Recently, while writing for an online gaming journalism website titled Gamertell, I worked on a story about California attempting to revive its anti-gaming crusade that was headed up by state Sen. Leland Yee.
The Court of Appeals is currently in deliberation on whether or not the Circuit Court’s decision about the anti-violent video games law being unconstitutional is actually correct. This is not the first time and probably won’t be the last time that similar laws will be instated and then contested.
The government has bigger problems to solve than who happens to be playing Gears of War, Half-Life, Def Jam Vendetta or other violent and potentially graphic video games. We’re a country at war. We’re trying to take care of drugs and gang violence. We’re trying to take care of crimes committed with guns through various different measures. Our economy is currently slipping down the drain. With all these problems, the State of California is still more worried about video games than anything else on their plate.
The problem that is being brought up is the problem of censorship. With ALL media converging, restricting one most likely will restrict all the others inadvertently. An example of this is games that have either books or movies based off them as well as has a soundtrack. If the game has content that is deemed inappropriate, to fully be able to ensure that children aren’t exposed to the content you would have to restrict, censor or ban anything that could come out of that, which includes books, movies, music and in some cases, other forms of gaming.
What about games based off of actual events? Kuma War, a game based off of the news, military press releases and actual maps of areas, puts you directly in the missions that have been done throughout the Wars on Terror, in Iraq and in Afghanistan. The game has been advertised as one of the most realistic online modern war-games out there. The only way to stop development of games like that is to censor news outlets, which won’t work due to the freedom of press. You would also have to further limit whatever the military and politicians share with the public in a time of war and restrict what would go into history books (education).
There’s also the issue of “sales to minors” restrictions, which are already in place. They don’t work. The way most children get content deemed inappropriate for them is having the parents buy it for them. If the parents buy the games, it’s not going to do much of anything to stop minors from getting games that are deemed inappropriate when someone finally thought of the children.
Let’s face it; a lot of parents don’t check out entertainment before getting it or some parents just don’t care. However, if you’ve already bought the game and don’t like the content, why complain afterwards. Game companies develop based off of public interest. If you’re causing profits for games that you wouldn’t want to see sold, you’re just perpetuating the cycle of the development of violent and lewd games. If you research ahead of time you can say that you aren’t buying it, your lost sale could be the one that ends up causing the game to make less than it cost to develop and publish, which would make the company discontinue future plans for a franchise.
Ratings, I wouldn’t have a problem with if parents paid attention to them. It’s the same thing with movies. An example, when I went to see Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween about five couples of parents ended up bringing in three kids each between the age of six months and eight years old. OK. It’s a remake of a teen slasher movie. Teen slasher movies have three things in common: sex, drugs and murder. Yet some of the parents decided to watch all the way through the movie with their kids to say that the content was inappropriate for their kids. They ended up waiting through two hours of sex, drugs and murder to realize that it was wrong for children.
These are the same kinds of parents who buy God of War or Grand Theft Auto for their eight to ten year olds and then after seeing little Timmy beat something to death with its own arm, blow someone’s head off while sniping, having a three-way or picking up a prostitute in-game end up saying “Won’t someone think of the children?” Why should the government step in and tell other parents how to raise their kids if you weren’t willing to be a good parent and find out about the content before buying the game? It’s a matter of self-education and learning from your mistakes.
One of my co-workers brought up that there were studies on whether or not violent games incited violent behavior, some of which were used to try to explain why the Columbine shooting happened.
The studies blamed the video games but they were flawed. They failed to take into account the fact that the kids were bullied and the school system wasn’t paying attention. There’s only so far you can be pushed until you push back. They also failed to take into account that the parents really weren’t paying all that much attention, since part of what was used in the Columbine shooting were homemade improvised explosives. One would think that the parents would realize their kids were making bombs at home.
When other students are to blame for pushing people too far, the school system is to blame for doing nothing to stop the other students from pushing them too far and the parents to blame for really not paying much attention to begin with, it must have been Doom that caused the shooting. That’s the logic that the studies used. Recently there have been studies that show gaming actually improves problem solving judgment, hand-eye coordination, intelligence, teamwork and manual dexterity. These studies were presented to the American Psychological Association at their annual conference this year. There have been have also been recent studies showing that games don’t inhibit one’s abilities to socially interact. This one was done as an Australian psychology grad student’s dissertation in which he examined children, adults, fellow students and parents to see if gaming inhibited social abilities in different age brackets. Both of these sets of studies have been done within the past year, whereas the studies being cited from California government are from the early ’90s.
If someone is violent or socially inhibited, it isn’t because of a game. The idea for violence already existed. The problem of shyness and/or violence already existed. An example is when Shawn Woolley killed himself presumably over a problem that popped up while he was playing EverQuest, a popular MMORPG. His family tried to blame the game for his decision. However, he already had the idea in his head and no one was really paying attention. He was also clinically depressed, which called for people keeping a closer eye on him for his own sake.
Another thing that is forgotten is the fact that violence has been around since before video games, movies, TV, music and books. What was it before then? Reality is simply an ugly beast but someone has to be blamed. Why not blame something that can’t defend itself, outside of satire? Nothing has an easy answer and when there’s blood on society’s hands, it always looks for the easy way out by displacing blame.
A lot of what entertainment gets blamed for ends up being a lack of people who are willing to take responsibility for their problems. People just have to wake up and pay attention to their choices. If they make a genuinely bad decision they have to be willing to acknowledge it and learn from their mistake.