Violence and Video Games

Although I didn’t want to continually harp on the topic of video game violence and violent crimes, it has played out that way. In an ongoing effort with other bloggers, I’ve tried to stem the tide of fear mongering and misinformation. I hope that in some small way, this information will find its way to the right people or perhaps some enterprising journalist, actually doing some legwork and background research, will find this searching for “violence and video games.” This is also ammunition for gamers. The next time some trash-clown tries to tell you how video games are making teenagers violent, this is for a “boo-yah” all up in their business.

First is an article from the Economist.com (I’ve included their graphics for convenience). The article is a fair and honest look at the video game industry and avoids a lot of knee jerking. From the article:

Amid all the arguments about the minutiae of rating systems, the unlocking of hidden content, and the stealing of children’s innocence, however, three important factors are generally overlooked: that attitudes to gaming are marked by a generational divide; that there is no convincing evidence that games make people violent; and that games have great potential in education. (emphasis mine)

Did I just read “no convincing evidence”? I believe I did, and I read that from a highly respected magazine. Not some two-bit blogger. Hear that, Mr. Thompson? I’ll repeat it for you: “there is no convincing evidence that games make people violent.” In fact, as we’ll see, the evidence actually points to just the opposite. But it’s understandable that the venerable members of our society don’t understand these “child playthings”.

“It’s just a generational divide,” says Gerhard Florin, the European boss of Electronic Arts, the world’s biggest games publisher. “It’s people not knowing what they are talking about, because they have never played a game, accusing millions of gamers of being zombies or violent.”

Again, this is something that should be brought to the attention of grubby lawyers and bloviating politicians. Play some GTA or Doom, let the storyline guide you and realize there’s something more complex than a “murder simulator.” That’s another great point the article makes:

What’s more, plenty of games, far from encouraging degeneracy, are morally complex, subtle and, very possibly, improving. Many now explicitly require players to choose whether to be good or evil, and their choices determine how the game they are playing develops.

This should could be a small factor into why violent crimes have gone down with video games are becoming more mainstream. The article also points to things critics hate to see — positive things being done with video games. My favorite was the teacher using Myst and its beautiful imagery to inspire kids to write better. Excellent. The article closes with some sobriety that video-game critics would do well to grok:

In June, Senator Charles Schumer held a press conference to draw attention to the M-rated game “25 to Life”, in which players take the role of a policeman or a gangster. “Little Johnny should be learning how to read, not how to kill cops,” he declared. True, but little Johnny should not be smoking, drinking alcohol or watching Quentin Tarantino movies either. Just as there are rules to try to keep these things out of little Johnny’s hands, there are rules for video games too. Political opportunism is part of the explanation for this double standard: many of gaming’s critics in America are Democrats playing to the centre.

The other stockpile of ammo comes from Gamer Revolution from its article, The Truth About Violent Youth and Video Games. I’ve also used the graph to further illustrate the point I’m trying to make.

While it’s not as eloquently written as the Economist piece, the author Duke Ferris did some good research (and documented sources) and found some interesting trends.

Something must be missing. That first graph is the overall violent crime rate, and we’re talking about youth violence here. So I found the data sorted by age, and it turns out that through 2002, youth homicide actually dropped across the board, the only increase being among adults…

The lowest levels ever recorded. In other words, the Playstation era has, in fact, produced the most non-violent kids ever

And when peopl read the next quote, I hope that little light bulb pops up and they think to themslves, quite profoundly, “Oh, yeah. That makes sense.”

To be fair, there have been about 300 studies on the effects of violent media, about 30 of which have been about video games. Most have found little to no connection, although some studies found a small, casual correlation between aggressive people and violent media.

Even if true, this does not necessarily mean violent media has created aggressive people. It is more likely that aggressive people are attracted to violent media.

And there’s more of being mean to the media —

The media in particular loves to bash video games, making sure to point out any time there’s an Xbox within 50 yards of a crime. This is because games are the new competition – every hour you spend interacting with a game is one hour less spent drooling in front of their fear-mongering programming.

Again, please read the whole article. It’s another good read with some excellent links for further knowledge.

So as I said, that settles it. You can look at the stastics anyway you want, there is no way you can say violent video games are leading to violent crimes. It’s a simple as the graphs and statistics bear out — video gaming is becoming more popular, with more and more gamers playing video games and yet violent crime is going down. Way down. So the print out one of those graphs. Tuck it away in your wallet. Next time some tells you that video games are causing the moral decline in our world, politely show them the business.

Update: Great. Now Thompson is going after Capcom for Killer 7. What does he base his reasoning on? An IGN review of the game. This is priceless. You can bet game review editors will be vetting all future reviews with Jack in mind. This man truly is an idiot.

Another Update: From this Slashdot article there’s a link to a long interview with Jack Thompson. I listened to the whole thing, and while I still don’t agree with him and he didn’t make any headway in convincing me, I’ll admit that he is well spoken and made some valid points. He’s a raging narcissist but he’s a lawyer, so that can be expected. Unfortunately, he’s still pointing to all this research linking video games with violence but he still can’t make the link with video game violence and violent crime. A lot of the research he points to (like this Indiana University study) involve adolescents that already have a predilection to aggresive (and violent) behavior. I mentioned this earlier. The link of brain chemistry and violent media can be shown but they still can’t link this to the actual increase in criminal activity. He’s still wrong.

If you have time, listen to it. It’ll make you frustrated and tear out your hair. It’s disturbing, it touches on a myriad of topics, including the GTA grandma, EA and the porn industry are in cahoots (huh?!), and many others.

(On a side note, I secretly thing Rockstar has something big planned for Bully. Everyone thinks it’s going to be a morally bankrupt game like GTA but I think there’s a big surprise waiting for us. We’ll see if that plays out, but it’s something that I’ve been thinking about lately.)

Another another update: The Videogame Pundit has also commented on this. There’s a funny exchange with Scott from VGCats and Jack Thompson here. I believe this comic is what started it. VGCats makes me laugh.

Related Posts:
Cranial Menus
GTA should have been rated AO
Parents just have to be better parents
Bad News for Rockstar

So I watched the 60 minutes episode this evening. I watched it with my father-in-law. Two things stuck out in my mind: 1) Cranial menus. What is a cranial menu, you ask? Read on for an explanation on that. 2) For all the things we say about personal responsibility, parental guidance, etc., the truth is people have been forever affected by this tragedy. That should not be sold short.

Now, on to cranial menus. This odd term can be directly attributed to that crazy old coot, Jack Thompson, Esq. In one of the comments by Thompson, he claims the kids (I mean killers) who play these video games (I mean murder simulators) form a type of “cranial menu” where they are able to pick and chose the moves they have done so many times in a video game, only this time in real life. This is supposedly what happened with Devin Moore (I thought his name was Devin Thompson). He grabbed the cop’s gun (why wasn’t that puppy secured?), looked at his cranial menu and his GTA-training kicked in. Here, I’ll just quote him from the transcript itself (which can be found here)

“The video game industry gave him a cranial menu that popped up in the blink of an eye, in that police station,” says Thompson. “And that menu offered him the split-second decision to kill the officers, shoot them in the head, flee in a police car, just as the game itself trained them to do.”

Puuhleese. Even my father-in-law, who watches us play video games but doesn’t play himself, saw through that pile of turds. Now, I know this has been discussed elsewhere, but there’s a big difference between seeing tetris blocks and killing other human beings.

I felt the reporter/commentator (can you be that old and still have an earring?) did a fairly good job of reporting. Things didn’t start out very good, though. Consider this intro:

Imagine if the entertainment industry created a video game in which you could decapitate police officers, kill them with a sniper rifle, massacre them with a chainsaw, and set them on fire.

Now that’s just not fair. I know that’s the allure of the GTA games. But to start a news story like that and you’ve already shown your hand. The viewers are already convinced video games are bad if you can “set them on fire“. But giving him the benefit of the doubt, Ed Bradley did a fair job asking the questions. A couple examples:

He asked David Walsh, a child psychologist (who did a study linking violent video games to physical aggression):

“You’ve got probably millions of kids out there playing violent games like Grand Theft Auto and other violent games, who never hurt a fly,” says Bradley. “So what does that do to your theory?”

Walsh respons:

“You know, not every kid that plays a violent video game is gonna turn to violence. And that’s because they don’t have all of those other risk factors going on,” says Walsh. “It’s a combination of risk factors, which come together in a tragic outcome.”

Other risk factors! It was glossed over that Devin was from a broken home, in and out of foster homes and most likely had very little parental interaction. The fact that he logged hundreds of hours playing the game was also only mentioned in passing. Where was the parent to tell him to turn off the game and do his chores, or his homework, or go outside and play? The kid was sixteen! Wasn’t he involved with school sports? Didn’t he have friends? Troubled, indeed.

Of course we need to ask the burning question, that of personal responsibility. We get it near the end:

But shouldn’t Moore, alone, face the consequences of his decision to kill three men?

Thompson responds with this doozy:

“There’s plenty of blame to go around. The fact is we think Devin Moore is responsible for what he did. But we think that the adults who created these games and in effect programmed Devon Moore and assisted him to kill are responsible at least civilly.”

I love that. There’s plenty of blame to go around. I’ll just end it with that. That sentence, those seven simple words sum up Thompon’s motivation. You can do awful, unspeakably terrible and despicable things, but since there is “plenty of blame to go around” let’s sue so people in the process. Nevermind the other people who are scarred forever by this tragedy (my second point). If we can make some cash in the process, let’s do it!

Update: You can read the Video Game Ombudsman’s reaction to the 60 minutes piece here.

Tomorrow on 60 Minutes there will be a story about a case involving a teenager and violent video games. From CBS’s website:

GRAND THEFT AUTO – Can a violent videogame called Grand Theft Auto be responsible for an 18-year-old murdering three people? That’s what the families of the victims are saying in a lawsuit and to Ed Bradley.

I believe these families are being represented by Jack Thompson, attorney extraordinaire. Earlier this week, there was a great “Fisking” (I love these blogging terms) by Josh at Cathode Tan. He dismantles pretty much everything the attorney Jack Thompson has said. (Man it’s hard not calling that guy names. It’s been done so well, by so many other people). It’s an excellent read, as are most of the comments that follow.

This is a perfect example of the power of blogging. It takes some leg work to do this and I’m glad Josh did his homework. He responds to Thompson’s comments/opinions/rants with a level-head. He doesn’t resort to personal attacks and name calling, as Mr. Thompson has been known to do. He points out flaws in the argument and then has examples and counterpoints to reinforce his points.

There are plenty of examples of this in the political blogging community (too many to cite any one example in particular) but blogs keep the so-called “MSM” on their toes. This type of leg work is just now starting to show up in gaming blogs. One I remember, in particular, was the GBA Disney game that had a swear word in it. Gasp! The story was originally found on The Sun (the link to the story seems to be gone) but is quoted here. This was just some shoddy reporting and no real research on the part of the writer. Just a knee-jerk reaction to a swear word on a Disney game. Did he think a game with the Disney name on it could make it through their Quality Control without this being caught? That’s quite a leap of journalistic faith. Actually, the game turned out to be a pirated version (hat tip to Video Fenky) and the pirates had a little shout-out to their competition. But it was the bloggers (and other interested parties, namely, gamers with brains) that righted this wrong. Jack Thompson needed someone to right some of his “wrongs”. While we’ve previously seen some mentions of Thompson which prove this guy measures way high on the wackiness meter (here, here and elsewhere) but no one had really taken him to task until Josh analyzed some of the stuff he has said.

Once Josh posted this, gamers and gaming bloggers took over and this spread pretty quickly. Evil Avatar had it first, since Josh submitted it there but it immediately spawned comments and opinions from fellow EAers. Penny-Arcade picked it up from EA and even though Tycho doesn’t talk directly to the issue at hand, he does make some good points:

… However, the man is essentially building his legacy on the broken bodies of desperate teenagers. Countering the man rationally will serve no purpose, the imagery is too potent. I’m powerless to dissect a sermon like that, simply because the task is so vast. There are a hundred ways his piece dissembles, exaggerates, omits key points, or relies on flourish and appeals, but his motif is perfectly packaged for media. The man spins at ten thousand RPM.

The importance of exposure on Penny-Arcade (or a similar site like EA) can’t be underestimated. Whether they consider themselves bloggers or not, they have an audience of millions and a link from their news stories will drive big time traffic to a site, with thousands of eyes pouring over all your hard work. I’m sure Josh got a nice big jump in traffic from that linkage. This link spawns hundreds of little links (like buttonmashing) and others, like the ones found here, here, or here, here, here, here, and here. (If there are others, let me know). This puts the story in front of even more eyes, most importantly those that have never heard of PA. (I know, it’s hard to believe, but some people haven’t been enlightened.) Call it a meme, call it whatever, but it’s out there for more and more people to see. Hopefully it is enough to counterbalance all the tripe that was spewed out in the first place. This is the voice of the gamer. The voice of a group of people who care about this form of entertainment and desperately want it to be respected and not blamed for everything that’s wrong with society. There were sicko killers and criminals before video games and there will be many more after. We just want some equal footing when defending our hobby of choice. One side of the story really isn’t an argument.

This voice of the gamer probably won’t be heard on tomorrow’s show. I’m afraid it will be one-sided and biased. But the blogging groundwork has been laid and we can also be vocal and have our voice heard. Places like Penny-Arcade and Evil Avatar (among others) have loyal followers that can be mobilized to do great things. Gaming bloggers can also do their part. Heck, we could stoop as low as GoogleBombing Thompson’s “help site” with something like “Clinically Insane“. But we gaming bloggers are above childish tomfoolery, right? We can, however, point people to Josh’s post and let them make their own conclusions. We can watch the bit on 60 minutes and actually debate the points they bring up. It will make us want to scream obscenities at the TV and then get on our favorite forum to call Thompson names not-fit-for-print but we must restrain ourselves and not allow ourselves to be baited into that trap. We just need some even-handed comments and discussions. No name calling! We are Mature Gamers, remember?

I’ll be watching the 60 minutes episode hoping both sides of the story are shown. I know they don’t have the best record of doing that, but one can hope. But I’ll definitely be blogging my thoughts. Until then…