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Violence
in Video Games
The crusade against violence in video games is
truly the witch hunt of modern times. You may not know it, but the
actual witch trials have already begun in the form of senate
hearings initiated by Senator Joseph Lieberman. (Here's Lieberman's
testimony.)
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Senator
Joseph Lieberman (bad guy) |
Video games caused
that school shooting in Littleton, Colorado, didn’t you know?
While Lieberman is arguably the game industry’s biggest opponent,
its best advocate is largely unknown. His name is Professor Henry
Jenkins, Director
of the MIT Comparative Media Studies
Program. In an odd footnote of
history, Jenkins was actually my professor in a few classes when I
was at MIT, and I assure you that any media industry—or indeed any
one—would do well to have Jenkins as an advocate. I think much of
his persuasive power stems from him not really being a
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| Professor
Henry Jenkins (good guy) |
supporter of any industry or company—he is a defender of popular
culture for principle’s sake, and argues from solid academic
grounding. It just happens that his principle’s are currently
aligned with the interests of the video game industry. It’s
daunting for me to even write this article, since Jenkins’s
arguments in this senate hearing were so strong. You can also read
about his experience testifying.
I’ll
begin by examining the violent nature of all competitive games, and
then comment on the separate issue of the depiction in violence in
those games. I’ll then discuss the use of violence as a theme in
film, games, or any other media. Finally, I’ll invoke some of
Jenkins’s arguments to explain the role of violent play in youth
culture throughout history.
Violent
Underpinnings
Competition
is violent. People win, people lose. Competition occurs in video
games, soccer games, the business world, and—I would remind
Senator Lieberman—political elections. Competition can be
academically interesting, and it can also teach valuable life
lessons about winning and losing. It’s ok for little Jimmy to
learn those lessons in soccer practice, but many parents have the
mysterious notion that it’s not ok to learn the exact same lessons
in a competitive video game.
Let’s
take an example of a violent video game: Street Fighter. In this
game, two players engage in a fight and try to kill each other! We
have to shield our youth from such abominations, blah, blah. Ok, let
me tell you what Street Fighter is really about. Two players
compete…to win. It’s a battle for position, for initiative, for
momentum, and for resources. Players develop creative combinations
of moves, traps, and tricks. It is a game of attack and defense,
risk and reward. Players take chances, they reduce their risk of
exposure to attack, and they learn to never give up until the end,
because comebacks are definitely possible. They learn the lessons of
winning and losing, since not everyone can be the best, but everyone
can improve with discipline, analysis, and practice. Players form
communities, meet friends, and even sometimes make enemies. Would I
want my children to play such a game? You bet. It’s preparation
for life.
What’s
on the screen during a game of Street Fighter is a bunch of
rectangles. The object of the game is to make your attack rectangles
collide with the opponent’s defense rectangles while keeping your
own defense rectangles safe. All of this happens to be covered up by
a bunch of pretty graphics. The rectangles are disguised as cartoon
characters who do punches and kicks, throw fireballs, and engage in
various wrestling maneuvers. Disguising this intricate game of
colliding rectangles as a fight between two characters is an
obvious, efficient way of handling things. The characters include
men and women of many races from around the world, and appeal to
players. Players can relate to characters, but they can’t relate
to colored rectangles. So…is
this a violent game? In some sense it has to be since it involves
competition, but it certainly isn’t anything we need to keep away
from children.
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| Here
we see some attack rectangles overlapping some defense
rectangles. It's all dressed up with fancy anime graphics of
Sagat (right) and Sodom (left). |
Violence as a Theme
The
fighting game is just one special type “violent game,” though.
Other games, such as Resident Evil, are much more based on violence,
and even use violence as a theme. What of them? To understand
violence as a theme, let’s look at some films: Schindler’s List,
Saving Private Ryan, and Reservoir Dogs. I don’t think anyone is
going to say anything bad about Schindler’s List. It chronicles
intense violence and persecution of Jews, and turns our stomachs.
Films like that could prevent another holocaust.
Saving
Private Ryan begins with 20 minutes of the most realistic depiction
of war violence I have ever seen captured on film. I felt like I was
a solder on that beach, and it scared the hell out of me. This film
exposed war for the atrocity that it is, and it’s films like this
one that could help us prevent another war.
Reservoir
Dogs is called a particularly violent movie, yet it’s body count
is much lower than most action films. There are only about 5 times
that weapons are fired, yet this film is criticized as being “more
violent” than other films with much more shocking statistics. The
reason is that Reservoir Dogs, more than many movies, is actually
about violence. It’s a characters study of a small group of people
who are incredibly violent. There’s a reality to it that, say,
Lethal Weapon certainly doesn’t have. The torture scene is
unnerving and difficult to watch, even though the violent imagery is
very scant (we’re left to imagine most of it). The emotional power
of violence is brought to bear. So sure, the criminals in this film
look cool, they wear cool suits, they walk in slow motion at the
beginning, they fire two pistols at once John Woo-style. They’re
glorified. But I don’t think anyone comes away from Reservoir Dogs
wanting to be a criminal. At least not anyone sees that in the end,
they all die except the one guy who used his brain the most. It’s
films like this one that could stop young people from being
criminals.
In
an interview, writer/director Quentin Tarantino was asked about his
use of violence in Reservoir Dogs. His answer was that he used it as
a literary device, just like any other. He considers it no different
from using tap dancing as a device. If you don’t like tap dancing,
he says, don’t see movies about it. In fact, I think he’s too
modest, as he created a work which asks the audience to examine
violence, to see it, to feel it, to realize its true horror and its
inevitable, tragic conclusion.
The
point is that using violence as a theme can be thought-provoking,
important, even entertaining in film, as it can be in video games.
But these examples must be in the vast minority, right? Most uses of
violence don’t’ have such lofty morals. We all know
Schindler’s List does, but surely something like…Casino
doesn’t. That was what the Honorable
William Bennett, Former Secretary of Education, used as an example, at least. I happen to think Scorsese
has some
valuable things to say as a filmmaker, and I don’t really want the
government deciding which works have challenging, valuable
depictions of violence and which ones don’t.
The
General Case of Violence in Games
Surely all violence in games can’t be
explained away from the few specific examples I’ve given so far.
Critics love to pick on Quake, for example. Even I don’t claim the
game is very strategically interesting. (Ok, I’m being harsh, oh
well.) It’s a “first person shooter” game, where the player
has a variety of weapons which he fires at everyone he sees. The
designers of Quake wanted, more than anything else, to make a game
that’s 1) fun, 2) fast, and 3) cool. Quake is certainly fast,
since you die about once every 5 seconds. About one million gamers
will tell you it’s fun. Sneaking in that extra “gib” shot to
detonate a corpse is “cool.” So is the trail that the
one-shot-kill rail gun round leaves behind. So is the feel of firing
the rocket launcher. I’m not making much of a case for redeeming
social value here, am I?
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| Damn,
this guy killed the whole room and gibbed all the
corpses...with the rail gun! |
To understand the role of Quake (and basically
ALL violent games), we’ll have to look at what Professor Henry
Jenkins has to say. I’ll attempt to summarize a few of his points:
- Parents
have claimed, throughout history, that whatever point in history
they were in was the most corrupt time for children. Books
corrupted children, then music did, then movies, then
television, then video games and the internet. The arguments we
hear today about video games are same ones parents made about
movies in earlier times, yet all these forms of entertainment
have become mainstream.
- “Boy
culture” has not changed throughout history. Boys have always
been violent. They have always formed hierarchical communities
based on mastery of something (of fighting, baseball, video
games, whatever). They have always done so in realms outside the
knowledge of parents, especially mothers.
- The
physical world has become a much less appropriate play space for
children of today, due to urban expansion and crime. In earlier
times, “boys would be boys” out in the streets, where they
would form their hierarchical communities. Now, they are able to
do so in the much, much safer virtual realm.
- The
virtual world is mostly a space away from parents, since most
parents today are not savvy about such things. Yet media in
general is more ubiquitous now, so parents today are, perhaps,
more aware of the competitive, violent tendencies of their
children today than parents were aware of 200 years ago. The
actual nature of children has not changed, of course.
So given all that, do you want your children to
play Quake? Maybe in some earlier times, kids all went down to the
river and formed hierarchical communities based on who could do the
most dangerous dives off the tree branch. Or they met on the street
and formed gangs based on who could do the most illegal mischief.
When kids of today play Quake, they’re doing the exact same thing.
They’re playing in a space where parents don’t go, and they let
egos clash. The difficult thing to admit is that this is the nature
of teenage boys—that it has always been the nature of teenage
boys—and that it has absolutely nothing to do with video games.
So a kid had a frustrating day at school. If he
plays a little Quake, I’m happy he had an outlet for his
aggressions. I don’t even care if he plays Mortal Kombat and rips
the heart of out his opponent’s chest (you can do that in MK).
Those are red pixels on a screen. I’d much rather children play
with red pixels than with actual guns. And don’t think that if
they didn’t have access to those red pixels that somehow their
nature would change. They’d wrestle with their friends, play in
the streets, try dangerous stunts, and any number of far more scary
things than sitting at home playing with harmless pixels in a
virtual world.
And the best part is that some of those violent
games have life’s lessons to teach. As I’ve discussed earlier,
some teach that violence—real violence—is a terrifying thing.
Others, the kind I play, teach the lessons winning and losing and of
strategy.
And what of girls? I’ve talked as if the
video game is a thing only known to teenage boys. While that’s by
far the largest demographic, girls play games too, of course. As one
of the all-girl Quake clans will tell you, they have a forum in
which to compete with boys on equal terms, in a virtual world where
physical gender differences don’t matter. Taken from a quote from
Jenkins’s senate testimony, a female Quake player explained to
him:
“Maybe it’s a problem…that little girls
DON’T like to play games that slaughter entire planets. Maybe
that’s why we are still underpaid, still struggling, still
fighting for our rights. Maybe if we had the mettle to take on an
entire planet, we could fight some of the smaller battles we face
everyday.”
Talk
back! Discuss this article in the forums.
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