study, 210 college students were asked to play either a violent or non-violent video game; 15 minutes after playing, those who had played the violent game ‘punished’ their opponents with a noise blast for a longer period than did students who had played the non-violent game (J Pers Soc Psychol 2000; 78: 772-90)” (Larkin 1525).

Noise blast is not defined anywhere in that article. That statement can be interpreted as the students who played the violent video games could punish their opponents with noise blasts while those who didn’t couldn’t. It could also be interpreted as both sets of students were given the opportunity to blast their opponents, and one set of students did it longer. It is never clearly stated, so therefore it should make the study moot and inconclusive. But because it is in a journal of higher learning, it can be understood by those who specialize in that specific field. Those people can tell the masses interested in the subject whatever they want to voice their opinion through this study.

The psychology of a person should matter most when it comes to a person SWI (Shooting While Influenced) of a video game, but it almost always never comes up. What is the most common occurrence when it comes to basing most of people’s opinions on video games is the fact that the evidence is right there.

A 2001 CNN article goes into how Attorney General John Ashcroft was about to take the violent game makers (most notably the makers of First Person Shooters) to task for making their games so violent.  He says that he doesn’t  want to infringe on those exercising their first amendment rights but he said that people needed to restrain themselves from exposing themselves with such constant violence.  Ashcroft also mentions that one of the shooters in Columbine had programmed his copy of the game Doom to mimic his neighborhood and that Michael Carneal had never fired a gun before but learned from playing “violent video games”. The media takes this piece of information and make it seem that Doom was the cause of the killing. Immediately after reading that story an average person thinks that Carneal learned to kill human targets through a video game and that he was disturbed enough to make his targets people he knew and his arena a place that he knows. (US attorney general takes aim at violent video games April 4, 2001)

What Michael Carneal did on his computer was to modify his copy of Doom to display different bitmaps, a process called “skinning”. It only modifies what a game looks like, nothing else. The game still plays the same and scoring is kept the same way. Many people who have the appropriate tools and the knowledge of changing something in a game to make it more recognizable to that one person would do it almost after getting the tools and/or the game. Some games are also able to be customized to fit a person’s desires.  The chances that any student wouldn’t want to take out some frustrations on a teacher that they didn’t like in a creative way that didn’t hurt anyone is small. But we only hear one side of the story. We know now that Carneal does have some psychological problems but it isn’t known if Doom caused it or that Doom is just circumstantial evidence.

Some places have decided to take a stand and decide, but it may not be the right one. The City of Indianapolis (IN) and Marion County passed a law in July of 2000 restricting access to coin operated video games in arcades.  It was the first of its kind in the United States. All violent coin-ops were to be labeled as violent and placed 10 feet away from all other video games.  Those games were also hidden behind a curtain or a wall and all game players had to be 18 or accompanied by an adult to play.  The city required all coin operated machines to have a city permit and the city thought it could enforce that law.  A Purdue professor thought that the law wouldn’t do any good.  He didn’t see a correlation between the violence and a person playing a violent video game (New law restricts violent video games in Indianapolis July 18, 2000). Three years later there has been no evidence that blocking the violent games from younger people has contributed to less violence. And if it did, three years is not enough time to make such a bold determination.

The United States isn’t the only country worried about the violence in arcades. The Canadian province of British Columbia is rating FPS games like Doom as porn games. It also is citing the reason it is doing so as a symptom of the culture of FPS games rather than the cause of them. The game was reviewed by the province’s Director of Film Classification rather than someone relevant to that position. This not only shows the paranoia of video game violence in this country, but that it has also spread to others as well. The fact that someone else needs to review games to classify them is a joke.

Merriam-Webster’s website m-w.com defines pornography as “1. the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement; 2. material (as books or a photograph) that depicts erotic behavior and is intended to cause sexual excitement; 3. the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction <the pornography of violence>”. Clearly, unless a person playing that game has some sort of pain fetish, it does not fit the first two, more commonly known definitions of pornography. But to use the third definition in this case is misleading.

An example: hockey is the national pastime of Canada, and emotions run wild when the people follow their teams, especially in British Columbia with the NHL’s Vancouver Canucks. Scoring goals and a hot and heavy divisional race and individual scoring titles at stake this year are likely to “arouse a quick intense emotional reaction” on the radio, on television and in the GM Place. By using the thought processes of the Director of Film Classification’s definition of pornography, she should therefore classify every game of the Vancouver Canucks shown on television as pornographic. They, like shooting someone provide an emotional response. This is a clear example of politicians using a double standard to limit the things that they do not understand.

In January 1994, the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board) was founded and its main purpose was to review games and to categorize them into 5 categories: Early Childhood (5 years and less), Kids to Adult, Teen (13 and older), Mature (17 and older) and Adults Only (18 and older). Since that time, the Kids to Adult rating has been replaced with the Everyone rating (ESRB.org). Those ratings are used in the United States and in Canada. Violent games are given the Teen rating and the vast majority of all shooters, games like SOCOM US Navy SEALS and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, are given ratings of Mature. If parents watched what their children buy or play, such a ratings system wouldn’t be necessary. It was devised to help vendors and parents with their monitoring of games.

The ESRB is also a flawed rating system. The reviewers of the game don’t play it. Three reviewers watch a video of the way a particular game is played. These three can be anyone: educators, parents, politicians, etc. The way a game is reviewed is those three reviewers (who are not in the same place when the game is being reviewed and have no contact with the other two) watch a preview of the game, meaning action during gameplay, cut scenes, character interaction, etc. That person then rates the game from a list that includes, violence, sex, language, and substance abuse. None of the categories are anymore specific meaning violence means violence in general instead of degrees in violence. All parts of those four categories are used in context of the game. In cases of inconclusiveness, more reviewers are used.

But the fact that none of the reviewers play the games they review bring up questions like the qualifications of the reviewer, if the reviewers are using the same criteria with an earlier rated game like they are with the one they are reveiewing and if a reviewer decided to tank a game’s review because of a personal agenda they have with the manufacturer of a game, or the gaming industry in general. The ESRB produces biased ratings for parents to check when buying video games.

But a lot of them don’t even bother. “Teens in grades 8 through 12 report that 90% of their parents never check the ratings of games before allowing their purchase and only 1% of the teens’ parents prevented a purchase based on its rating (Walsh, 2000). Also, 89% reported that their parents never limited time spent playing video games” (Anderson and Bushman 354). The parents don’t know what their kids are buying to even prevent the possibility of their children considering shooting people in a major killing spree.

Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan pressured Illinois game retailers to take a hard stand and enforce the ESRB ratings. He conducted a sting operation with 13 to 15 year old kids and in all the attempts of those kids buying an M-rated (appropriate for adults aged 17 and older) were successful. Through that pressure Wards (now defunct) pulled all its M-rated games and Wal-Mart soon followed suit ("For Mature Eyes Only", 24). The retailers don’t care that children are buying known violent games. As long as they get their money, why should they? It doesn’t matter who buys the game, as long as someone does. It should also be noted that stores are not prosecuted if they do sell violent games to minors and individual stores can choose if they wish to sell M-Rated games to minors or not.

The ESRB is a failure in the sense that it does not prevent the sale of M-rated games to those younger than 17 and it does not make parents very clearly aware of the fact that their child either has played/bought or will play/buy violent games or what the “violent content” constitutes. The government sees the inconclusiveness and the confusion and jumps at this chance, hence Lieberman’s promises to regulate violent games. But they don’t need to, other than the fact that they don’t have any real, direct experience with the material.

Sony, the manufacturer of the widely popular and successful console Playstation 2 censored content on the game BMX XXX which featured topless women in internal game movies and on bikes. Akklaim, which manufactured the game, released it uncensored on the other major consoles. Because the video game industry is now a major moneymaker, companies are now starting to do what they need to do to limit mature content: police themselves. Sony has started the process and eventually others will in time.

Technology is a thing that is in constant change and a state of flux. The gaming consoles of the early 1980’s are not even a fraction as powerful as the consoles of today. The then ultra-modern graphics of Super Mario Bros., Legend of Zelda and Duck Hunt have bowed out to the ultra-realistic games of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance and Bloodrayne. With that change comes a better representation of the game’s environment. The ones who know best how to make sure that the environment doesn’t get too realistic and that the game isn’t an extreme showcase of gore and blood are the ones who make the games themselves.

The media needs to get a hold of itself and stop hyping every news event as though it is the story of the century. That is probably why the government is going after the gaming industry so hard. The media companies hear the words “shooting” and “video game” and immediately tie the two together and blow the story up much more than it should have been. By every company wanting to get the story first without checking accuracy we get generalizations involving FPS games. The media companies have reported the general content in some games, but other than the media that specializes in video game news, they have not reported the fact that Sony censored BMX XXX and the same game was released unedited for other systems, or the reviewing practices of the ESRB, or the percentage of parents that monitor their kids game playing habits or that stores don’t have to enforce the ESRB ratings or how experienced politicians are with games. But the media isn’t the only one at fault with the current situation.

There is no reason whatsoever for the government to step in and tell gaming companies how to make a game. They don’t tell the movie industry not to make or distribute absolute shooting-spree style gore fests or to not make or distribute pornography. Congress should do the things that it does best- make laws that will prosecute the people that are violent and emotionally unstable, not to limit the small chance that such a person will be exposed to that.