Gaming and politics
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Well, even though this was widely linked last week, I’d be remiss if I didn’t comment on it as well. There was a piece in the Opinion Journal (of the WSJ.com) by Brian Anderson about video games. It’s the same mantra we’ve been hearing but it never hurts to repeat it:
Video games can also exercise the brain in remarkable ways. I recently spent (too) many late-night hours working my way through X-Men: Legends II: The Rise of Apocalypse, a game I ostensibly bought for my kids. Figuring out how to deploy a particular grouping of heroes (each of whom has special powers and weaknesses); using trial and error and hunches to learn the game’s rules and solve its puzzles; weighing short-term and long-term goals–the experience was mentally exhausting and, when my team finally beat the Apocalypse, exhilarating.
And the ever-present challenge to would be gaming-Nannies:
With the next generation of high-powered consoles on the market or soon to appear, gamers will have even richer, more complex virtual environments, many of them nonlinear, to explore. Working through these worlds alone, with friends or–in the ever more popular “massively multiplayer online role-playing games,” or MMOs–with thousands of strangers is far from a “colossal waste of time.” Video games are popular culture at its best. Critics would do better to drop the hysterical laments and pick up a joystick.
Of course, that can be favorably contrasted with this article in the Washington Times about video game legislation, that claims:
For one thing, these laws have tended to be mostly symbolic; the fact that interest in them tends to fade in the absence of newspaper headlines suggests strong elements of political theatrics at play. Second, the laws are regularly struck down by courts for their dubious constitutionality, and everyone including the scourges knows this. Third, more than 9 of 10 retailers have policies restricting the sale of such games to children anyway. All of which begs a question: Just how sincere are the proponents of these laws? Most of them are Democrats with strong interests in easy “moral values” scores. Smells like opportunism to us.
Political theatrics? Political opportunism? Perish the thought!
As an aside, the Opinion Journal mentions the study done by Dmitri Williams at the University of Illinois (which I mentioned here) which uses the game Asheron’s Call 2 for its study. I’ve never played AC2 (or the first one, for that matter), but it doesn’t seem like that game would be explicitly violent or very gory. Is it? Are the violence and gore on the same level as a Resident Evil 4 or a Grand Theft Auto? And if so, can fantasy violence really be compared to a game with more “realistic” characters? Is running over an innocent bystander with a pick-up the same as smashing a goblin with a mace? Just a thought.
Related articles can be found here.
A quick follow-up
Gamestop posted a summary of the Senate hearing on video games, which is referenced in my earlier post about the proposed video game legistlation.
From the review (you can get all the pertinent links, including testimony transcripts here), it seems like the testimony was stacked in favor of the legislation, but there was some heartening quotes, like this one from Paul M. Smith, a partner in the law firm Jenner & Block:
The attorney went on to explain that “Every court to have considered the issue has found ‘violent’ video game laws would not pass constitutional muster because the government lacks a legitimate and compelling interest in restricting video game content. Under well-settled First Amendment principles, expression may not be censored on the theory that it will cause some recipient to act inappropriately, unless it falls into the narrow category of speech ‘directed to inciting’ and ‘likely’ to incite ‘imminent’ violence.”
Unfortunately, that is countered with this argument from Kevin Saunders, a Professor of Law at Michigan State University:
Saunders’ second legal basis will likely prove the most troubling to gamers. This approach would argue that “is that video game play, like the play of pinball machines, is not an activity protected by the First Amendment.” It would legally differentiate the expression of a game designer, which would be protected, from the playing of games, which would not be. As an example, he compared a sexually provocative dancer’s movements, which is a performance and therefore expression, to a gamer playing in an arcade, which is not, even though others were watching him.
This definitely far from over, but there seems to at least seem to be a level of civility between both sides. No one attacked (verbally or otherwise) the otherside, so I guess that’s a good thing.
I guess they’ve never played Grand Theft Auto.
Listen up, people!
I keep hoping that the more I read articles like “Natural Born Regulators” the more people it is reaching. I know I bang the drum pretty loudly here, but I’m just background noise in the grand scheme of things. This article is another good look at the problem with politicians trying to protect the you-know-who.
From the article:
Indeed almost every important social indicator has been improving in recent years even as video-game use among youths has increased. Juvenile murder, rape, robbery, and assault are all down significantly over the past decade. Aggregate violent crime by juveniles fell 43 percent between 1995 and 2004. Meanwhile, fewer kids today are carrying weapons to school or are victims of violence in schools than in the past. Alcohol and drug abuse, teen birth rates, high-school dropout rates, and teenage suicide rates have all dropped dramatically as well. These results do not conclusively rule out a link between exposure to games and violent acts or promiscuous sexual behavior, but they should at least call into question the “world-is-going-to-hell” sort of generalizations made by proponents of increased regulation.
Heard that before, right? What about this one:
Finally, there might be some cathartic or educational benefits associated with many video games. From the Bible to Beowulf to Batman, depictions of violence have been used not only to teach lessons, but also to allow people — including children — to engage in a sort of escapism that can have a therapeutic effect on the human psyche. Kids know the difference between make-believe violence and the real thing. And many games today are remarkably sophisticated, offering players a “cognitive workout” that is far more stimulating, rewarding, and even educational than much of the other media fare that is available.
Yeah, heard that one before, too. Unfortunately, the one we hear the most is this:
In sum, the debate over video-game regulation is being driven by myths and misperceptions. Policymakers and critics should consider the facts before moving forward with efforts to regulate the gaming industry, especially since such rules could have profound First Amendment implications as well.
And that’s the problem. Those pesky facts keep getting in the way!
(thanks to my bud Rightank for the tip)
Kids don’t get to watch eye gougings anymore
Buttonmashing.com reader Bobster, always the helpful tipster, sent me a link to an article at Reason.com entitled Blood, Guts, and Entertainment: A sanguine take on sanguinary diversions. A great read, as most Reason articles are. The writer, Justin Pete, is reviewing the book Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment in which the author argues, “that violent entertainment is good, indeed necessary—a way to sublimate the vestigial primal urges left over from our hunter-gatherer days” and “our popular culture may be saturated with synthetic gore, but at least we don’t spend our leisure time watching real people have their eyes put out, their limbs pulverized, their sex organs amputated and their flesh torn to pieces with red-hot pincers.” Interesting claims, to say the least. While I don’t necessarily agree that we have “primal urges” to “sublimate,” I do think exploring violence in our culture (especially in the past) is a starting point to refute the hand wringing that goes on now. It seems that a lot of people decrying violence in the media ignore history, much to their convenience.
Justin sites example after example from the book of violence in past entertainment, in order to dispel the myth that “things were so much better (simpler, purer, cleaner, take your pick) before.” The idea that movies like Natural Born Killers couldn’t have been made in 1939 (the year of The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind) is simply a fallacy:
Such a simplistic worldview conveniently forgets that 1939 also brought such films as Death Rides the Range, Six-Gun Rhythm, and The Man They Could Not Hang, advertised with the tagline, “Boris Karloff dares you to see this holocaust of horror!”
But, in the end, the conclusion that violence in the media is not directly responsible for violence of the partakers is never breached in the book. It’s a shame. We’ve said it here before, but no one seems to listen. Just because we enjoy violence in our games (or movies or books) doesn’t mean we wish to participate in it. Being entertained is enough for us. But, as Justin says
… the tweaking [Schechter] delivers to the world’s Chicken Littles —those like Gov. Blagojevich, who writes on safegamesillinois.org that “when kids play, they should play like children, not like gangland assassins”—is overdue. If violent entertainment is anything, it is a mirror held up to a violent culture. Eliminating these cultural reflections won’t do anything to alter the master image.
Gaming Parents: good little citizens.
It’s been passed around a lot already, but I couldn’t pass up the news story reporting that 35% of parents game. Not only can I include myself in that 35% (even though no one asked me), I loved this little tidbit:
Gamer parents are also likely to be voters, according to the study, with 73 percent of those surveyed claiming to visit the polls regularly. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 85 percent think that monitoring the appropriateness of what kids play should be the job of the parents, not the government or game publishers. Similarly, parents believe by a two-to-one margin that it isn’t the government’s job to regulate games at all.
See that? Are all parent gamers conservatives? Nope. We’re just well adjusted and we’re involved. Involved in our kids’ lives, involved in politics (some of us more than others), involved in rational thinking.
It’s something we picked up while we were gaming.
It’s a boy!
I’m so proud! This week has seen the birth of another blog-son of mine, the Conservative Buckeye. Run by long-time buttonmashing.com reader Jeremiah, the Conservative Buckeye is a mish-mash of TV culture, food and restaurant reviews, Ohio State football, and a little politics on the side. Stop on over and say hi!
Jeremiah is my second blog-child. My first, who I think I’ve mentioned before, is run by my buddy James, aka Rightank, at Rightank.com, another conservative blog with a judicial/political slant (he is a lawyer, afterall).
I know my readership is from all colors and stripes of the political spectrum so I don’t expect everyone to agree with my friends. While I keep my political leanings close to the vest here, I am firm in my beliefs. All I say is have an open mind.
But is that Legal?
Glenn Reynolds, aka The Instapundit, has a great piece on the Clinton/Lieberman/Bayh legislation that would codify the ratings assigned to video games. While IANAL, Reynolds is, so when he says this law would be unconstitutional, I would have to agree. He makes some great points, including the fact that this is blatant posturing by Clinton to position herself with parents for the upcoming 2008 election. A couple choice quotes:
Politicians — and, for that matter, journalists — tend to think there’s a difference, because a lot more of them read books than play computer games. But that’s more a reflection on how behind the times they are
We’ve said something along these lines many times before here, but it bears repeating. It’s the rock-and-roll analogy. Our grandparents didn’t like that our parents were listening to Elvis Presley because it was foreign to them and that made them resist it. This is very similar.
And since it’s hard for me to believe that a rating system for books would pass constitutional muster, I have considerable doubt that it will do so here.
This is another point. Where does the rating of the media (and our hobbies/past times) end? Everyone already ignores movie ratings (including the theaters), the Parental Advisor sticker on a CD case is the path to instant success with teenagers, and supposedly no one understands the video game rating system. Rating systems work if they’re actually meaningful, not just empty gestures with “the Children” in mind. So far they all seem to be just that.
Needless to say, go read the whole thing.
I’ve bookmarked the opinion Reynolds references for future referencing. It’s a good read (if you can navigate the legalese) and it seems at least judge Posner “gets it”:
Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low. It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware. To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it.
Maybe video games are different. They are, after all, interactive. But this point is superficial, in fact erroneous. All literature (here broadly defined to include movies, television, and the other photographic media, and popular as well as highbrow literature) is interactive; the better it is, the more interactive. Literature when it is successful draws the reader into the story, makes him identify with the characters, invites him to judge them and quarrel with them, to experience their joys and sufferings as the reader’s own.
Indeed.
(thanks to Bobster for the link)
Gaming and politics
I will probably need to add a new category for games and violence/politics at some point here on buttonmashing.com. I don’t cover them as thoroughly as Game Politics and others but I still follow it closely. (I’m little bit of a poltical junkie but I try to avoid anything too political on these pages). Anyway, this is old in blog-time, but there’s a good response to Hillary Clinton’s propsed legislation I briefly mentioned here at Tech Central Station.
I like that other people are getting into the discourse. John Luik isn’t a gamer but says something that I just love.
For some, these complaints about video games are nothing more than a reflection of the cultural and generational divide between those below and above age 40. For instance, the Economist recently noted that “The opposition to gaming springs largely from the neophobia that has pitted the old against the entertainments of the young for centuries. Most gamers are under 40, and most critics are non-games-playing over 40s.” That may well be true, though studies suggest that about half of Americans play some sort of video game. As for age and bias, I am both not a game player and rather regrettably well past 40, but the evidence leads me to side with the kids who want to play.
I also find it interesting how many people (bloggers) out there are into gaming in one form or another that aren’t “gaming bloggers”. I read a lot of gaming blogs (too many!) but I also read my fair share of blogs on other topics. I recently read this little gaming blurb on VodkaPundit about Bushnell’s comment about the number of gamers being smaller than 20 years ago. The VodkaPundit, as long as I’ve read him, doesn’t often comment on such things, so it’s cool to see others talking about it. What really amazed me where the number of comments remininscing about gaming. I think that’s a great thing and I hope it continues.
Ugggh
Hello, America. I want to be your next President. Why should you vote for me? Look at all the things I’ve done for the children. Won’t you please think of the children?
Parents just have to be better parents.
First off, I never wanted buttonmashing.com to become a place for political statements, so I will try to refrain from such comments as much as possible. Also, I didn’t want to talk about GTA:SA anymore. I think the game has no redeeming qualities. I respect the opinions of people who think otherwise, but for my money, GTA:SA is a poor game. That said, I really don’t want to beat dead horses (Jack Thompson is an idiot and the GTA scandal) anymore but if you throw in another horse (Hillary Clinton) 
and I’m game. As it’s been reported, Senator Clinton has thrown her considerable political weight behind an investigation into Rockstar’s peccancies.
Mrs. Clinton asked the commission to determine “the source of this content,” especially since the game can fall into the hands of young people. The game industry’s self-policing unit, the Entertainment Software Rating Board, is investigating whether the maker of the game violated the industry rule requiring “full disclosure of pertinent content.”
Do we really need “federal regulators to investigate” this? Whether this game should have been rated M or AO by the ESRB it should never “fall into the hands of young people.” The NY Times also seems to be sketchy on the rest of the details, but that’s beside the point. It’s troubling that an influential Senator has taken interest in this case, because it gives credence to nut-jobs like Jack Thompson.
In fact, this seems to have been Jack Thompson’s dream come true, as he is literally slobbering in this letter he purportedly sent to everyone in the video game industry.
(On a side note, as a conservative Republican, I am sad to learn that Jack Thompson also belongs to my party. But that is neither here nor there.)
As I read this letter, I had to pause numerous times and pinch myself. Certainly I had drifted into a parallel universe where logic doesn’t exist and saying things crazy-stupid is the norm. As few choice quotes from the letter:
For a month Doug Lowenstein and his ESA pretended that there was no mod, that there was no scandal, that there was no need for any action whatsoever by ESA. How wrong he was.
No, how wrong you are Mr. Thompson! It’s the ESRB, not the ESA, that needs to take action. They rated a game based on content provided to them. It is neither Lowenstein’s nor the ESA’s fault that Rockstar may have held back certain content. This is just hot air.
Doug Lowenstein could have prevented what is going to happen today, but he preferred to shoot the messengers. It is his chronic style.
I wondered if he was trained to do that in Grand Theft Shoot-the-Media. Do you think he has an option of “Shoot the Messenger” in one of his cranial menus?
News organizations don’t trust ESA because Doug Lowenstein is its head. Why should they? He treats them like dirt.
After watching 60 minutes in March, I’d say it was the other way around. They gave whackos like you all the time in the world to spout your nonsense and then gave Doug the equivalent of a couple sound bites.
When Hitler invaded Russia, opening up an Eastern offensive on the eve of winter, Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill noted that “Hitler must have been rather loosely educated, not having learned the lesson of Napoleon’s autumn advance on Moscow.”Your Doug Lowenstein is similarly “loosely educated” about the United States Constitution.
Whoops, Thompson has “jumped the shark.” When the “Hitler” comparisons are thrown around, it’s time to pick up your things and leave. Nothing to see here. If you made it that far in the article, you can stop there. Does anyone see the similarity between a madman who exterminated millions of people and a man who may have missed a simple bit of content in a video game where NO ONE DIED? I know you, smart buttonmashers, are familiar with history. I won’t belabor the point anymore. You’ve seen the diarrhea pour out of this guys mouth time and time again. There’s more of this garbage, you can read it if you are a glutton for punishment. You can make your own decision about this guy.
There is one nice little gem, though, from Mr. Thompson. It reminded me why I love George W:
The evening in January 2000 that I appeared on NBC Nightly News to talk about the link between violent games and Columbine, Tom Brokaw asked then Governor Bush about that link and what he as President would do about it? George Bush simply said “Parents just have to be better parents.”
Amen, brother! We can write all the legislation in the world, fine stores and their clerks for selling games to minors, whatever. In the end, if the parents will let little Tommy play GTA:Kill ‘em All Rampage, who’s to blame, really?
Update: Here are two cents (which are actually worth more) from blogger JKL, in which he refers to Jack Thompson as Thumper. Anyone who would think of that is okay in my book.
Also keep checking out Kotaku for updates. Brian is on this case like white on rice.
Related Posts:
Cranial Menus
GTA should have been rated AO
Parents just have to be better parents
Game Cheats as Political Speech : Kotaku
This is one of the best posts I’ve seen at Kotaku. Ever. Pure awesomeness.
My buddy over at Rightank would get a big kick out of this one.
Update (4/20/05 12:53pm): As pointed out to me by Ed (in the comments), the original source to the list of “cheat codes” is the Riding Sun blog.
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What we're playing
Tony
GTA IV | Mario Kart Wii | Super Mario Galaxy
Nat
Okami | Bioshock | Overlord | Mario Kart Wii | Boom Blox | FF7: Crisis Core | The World Ends With You | DiRT | Rogue Trooper (PC) -
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