If you're a US politician who wants to improve your family values score, it' s not necessary to take a complicated stand on abortion. Just go after the violent video game boogeyman. While proposals that would make violent games harder for minors to get than a bottle of hard liquor have been overturned in six states and a number of municipalities, that doesn't stop even liberal politicians from trying to pick up easy points by supporting such proposals.
We're not comfortable with games that cover uncomfortable subjects, like teen-on-teen violence. Games are "supposed" to be fun. But while we might not be ready for games that have something to say, the games themselves are talking, and sometimes it's worth listening.
"In a violent video game," you say, "you enact the violence and that's different from just seeing it." This is true. But while there are people who can't distinguish reality from fantasy, it's a small percentage of the population -- and as far as I can tell, people who play (or design) games are not more likely to have greater problems in this area.
When my kids were little, I'd bring them to the office after school, which they loved: we had a LAN so they got to play Quake. "Don't you think that's bad for them?" other parents would ask.
Actually, I encouraged them to play, because I noticed that when they killed each other in the game, they seemed to have less inclination to wail on each other at home. Although the girls were just five and eight years old, I had no doubt that they could tell the difference between a game and "real life." When I was a kid, we heard that cartoons were violent and harmful -- but I knew that dropping an anvil out a window was a really bad idea.
There is a relationship between an increase in video games and crime, but it might surprise you: juvenile crime has steadily decreased at the same time video game consumption has increased as measured in hours of play.
There's another group of people who continually and repeatedly enact violence and mayhem; sometimes they even pretend to be serial killers or con artists. We call them actors, and we do not revile them; rather, we revere them.
Have you ever watched a Shakespearean play? Night after night, people pretend to maim each other, kill their spouses, and stab their rivals, and yet I've never heard that actors are particularly likely to commit crimes off the stage. It's true that in other eras, actors had a social status only marginally better than gypsies and petty thieves, but all nascent art forms tend to be initially distrusted -- think about jazz, comics and novels.
Opponents of violent video games are right about this: games are immersive, and the player can easily develop a visceral understanding or identification with a character. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, because in games as in life, actions have consequences. Fail to take care of your Neopet and it will die. If you start a war in Civilization, your popularity will plummet and your cities will fall into disarray. And play mass murderers Dylan Kiebold and Eric Harris, the real-life killers who perpetrated the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, in the role-playing game Super Columbine Massacre, and it's nearly impossible not to be filled with revulsion.
Super Columbine Massacre earned both supporters and detractors within the games industry, and mostly detractors outside of it. (It was eloquently defended by my boss, Greg Costikyan.) Had the designer (who in fact attended Columbine High School), chosen to make a documentary or write a book or create a painting about the same subject, from the same viewpoint, the work might have been criticized. But its' very right to exist would not have been questioned.
Yes, some games are grotesquely violent. But there's violence in the world, and lots of it. It's not possible to make a game about Iraq or about tragedy at a high school without depicting bloodshed. If violent games did nothing except provide a socially acceptable outlet for everyday anger, that would be a worthwhile thing; I'd rather have my kids kill each other online and be sweet to each other off, or have people express their road rage in Grand Theft Auto rather than on the Long Island Expressway.
But if people walk away from a game with the certainty that shooting up a school is gross, not glamorous, or that car bombings are horrifying, not exciting, that's got world-changing potential.
