Kyra Smith sees a can of worms and opens it.
Games violence study is launched! (yet again)
Guns don't kill people; people with guns kill people.
By the same token, violent computer games don't make people violent. Some people just are violent and they're out and about throwing bricks though windows, nicking cars and beating up pensioners. They're not sitting quietly at home playing Bioshock. I don't believe for a moment that firing a not-real gun at not-real people and watching them explode into fountains of not-real gore is even remotely connected to the impulse that makes someone grab a real gun and fire it at real people (who presumably explode in fountains of real gore, I wouldn't know, I've shot innumerable not-real people but, surprisingly, not a single real one).
Yes, violence is a terrible terrible thing. Computer games, on the other hand, are fun. And to draw a connective line between computer game violence and real world violence is about as convincing as the Elizabethan claim that having a man pretend to be a woman on stage would soon enough actually turn him into first into a sodomite and then into a woman. Throughout recorded history, there has been a parade scapegoats for social ills, from Jesus (now available for Playstation and PC) to television. In Elizabethan and Restoration times it was the theatre, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was the novel, in the twentieth century it was the television and now it's the turn of the computer game. In fact, if you look at it chronologically the longer something has been around the more likely it is to have acquired a patina of cultural respectability.
Going to the theatre is generally considered a rather high-brow entertainment. Reading a novel is slightly less so, because of all the Harry Potters in the world, but still an acceptable demonstration of one's intellectual worth. As for watching television, vegging out to Eastenders may not win you prestigious friends but it's usually perceived to be a harmless indulgence but some films are now uncontroversially regarded as capital A art. I am, however, just young enough to recall a time when watching too much television (regardless of whether it was Coronation Street or Schindler's List) was supposed to give you square eyes and damage your capacity for sustained thought. In fact, since I enjoy going to the theatre, reading novels, watching movies and television, and playing computer games, if all the bad press such pastimes have accumulated over the centuries is to be believed, I am, or rapidly will become, a gender-fluid infertile square-eyed prostitute with limited mental capacity and pronounced violent tendencies.
Computer games contain violence. But engaging with (and, dare I admit it, oh dare I admit it, enjoying) violence in a safe-space of fantasy and imagination does not a violent person make. In fact, it's not people in fantasy land, no matter how vivid and well-realised that fantasy land may be, you have to worry about: it's the people not in it, who are causing all the trouble. I can't imagine many (any?) gangsters play Grand Theft Auto. Nor, as Dan points out, are we likely to find copies of Doom or Wolfenstein in the bedrooms of members of Al Qaeda. That Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are reported to have been fans of both games strikes me as illustrative of precisely nothing. Adolescent boys found to like computer games, shocker. I'm sorry for the cheap Columbine reference but the fact of the matter is that if you were to do a survey of the hobbies of any male between fifteen and thirty five I imagine a fondness for computer games would recur with unhelpful regularity. Statistics dug up from the bowels of the internet (so are, therefore, probably entirely spurious) suggest something like 80% of males between the ages 12 and 17 play, or have played, video games, and two thirds of males 18-34 play them. And, as any scientist worth their white coat is likely to point out, causation is not the same as correlation. Although it's conceivable that there is a correlation between violent games and violent teenagers, that merely says that some violent people happen to enjoy violence. It doesn't mean that one leads to the other. Similarly, playing computer games doesn't make you under-socialised; they just give under-socialised people something to do of an evening.
The more I read on this subject, the more I become convinced that it isn't the supposed psychological consequences of computer game violence that's the issue here. It's the fact that a certain section of society just doesn't like computer games, the same (or similar) people who ganged up get fox-hunting banned probably. The question is not whether computer games are having a bad effect on our kids but whether it's okay to enjoy graphic simulated violence. To which, I answer: why the hell not? I absolutely support the right of the posh and rich to chase small animals across the countryside (the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable..) and, equally, I absolutely support the right of those who want to spend their evenings blowing virtual shit up. Computer games are the new kids on the block of public entertainment; yes they're perhaps the most technologically advanced and in terms of sheer interactivity they surpass everything that has gone before. But we all have our fantasies and pleasures and explore them in whatever safe spaces we can find " why does this seem to carry with it an invitation for moral judgement? Ultimately is there any difference between spending a few weeks being Snake Solid or escaping the routine of your boring dayjob to go wet n' wild in Ibiza? And the argument that people who play computer games will gradually lose touch with reality to the extent that they're looking around for grannies to gun down in their day-to-day lives is so utterly facile it's barely worth addressing: they said precisely the same thing about the novel when that first got big.
Computer game violence is not evidence that our society is becoming darker or that we are growing de-sensitised to the horror of real world violence; it just means that instead of attending public executions, cockfights, pillories, gladiatorial matches and all the other fucked up things people have done for entertainment throughout the centuries, we're channelling aggression and exploring taboos within a carefully controlled and ultimately harmless environment. Clicking a mouse and pulling a trigger are worlds apart.
And, as if it wasn't self-evident, computer games aren't making our kids more violent. Some of them were little shits anyway.
"Poets in theatres wound the conscience ... they arrange comforts of melody, to tickle the ear; costly apparel, to flatter the sight; effeminate gesture, to ravish the sense; and wanton speech, to whet desire to inordinate lust." - Stephen Gosson (The Schoole of Abuse, 1579)Oh for fuck's sake, did my tax money pay for this? Well I want it back, right now. I understand there are people in need of medical treatment, postmen and policemen who deserve to be better paid, roads that require re-paving and schools that are desperately short of vital resources: why in God's name are we dignifying this sort of hysterical Daily Mailist bullshit with scientific attention? I can't even begin to express just how tired I am of this tedious and oft-repeated theme. I see the Video Game industry has embraced this study, perhaps as a desperate bid to get some peace from the media, but I still resent it being performed it at all.
Guns don't kill people; people with guns kill people.
By the same token, violent computer games don't make people violent. Some people just are violent and they're out and about throwing bricks though windows, nicking cars and beating up pensioners. They're not sitting quietly at home playing Bioshock. I don't believe for a moment that firing a not-real gun at not-real people and watching them explode into fountains of not-real gore is even remotely connected to the impulse that makes someone grab a real gun and fire it at real people (who presumably explode in fountains of real gore, I wouldn't know, I've shot innumerable not-real people but, surprisingly, not a single real one).
Yes, violence is a terrible terrible thing. Computer games, on the other hand, are fun. And to draw a connective line between computer game violence and real world violence is about as convincing as the Elizabethan claim that having a man pretend to be a woman on stage would soon enough actually turn him into first into a sodomite and then into a woman. Throughout recorded history, there has been a parade scapegoats for social ills, from Jesus (now available for Playstation and PC) to television. In Elizabethan and Restoration times it was the theatre, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was the novel, in the twentieth century it was the television and now it's the turn of the computer game. In fact, if you look at it chronologically the longer something has been around the more likely it is to have acquired a patina of cultural respectability.
Going to the theatre is generally considered a rather high-brow entertainment. Reading a novel is slightly less so, because of all the Harry Potters in the world, but still an acceptable demonstration of one's intellectual worth. As for watching television, vegging out to Eastenders may not win you prestigious friends but it's usually perceived to be a harmless indulgence but some films are now uncontroversially regarded as capital A art. I am, however, just young enough to recall a time when watching too much television (regardless of whether it was Coronation Street or Schindler's List) was supposed to give you square eyes and damage your capacity for sustained thought. In fact, since I enjoy going to the theatre, reading novels, watching movies and television, and playing computer games, if all the bad press such pastimes have accumulated over the centuries is to be believed, I am, or rapidly will become, a gender-fluid infertile square-eyed prostitute with limited mental capacity and pronounced violent tendencies.
Computer games contain violence. But engaging with (and, dare I admit it, oh dare I admit it, enjoying) violence in a safe-space of fantasy and imagination does not a violent person make. In fact, it's not people in fantasy land, no matter how vivid and well-realised that fantasy land may be, you have to worry about: it's the people not in it, who are causing all the trouble. I can't imagine many (any?) gangsters play Grand Theft Auto. Nor, as Dan points out, are we likely to find copies of Doom or Wolfenstein in the bedrooms of members of Al Qaeda. That Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are reported to have been fans of both games strikes me as illustrative of precisely nothing. Adolescent boys found to like computer games, shocker. I'm sorry for the cheap Columbine reference but the fact of the matter is that if you were to do a survey of the hobbies of any male between fifteen and thirty five I imagine a fondness for computer games would recur with unhelpful regularity. Statistics dug up from the bowels of the internet (so are, therefore, probably entirely spurious) suggest something like 80% of males between the ages 12 and 17 play, or have played, video games, and two thirds of males 18-34 play them. And, as any scientist worth their white coat is likely to point out, causation is not the same as correlation. Although it's conceivable that there is a correlation between violent games and violent teenagers, that merely says that some violent people happen to enjoy violence. It doesn't mean that one leads to the other. Similarly, playing computer games doesn't make you under-socialised; they just give under-socialised people something to do of an evening.
The more I read on this subject, the more I become convinced that it isn't the supposed psychological consequences of computer game violence that's the issue here. It's the fact that a certain section of society just doesn't like computer games, the same (or similar) people who ganged up get fox-hunting banned probably. The question is not whether computer games are having a bad effect on our kids but whether it's okay to enjoy graphic simulated violence. To which, I answer: why the hell not? I absolutely support the right of the posh and rich to chase small animals across the countryside (the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable..) and, equally, I absolutely support the right of those who want to spend their evenings blowing virtual shit up. Computer games are the new kids on the block of public entertainment; yes they're perhaps the most technologically advanced and in terms of sheer interactivity they surpass everything that has gone before. But we all have our fantasies and pleasures and explore them in whatever safe spaces we can find " why does this seem to carry with it an invitation for moral judgement? Ultimately is there any difference between spending a few weeks being Snake Solid or escaping the routine of your boring dayjob to go wet n' wild in Ibiza? And the argument that people who play computer games will gradually lose touch with reality to the extent that they're looking around for grannies to gun down in their day-to-day lives is so utterly facile it's barely worth addressing: they said precisely the same thing about the novel when that first got big.
Computer game violence is not evidence that our society is becoming darker or that we are growing de-sensitised to the horror of real world violence; it just means that instead of attending public executions, cockfights, pillories, gladiatorial matches and all the other fucked up things people have done for entertainment throughout the centuries, we're channelling aggression and exploring taboos within a carefully controlled and ultimately harmless environment. Clicking a mouse and pulling a trigger are worlds apart.
And, as if it wasn't self-evident, computer games aren't making our kids more violent. Some of them were little shits anyway.
