If you’ve read my column regularly, you’d probably recall from my Oct. 31 column that I love a good video game.
I like constructive, pacifistic games — I like building cities, maybe playing golf with an anthropomorphic dinosaur and solving puzzles. But I like violent games, too. I want to smash a supersonic race car into my opponents’ machines, sending them spiraling into a smoldering mechanical wreck in the city streets below. I want to shoot big guns and wave pointy swords around, I long to throw bombs at fellow go-karters, I yearn to run through big castles and flatten goombas with steel-toed boots. I want to pander to my id and exercise my brain at the same time. But, I just want to do all of this in a virtual world.
“But Travis,” censoring talking heads wail, “despite your dashing charm and quick wits, your appreciation of the simulation of violent acts, however ethically you behave in real life, promotes a desensitizing culture that tramples the universal perception of the sanctity of life.”
Their responsibility-dissolving leftist counterparts are no better, charging that companies who produce violent games irrevocably compel naive consumers to emulate violent acts and conclude those companies must be held ethically and legally (and presumably solely) accountable for these acts.
Fortunately, even in a judicial system that’s had considerable difficulty adjusting to the complicated implications of rapid technological development in the last decade, judges have generally found these absurd, disconnected claims of culpability by proxy to be just that.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Babcock dismissed a suit filed by relatives of a teacher killed in the 1999 Columbine High School shootings. The claim purported several dangerous arguments: that game makers could have reasonably foreseen that their product would have caused violence; that video games should not be protected as free speech as other media are; and that specific games are (presumably ethically) defective, in that the game taught players how to use an object — namely a gun — without accurately reflecting the complex responsibilities and consequences of using a weapon in real life.
And therein lies the catch: Arguments that reassign responsibility rely on the notion that a video game’s players have enough difficulty distinguishing between fictional (and generally unrealistic) consequences in a fictitious world and actual consequences in the real world; that they believe reasonable actions in one parallel legitimate behavior in the other. This is, of course, entirely false for that majority of gamers who are old and sane enough to make these distinctions.
Unfortunately, some pundits disagree.
In a 2001 article in Maclean’s, Simon Fraser University’s Stephen Kline oblique opines that “the industry is getting away with murder” — never mind that the National Institute on Media and the Family, which assesses media for responsible regulations, hailed the video game industry “more responsible than the other media industries.”
Judge Danny Boggs sagely agreed, writing in a ruling from a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that “We find that it is simply too far a leap from shooting characters on a video screen to shooting people in a classroom.”
Boggs is right: Millions play violent video games; only a few commit violent crimes that could even loosely be linked to those games. An NIMH study suggests video games that reward aggressive behavior stimulate aggressive thoughts immediately following play; similar studies suggest the same is true of other media. But for all but the psychopathic, a fine-tuned system of social and cultural inhibitions prevent aggressive thoughts from manifesting into aggressive, harmful behavior.
Moreover, claims of the gaming industry’s responsibility for violent acts, in conjunction with these rightfully rejected legal claims, imply a deeper, more problematic assertion: That video game makers are not only culpable for others’ acts (possibly result from an inability to distinguish between the real and the virtual) but that these companies are largely responsible for this schizophrenic disconnect in the first place.
Could the violently tragic events that have prompted protest about video game violence been rooted in deeper issues? According to the Federal Trade Commission, 85 percent of game purchases are mediated by parents. Could some parents be faulting in their responsibility to screen content for age appropriateness — even with the help of the Entertainment Software Rating Board’s rating system? Or worse, could these parents simply be guilty of failing to cultivate an ability to distinguish fact from responsibility, and senses of responsibility and causation in their children, in the large majority of the time when those kids aren’t playing games? Could it be that parents, overzealous activists and some politicians are looking for a scapegoat for a social ill, rather than a solution?
The most potent and relevant question in the debate about violence in video games, it seems to me, is not whether video games might catalyze violence, but whether society will allow people to dissolve themselves illegitimately of responsibility for their own actions.