David
9/16/08
Formal Essay #1: Draft 1
Have you played a videogame recently? Do you play videogames at least one hour weekly? 62% of all teenagers play videogames for at least one hour a week. If you do play videogames, you probably have played violent games at some point. Some analysts believe there is a link between playing violent videogames and committing violent acts. Such individuals point at school shootings and other such distressing incidents and often try to find any possible link that the event had with violent videogames. They point to games such as Doom, Counter-Strike, and the Grand Theft Auto series to blame for awful tragedies. They such games are murder simulators, realistic virtual realities that train kids to kill, and reduce their inhibitions towards violence. I, as an avid player of videogames, have neither gone on a shooting rampage nor believed that I was being trained while playing games such as Grand Theft Auto.
There is a large community of videogame players in the world. This number is so large, that a legal, official census has not and might never be taken. With the U.S. population just over 300,000,000 at July 2008 estimates, and 72% of the U.S. playing videogames, that leaves us with a grand approximation of 216,000,000 in the U.S. playing videogames. Now the estimated number of arrests in the United States for violent and property crimes in 2007 was 14,209,365. Even if every single arrest in the U.S. in 2007 was committed by a videogame player, that would mean only 15.2% of videogame players have committed violent acts. As impossible as that is, that would hardly warrant the immense push against videogames as is hoped for in some people’s minds. As it stands now, most people play videogames as a hobby, which would mean those people have less of a chance of committing violent acts.
Many people would like to see videogames banned. Some just wish for stricter controls on who can buy videogame, and who sells them. There are many actions taken against videogames, especially when they are connected to a tragedy. Things like lawsuits try to prevent certain games from coming out. Grand Theft Auto IV, an M-rated shoot-em-up game released recently, was a cause of great concern. Many activists tried to ban the game from releasing, others tried to raise the rating, and still others tried to take down the game developers themselves. Despite their best efforts, GTAIV released worldwide to much great acclaim. Many teenagers played the game within the first few weeks. It was an activist’s worst nightmare. However, as the thousands of people sat in front of the “wretched” game, only a few sporadic cases of videogame violence were reported.
The case against videogames isn’t just about violence-inducement. Another complaint many parents have is one where their children don’t’ kill anyone, but not do anything period. One father complains that videogames turned his children into addicts. “They grew increasingly withdrawn, walking around like the zombies from ‘Night of the Living Dead.’ Unless I pried them (forcibly) from the computer, they would spend five or six hours at a time absorbed in these online fantasy worlds” (Moore). The parents seem to think that allowing the kids to spend countless hours on a computer, then suddenly trying to yank it away, is a good idea. If you would rather your kids to be off the computer more often, don’t pull it away like a crutch from an old man. You need to wean your kids off the computers, so as to not have them protesting. The weaning doesn’t have to be like a detention, either. Spend time with your kids camping, at the beach, on a road trip, anything away from videogames.
Studies are used in this debate in a variety of ways. One recent study, however, from the Massachusetts General Hospital's Center for Mental Health and Media, shows “many young people play video games to manage their feelings, such as stress and anger, and those who play violent video games are among those more likely to play to deal with their anger” (O’Brien). Teens like me use violent videogames as an outlet for their aggression, to make sure it doesn’t come out elsewhere, like at school or at work. Videogames easily reduce stress, and they are rather efficient at it too.
It seems as if advocates against videogames see the issue in black and white. I use a metaphor for their logic. Take the Nazis and the Germans. Equate Nazis with videogame-playing murderers and Germans with simple videogame players, normal to the limit and unusually placid. Now, a lot of Nazis were German, correct? But not all Germans were Nazis. These advocates would see that most Nazis were German, and immediately assume all Germans were Nazis, which is simply incorrect. Nowhere near all of the Germans were Nazis, yet the advocates would persecute them such. Another analogy along the same lines would be comparing squares and rectangles. All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. Black and white reasoning is bringing the debate to its knees.
One of the biggest activists in the fiasco that is this debate is Florida attorney Jack Thompson. His company-bashing tactics leave a lot to be desired legally, but one-on-one conversations with him are posted around the net and seem to have an aura of madness about them, since his answers are personally insulting and have a penchant for being off-topic, vague, or downright falsities. Insults to the writers of emails, threatening phone calls, and lawsuits galore personalize his exchanges.
What can be done about violent videogames? It is true, certainly true, that such games should not be put into the hands of small children. The ESRB rating of Mature should be strictly followed. This allows only individuals over the age of 17 to buys such games. The blame does not only fall on kids who acquire these games by other means; parents should be on the lookout too. Parents should monitor what their kids play and take appropriate actions, such as grounding the child, if they find that they have games marked for older audiences. Parents need to care about what their kids are doing.
I still sit back and watch as the adults are the ones going haywire. Sometimes, in this debate, the adults are less rational than the kids, and watching this makes me wonder if it’s the kids we should be controlling, or the adults.
Works Cited
Crecente, Brian. “Feature: Dissecting Jack’s Lies.” Kotaku. 17 Apr. 2007. 18 Sept. 2008 <http://kotaku.com/gaming/feature/feature-dissecting-jacks-lies-252914.php>.
Kohler, Chris. “Jack Thompson Versus Gamers.” Wired. 1 Nov. 2005. 18 Sept. 2008 <http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2005/11/69404>.
Moore, Stephen. “Teenage Zombies.” The Wall Street Journal. 4 Jan. 2008. 18 Sept. 2008 <http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110011080>.
O’Brien, Ciara. “Teens using M-rated games to vent anger.” Electric News. 7 Apr. 2007. 18 Sept. 2008 <http://www.electricnews.net/article/64997.html>.
Peckham, Matt. “All Time High: 72% of U.S. Population Plays Video Games.” PC World. 3 Apr. 2008. 18 Sept. 2008 <http://blogs.pcworld.com/gameon/archives/006748.html>.
“Table 29.” Crime in the United States 2007. 2008. U.S. Department of Justice - Federal Bureau of Investigation. 18 Sept. 2008 <http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2007/data/table_29.html>.
“United States.” The World Factbook. 21 Aug. 2008. Central Intelligence Agency. 18 Sept. 2008 <https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/us.html>.
Vitka, William. “GameSpeak: Jack Thompson.” CBS News. 25 Feb. 2005. 18 Sept. 2008 <http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/24/tech/gamecore/main676446.shtml>.