Violence, Games & Art - Part 1

Technos: Quarterly for Education and Technology, Spring, 2000 by Thom Gillespie

The temptation is always to compare games to movies and TV as a metric, and looking at the top 50 movies of last weekend, about 18 of them have PG-13 ratings or stronger due to violence; about 36 percent. Clearly, violence is popular in the movies. But none of the top 50 movies this weekend featured killing after killing as the main activity of the movie, except perhaps Scream 3.

Item (b) is speculative. Perhaps people become more aggressive as a result of playing these games. Who knows? There are no studies. Of course, we all know that most everyone can distinguish fantasy from reality, and when speaking to any hardcore gamer, you'll hear that they've been blowing people up in video games since they were 11 yet have never killed anyone. What's more certain is that very young kids shouldn't be exposed to certain subject matter. I wouldn't want to see a two-year-old spend time playing "Family Violence Simulator" and learning that wife-beating is an acceptable part of how families behave. Hence, a widely understood rating system is necessary for computer games. And hopefully by the time the kids start to get outside of their parents' control, they've already been taught a few moral values.

Don Strawser, graduate student-MIME at IU & coordinator of the Bureau of Shenaningans

Do you think computer-game violence is a problem?

I do not think that games are too violent. What are we measuring them against? Are TV or film too violent? There is a lot of violence in video games -- no question. But it is mediated violence, violence that takes place through some sort of media platform. We don't consider fairy tales or books too violent. And, although there are numerous arguments against violence on film and television, it isn't going away. Violence is part of human nature, and people will always find ways to express or experience it whether it be pro wrestling, football, TV, film, or video games.

What is the attraction of a game such as Thrill Kill?

I went under the assumption that the designers were trying to go so far over the top that it couldn't possibly be taken seriously. Yes, the game is very violent and sadistic. However, I find it hard to believe that someone would go out and try to do these things to a real human being, just from playing the game. How many people play Quake or Unreal? Thousands? Millions? When someone shoots someone else, why is the first thing asked what game they played? Columbine and the incident in Kentucky occurred not because of video games, Internet pornography, or Hitler. They happened because very unhappy young people had access to guns and no supervision. No one asked where these kids' parents were. There is no medium, no game, no movie, no book, no song, or TV show that is going to cause you to go out and kill people. Anyone who believes that is looking for a pat answer, not an explanation.

Henry Jenkins, MIT professor

Do you think computer-game violence is a problem?

Depends on what you mean by "problem." I see computer-game violence as a problem of limited creativity, but not as a social problem. Right now, we are pathologizing issues of taste. Anti-game activists are frightened because children and teens have tastes that aren't the same as theirs, and they have projected all kinds of frightening meanings onto those tastes. They have produced little compelling evidence to suggest that video-game violence leads directly to real-world violence, and much of the evidence they do present has been exaggerated and simplified to make political points. The reality is that there are still relatively few reliable studies to date on video games at all. Those studies that do exist show contradictory things. Some suggest, for example, that children are less susceptible to confusion between reality and fantasy playing video games rather than watching television, because they are controlling what happens and they know they aren't really shooting each other; whereas on television, the line between documentary and docudrama can be rather slippery. It is a problem, though, that an over-reliance on formulas based on violence stifled the growth of the video game industry and blocked the full exploration of a broader range of stories and experiences that games might facilitate.