15 November 2005
Many outspoken politicians have been in protest against video games. They contend that video games and other forms of media increase violent behavior in individuals. This is not a new trend. Senator Joe Lieberman has been on a “crusade” against video games and violent media since 1977. Hillary Clinton has recently joined the crusade in the highly publicized “Hot Coffee” incident of this last year. Both refer to sources and research done by controversial sources such as Colonel Dave Grossman and Dr. David Anderson. What I intend to consider is the opposite and a seemingly rarely considered view. Does violence in video games lower the amount of real life violence? My claim is that because people are able to act out violent tendencies according to the rules or objectives in a game, the players are
not left needing a release for their violent tendencies in real life. I make a clear distinction between video games and other forms of media for example violence in movies, which leaves the viewer yearning to act on violent tendencies that may or may not have been present before watching the movie.
On 10 December 1993, ID Software released
Doom for pc (wikipedia sidebar). Not only was it released for pc but it was released as a demo as well, allowing approximately ten million people to download it off the internet at no charge. Before that was Midways Mortal Kombat fighting game. These games rocked the boat in terms of on-screen violence and mayhem. They were not the first, however. Previously,
Night Trap (October 15, 1992.), was released taking advantage of the newly popularized compact Disk technology. The difference between these 3 games is their relative popularity.
Night Trap was a point and click type game that left little control to the user to actually manipulate the game in any way more than we currently manipulate a DVD or VCR player.
Doom and
Mortal Kombat were both very interactive games that allowed the player to take control of fictional characters in a science fiction or fantasy setting and defeat foes that were not based on real people.
Senator Hillary Clinton had begun her crusade against Violence in video games early this year when the publicity of “Hot Coffee” reached its peak. “Hot Coffee” is a scene or mini-game in the main part of the game
Grand Theft Auto that includes some unfinished sexual content. She claimed the publisher Rockstar Games had left the sexually explicit content in the game in such way as to thwart the Electronic Software Rating Boards (ESRB) rating system. In order to access the content in question, the end user is required to physically modify the hardware in which the game is played in the case of consoles and to download a third party software patch.
Colonel David Grossman, another notable critic of video games and video game violence, has been a long-standing member of the crusade against video game violence. Drawing on his extensive military career as his primary source of information, he uses such analogies as
Within the midbrain there is a powerful, God-given resistance to killing your own kind. Every species, with a few exceptions, has a hardwired resistance to killing its own kind in territorial and mating battles. When animals with antlers and horns fight one another, they head butt in a harmless fashion. But when they fight any other species, they go to the side to gut and gore. Piranhas will turn their fangs on anything, but they fight one another with flicks of the tail. Rattlesnakes will bite anything, but they wrestle one another. Almost every species has this hardwired resistance to killing its own kind. (Killology "Trained to Kill" para 4)
This is just not true; many animal species have been known to kill members of their own species. Whether it is territorial or population control, many animals have been known to fight for that which is important.
He goes onto compare video games to military as in
Whereas infantry training in World War II used bull's-eye targets, now soldiers learn to fire at realistic, man-shaped silhouettes that pop into their field of view. That is the stimulus. The trainees have only a split second to engage the target. The conditioned response is to shoot the target, and then it drops. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response: soldiers or police officers experience hundreds of repetitions. Later, when soldiers are on the battlefield or a police officer is walking a beat and somebody pops up with a gun, they will shoot reflexively and shoot to kill. We know that 75 to 80 percent of the shooting on the modern battlefield is the result of this kind of stimulus-response training.(Killology, para. 3)
If this were the case, would this not have a positive or negligible effect on the players of games rooted completely in fantasy with little or no resemblance to reality? The majority of the games such as
Turok, Serious Sam, and
Doom do not even deal with outlines or silhouettes. If what the colonel says were true then these games would have absolutely no effect on the person. There is a clear distinction, both in these games and in real life, between the monsters of
Doom, and the people the player interacts with everyday.
Curt Lavarello, Executive Director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, states “A lot of the issues that kids get into fights over are the same as they were 25 years ago. What's changed drastically is the availability and accessibility of weapons and firearms” (Koch, K., School Violence).
Often overlooked in the debate over video games is the connection to other forms of media. Actually, it is the lack of a connection to other forms of media that I am suggesting needs to be researched. To watch a violent “R” rated movie filled with blood, gore, violence, sex, and all the other evils being discussed only takes a single click of the play button. This is not the case in video games. Games by their very nature are very engrossing for much longer periods. A single button push will not reward the player with hours of entertainment but repeated buttons and controls are necessary to get the full story of the game or to reach the pinnacle of the story. I find video games much more akin to sports such as football or baseball. With the release of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG)
World of Warcraft by Blizzard North, it is no longer a solo act of violence. Instead, palyers are forced to use social skills to form groups and raids. Often, with people the player may or may not know in real life. It is also required that the player spend a fair amount of time interacting with people that the player have no previous experience with. It requires more then twenty one days of playing to reach the “end-game” which itself is a never-ending series of quests. The game itself, though rated “T” for teen by the ESRB deals with such issues as war, genocide, and racism as well as sexual innuendo.
The research actually done on the specific topic of video game violence is sparse and incomplete at best. Leading the anti game research is Craig Anderson, a qualified Doctor in psychology. It must be pointed out that he tends to
not point out research done by anyone else. This seems to me to add quite a bit of bias to his research. An outside observer would think that the research of one man could be discredited on the very basis that it was done by one person. It is not unlikely in the social sciences to have an anomalous research study that finds the hypothesis correlating with the research. His lack of further research and further studies discredits him the most.
Jonathan Freedman, a critic of Anderson, has written extensively not only on Anderson’s research but others in the field, both those who support the hypothesis and those opposed. He found:
the majority of experiments have not had positive results. After detailed analysis of the numbers that the researchers reported, Freedman summarizes: 37% of the experiments supported the hypothesis that media violence causes real-world violence or aggression; 22% had mixed results, and 41% did not support the hypothesis. After he factored out experiments using "the most doubtful measures of aggression" (popping balloons and so forth), only 28% of the results were supportive, 16% were mixed,
and 55% were non-supportive of the "causal hypothesis" [underlined for emphasis] (Heins 4).
This is in direct contradiction to Anderson who claims the research to be complete and irrefutable.
The research actually done on the subject of the effects of video game violence is sparse at best. For the most part it is inconclusive and often in direct contradiction to other similar research being done. Furthermore, it contradicts the statistics that are currently available to the public on such issues as violent crime data, video game and demographics data, including sales of games by country, state, city, and an amazing amount of data that relates to the income of the purchaser.
In 2000 the Surgeon General released a report containing all media topics and addressed issues such as violence, gore, and sex in the content of the media. This report also covered the topic of video game violence, finding that the research into media violence and especially video games is lacking as of the date of the report.
A recent meta-analysis of these studies found that the overall effect size for both randomized and correlational studies was small for physical aggression (
r = .19) and moderate for aggressive thinking (
r = .27) (Anderson & Bushman, in press). In separate analyses, the effect sizes for both randomized and cross-sectional studies was small (
r = .18 and .19, respectively).
The impact of video games on violent behavior remains to be determined. [underlined for emphasis] (Satcher)
My final argument is that there has not been an increase in crime as claimed by many critics. News media sensationalism has contributed to the false view that crime is on the rise. In fact the crime rate since 1993 has fallen substantially including, but not relegated to, violent crimes.
As for trends in arrests of juveniles for violent crime, a comparison of 2004 data with those of 2003 indicated that the number of juveniles arrested for violent crimes declined 0.8 percent, 5.5 percent compared with 2000 data, and 30.9 percent compared with 1995 figures (Federal Bureau of Investigation).
Considering that “Console and portable software sales: $6.2 billion, up 8% from 2003” (wikipedia Video Game Sales), according to the critics this should mean that there is also an increase in violence. However according to the United States Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, violence per capita among youth is down
I personally do not allow my children to purchase any video games, or movie, no matter the rating. However if my son were to ask me to purchase a game or movie for him the first place I would look is at the rating not at the box art or the manual. If I see that it is rated in a way that I find acceptable (E for everyone or PG), then I have no problem getting the game for him. If the game is rated T for teen or pg-13, I would have to look at the game screenshots and perhaps play the game demo to truly ascertain if anything was wrong with the game. If the game is rated M, my son would not be playing that game. This is because I am a conscientious parent not because playing the game would make him a cold-blooded killer. When it comes to TV and movies, he is exposed to enough violence, blood, gore, and sex. He does not need to see that in video games as well. If he were not a fan of action movies but chose to watch more kid oriented TV shows, I would consider letting him play more video games that are violent. The exposure to these violent and overly sexual elements is everywhere, just look at the prime time show listing and abstracts.
