PATCHEN BARSS:
Video games and violent behavior
CBC News Viewpoint | February 27, 2004 | More from Patchen Barss
"To best experience, you should turn off the lights, close the drapes, lock the door. Then get ready to kill."
Such instructions aren't typical of a video game, but Manhunt isn't a typical game. Developed by Rockstar Games for the Playstation 2, this is one of the most darkly violent and disturbing games on the market. The above words appear on the opening screen, and things just get worse from there. To succeed at the game, players must suffocate enemies with plastic bags, stab them to death with glass shards and break necks barehanded. (And that's just the first stage of the game.)
Games like Manhunt – and other Rockstar atrocities including the Grand Theft Auto and Max Payne series – are the ones that get parents and academics so riled over video game violence. The most recent issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Adolescence highlights a slew of studies linking video game carnage to real life violence.
While there's much to learn from these studies, the idea that video games have the power to turn children into a bunch of pugnacious scrappers and serial killers is intuitively preposterous. Whatever correlations academics find between virtual and real aggressiveness, the fact is that a well-adjusted person could play violent video games all day every day and it would do nothing to disturb their serenity.
The reason should be obvious: most of us can tell the difference between a game and reality. Running over civilians in a video game is hilarious. In real life, I refuse even to break the speed limit.
That's well and good for the mentally stable, the counterargument goes, but what about impressionable kids and people on the edge? What about stepbrothers William and Joshua Buckner who in 2003 fired shotguns at random vehicles, later telling police they were inspired by similar scenes in Grand Theft Auto? What about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold who killed 15 people including themselves at Columbine high school in what appeared to be a chilling imitation of Doom, a first-person shooter game the two were known to play?
"I refuse to believe that a video game caused two right-headed kids to kill all those people," said Malcolm Kelly, editor of the National Post's video game page. "I think there would just have been another trigger. You only have to go back and realize there have always been crazy things that happen in the world."
Jack the Ripper, for instance, didn't play video games. Of course that argument only takes you so far - just because there are other causes of violence doesn't mean video games aren't a contributing factor. But there has been a strange tendency in the past 50 years to blame the corruption of young people on new forms of entertainment.
In 1954, psychologist Fredric Wertham's alarmist book Seduction of the Innocent argued that comic books were leading young men into a world of sex and violence. In the 1970s, a couple of suicides connected to the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons led to mainstream panic that the game drove people insane.
Video games take a particularly hard rap, partly because they're so immersive - you don't watch somebody getting beaten to death, "you" beat them to death - and partly because the technology allows for such realism: the sound of bones snapping, the fine spray of blood splashing the "camera," the look of grim satisfaction on the killer's face.
It's no surprise people find these scenes objectionable. It's no surprise critics want to protect young people from seeing them. But to leap from there to suggesting the games cause violence simply doesn't follow.
In preparation for writing this column, I spent a weekend shooting, beating and slashing my way through the worst of these games. I can say with certainty that video games don't teach you to kill; they teach you to push buttons in a proper sequence. I'm not being disingenuous. I have been mugged. I have been in car accidents. I've fired guns. None of these experiences bears any resemblance to playing a video game. Realism isn't the same as reality, and anyone who confuses the two owes their psychosis to something other than the technology.
In a recent New York Times article, Johnathan Dee describes the amoral quality of violent games. "Actions have consequences - even in [Grand Theft Auto], if you steal a car and the cops catch you, you have to go jail… but the consequences are inside the game itself; they have no application outside it…Everything is permitted."
He's correct that the consequences of an action are contained in the game, but he forgets that the action itself is also contained in the game. You're not facing the consequences of stealing a car, you're facing the consequences of playing a game in which your on-screen agent steals a car.
The critics get it right when they call on the industry and parents to take greater responsibility for what children see on the screen. As with comic books, television and movies, video games need to be rated (which they are), and those ratings enforced (which they often are not).
But to suggest that video games present some new, violent threat to society simply makes no sense. Teen violence is a real-world problem; it seems highly likely to me that its causes will also be found in the real world.
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PATCHEN BARSS
Freelance Writer
Patchen Barss is a Toronto-based freelance journalist who specializes in science and culture. In the early 1990s, he wrote a technology column for The Montreal Gazette, and later became the editor of the National Post's Discovery Page. In the past two years, he has done stints at the Discovery Channel, at several documentary film companies, and at CBC Newsworld, where he worked as a producer on the show Inside Media. He now works from home, which he enjoys immensely.
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