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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Clearing the air: the debate over video game violence
Friday 27 April @ 13:28:12 |
 By Steve McPherson
In the aftermath of the massacre at Virginia Tech last week, amid the swirl of speculation that inevitably follows an event when there are so few actual facts, the media reached for its familiar bugbears as an explanation for this horrible tragedy: violence in movies and video games, specifically, and in American culture as a whole. It’s not unreasonable to take a good, hard look at the violent elements of our culture, but it’s ultimately naive to believe that there is a single source, a single bad influence that we can remove like a tumor and then go on our way, free from the kind of violent eruption that happened on April 16.
 Syndicated talk show host Phil McGraw was joined by vocal video game critic Jack Thompson on “Larry King Live” in the wake of the shootings, saying, “We are programming these people as a society. Common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they’re on a mass killing spree in a video game, it’s glamorized on the big screen, it’s become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the suggestibility is too high. And we’re going to have to start dealing with that. We’re going to have to start addressing those issues and recognizing that the mass murders of tomorrow are the children of today that are being programmed with this massive violence overdose.”
Appearing separately on “Hardball” with Chris Matthews, Thompson, a longtime critic of the video game industry who has filed several suits against game companies, took a familiar line. “These are real lives. These are real people that are in the ground now because of this game. I have no doubt about it,” he said, pointing the finger squarely at a first-person shooter called “Counterstrike.”
The problem with all of this? There’s very little evidence that shooter Seung-Hui Cho had anything more than a passing acquaintance with video games. The police search of his dorm room turned up no video game consoles or video games, and “Hardball” host Chris Matthews, in the very same segment cited above, pointed out that in interviews, Cho’s roommate said that he had never seen him play any kind of video or computer game.
Thompson’s reply was that Cho was “immersed” in playing “Counterstrike” while he was in high school, a report he cited from the Washington Post. The actual Post article has Korean classmates from high school describing him as “a fan of violent video games,” and this is exactly the kind of hyperbole that makes this issue impossible to address rationally. When such accusations are leveled at an entire art form by stuffed shirts with little firsthand experience of the medium, it does nothing to advance meaningful conversation about the cultural impact of said art form.
At least McGraw was cogent enough to point out that there’s more than one component to this debate. The fact is, most indications point to Cho having an untreated mental disorder. We simply can’t ignore that fact when looking at his motivations. If, as Thompson cited, 80 percent of the males at Virginia Tech play violent video games, but some significantly smaller percentage are suffering from a dangerous mental and medical condition that is going untreated, which part of this equation should we really be focusing on? 80 percent? If the percentage is really that high, shouldn’t we be looking at a factor that narrows the field a bit better? Surely Thompson can’t be arguing that 80 percent of the college-aged male population is at risk of suddenly going on a killing spree, can he?
I’m not pro-violent video games any more than someone who’s pro-choice is pro-abortion. Advocating personal choice and responsibility does not equal endorsement of an act or lifestyle. But as someone who’s played “Doom” and “Quake” and “Grand Theft Auto” and many others, I believe that the majority of gamers would react in the same way as myself when confronted with the idea of acting out what happens in these games: with horror, revulsion and fear. There’s just no way that I personally could ever make the leap from what happens on the screen to real life. We live in a violent culture—to act as though it is otherwise is to believe that the President is always right, that our government never makes a mistake and that bad things never happen to good people. You can’t change an entire culture—one that was born in armed rebellion and raised on Manifest Destiny— by removing one manifestation of that mindset; like the atmosphere, it’s pervasive, fluid and around us all the time. You can’t change it by deciding to remove a certain amount of nitrogen from the air.
No, here in the United States, we’ve learned that you can only change the atmosphere by adding to it. We’ve added pollutants that have made the air more toxic and accelerated global warming, but maybe we can add things to our culture that will make it healthier: more reasonable discussion, more inquiry, more guidance and support for children and those who’ve fallen through the cracks in the system and, ultimately, more compassion and understanding. ||
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