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C-Nub takes on Violence in Video Games; Geezer Style
Everywhere we look, Video Games and gamers
themsleves are being blamed for ultra-violent acts in real life. Many lawmakers
fall on either side of the fence on this, and there has been plenty of debate in
the gaming industry itself as it wrangles with a Ratings system that works when
actually used and paid attention to by parents. But I digress...
CNub delves into the mysteries himself, and some
of what he comes up with may or may not surprise you. Read on!
“Video game violence.” The words that send shudders up and down the backs of potential consumers worried that congress, in their near infinite wisdom, are going to decide which games are appropriate for us and which will warp and twist our souls, turning us into terrorists.
While it may be difficult for those of you who know me to believe, I had a thought. In fact, I had several thoughts, joined together in a coherent fashion, the end result being as follows; we at the Geezer Gamers are uniquely positioned to take a good, long look at video game violence and the effect, if any, its having on society. As gamers ourselves, we have first hand experience with pretty much all of the “violent” games ever released, at least as a community. We are also parents; at least some of us, and of those parents, at least one third are concerned with the future welfare of their children. I’m assuming the rest of us are fattening ours up to eat. Personally, I’m planning on an open pit rotisserie, but neither of my kids will put on weight.
Before we go any further, though, we have to define what exactly constitutes violence in a video game. Does Mario jumping on the head of a befuddled looking turtle-thing constitute a violent assault? I guess it depends who you ask. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to throw a random definition out there. We’re going to be looking at “graphic violence”, or basically where one fairly realistic person is injured / killed by another fairly realistic person visibly. This means that while the virtual Star Destroyers in whatever game you’re playing may be full of thousands of people, blowing them up doesn’t count as graphic violence.
So when, then, does Graphic Violence become commonplace in games? There may be some debate over this, but I’m going to say May, 1995. Why May, 1995? Because that happens to be the birth of an era, the launch of the game credited with single handedly creating the most popular (and overpopulated) genre in video games, the First Person Shooter. In may, 1995, ID software released Wolfenstein 3D, a DOS based game featuring the unique viewpoint (At the time) of a man looking down the barrel of his gun at enemies.
Wolf 3D changed how video games were played and looked at. Enemies no longer vanished in random flashes of light or by simply falling of the 2D screen. They fell clutching gapping, pixilated wounds, dying not before they let out a piercing, eight-bit death-cry. Soon after its release, ID released Doom, an expansion of the Wolfenstein premise and one of the most popular video-game franchises in history. Similar games followed soon after, many floundering in a sea of similar games, while a select few others, by virtue of their innovation and use of available technology, became franchises of their own. Quake, Duke Nukem, Warcraft, Command and Conquer, Mortal Combat, Metal Gear and many, many other games all took lessons from Doom (and the revenue it generated), and added more and more violent content.
Fast forward eleven years, and we have games like GTA, Saint’s Row, Manhunt, and Condemned: Criminal Origins continuing to push the envelope of violence. Nothing in this trend has changed, so what has the overall impact on society been?
Well, that’s actually a pretty easy question to answer. In Canada (the greatest country ever!), the crime rate has been decreasing steadily since 1991, with 2003 as the only year it didn’t drop. The total number of court cases involving young offenders fell by seventeen thousand incidents per year between 1999 and 2003.
In the UK, incidents of violent crime committed by youth have fall 14% since 1995. The government released a report citing the following as the leading causes of social dysfunction in youth: A troubled home, exclusionism at school, drug / alcohol abuse, mental illness, poverty and peer pressure.
And according to the US Department of Justice, violent crimes (rape, robbery, armed assault and homicide) have been steadily declining since 1993. One top of that, crimes committed using firearms, again according to the US Department of Justice, has fallen from nearly 1.25 million incidents per year in 1993 to just under three hundred thousand incidents in 2004, a year when video game companies posted combined revenues of over ten billion dollars.
In the past ten years, the video game industry has grown from its humble beginnings as the only friend of the pimple covered computer nerd to a global super-industry. Easily the fastest growing sector in the entire entertainment industry, a video game now holds the record for the single most profitable day in entertainment history. Halo 2’s sales laughed at the latest Harry Potter book, stomped the final Star Wars chapter and crapped all over Frodo and his damned, dirty elf friends. (I hate elves).
Yet as the influence and reach of the video game (soon to be “digital entertainment”) industry grows by leaps and bounds, all across the civilized world (arguably civilized, anyways), the crimes one would associate with the potential “bad influence” of video game trends and the people (16-34 year old males) you’d expect to be committing them simply aren’t materializing. In fact, if video games could be said to demonstrate any impact at all on the people playing them, it would appear to be a reduction in criminal behavior.
… what?
This is by no means conclusive, in fact, crime rates could have absolutely nothing to do with video games (and probably don’t), but if you look at the only hard, statistical evidence available, the only observable (potential) impact of violence in videogames is the opposite of what congress seems to think. Its making us calmer, more rational and less prone to violent “lets blow up a post office, they cancelled Friends!” outbursts.
So if the increasing level of violence in video games is not a reflection of our own growing bloodlust, if we aren’t slowing devolving into a mob of bloodthirsty savages, why are video game companies continuing to test the boundaries of what’s possible/acceptable in regards to video game violence? I think I may actually have a staggeringly simple answer to that question.
Video games are an escapist fantasy, there’s no point in denying it. We play them because, as we play them, we get to live a multitude of virtual lives vastly different from our own, in different realities with different rules. We’re faced with extreme choices and situations that carry none of the real-world’s extreme consequences. The more visceral and engaging the fantasy, the more involved the user is going to become… This isn’t a trend limited to games that function based on violence. Take a look at other genres. Racing Games are evolving; car customization wasn’t even possible in racing games before Grand Tourismo. Forza made incredible leaps forward with the “paint” system, Test Drive Unlimited promises a seamless single player / multiplayer experience in the first ever open world racing game. Conquest style games like Civilization and Master of Orion are about to take a giant leap forward in scope with games like Spore, where you play your civilization from its humble origins as a single cell all the way to its rightful place as the supreme civilization in the galaxy, with the players designing and playing through every single step along the evolutionary ladder. (Creationists need not reply) Puzzle games are growing more and more complex, with Portal at the forefront of what’s possible and the understated games available on Xbox Live Arcade providing puzzle gamers with all kinds of new challenges. Fighting games, while graphically violent, have limited themselves based on their genre. There’s really no way for a fighting game to outdo the level of violence found in Mortal Combat games, so instead they improve in other areas. Graphics, level design and inter-activity, animation quality, sound and special features. DOA4 has the smoothest and most visually impressive counter system I’ve ever seen in a fighting game, I’m shocked by the ungodly number of animations each character must have, being able to counter every move from every other fighter with seamless, fluid movements demonstrating grace and power absent from the earlier generation of fighting games. In every avenue of video games, there have been constant upgrades and innovations to the level of features. Hell, even the way we interact online is beyond the scope of what we, as gamers, could have imagined five short years ago. Those of us that have Xbox 360’s now take for granted the ease, depth and functionality of the improved Xbox dashboard. Turn on your original Box and check out what you can do with it when there’s no game inside. It feels downright stone-age by comparison. Ten years ago, if you told someone you had an MMORPG, they’d probably wonder what kind of medication you were using to treat it. Now, there are games available where tens of thousands of players interact with each-other in the same, consistent and evolving world(s).
The level of violence in our videogames isn’t dictated by any particular innate level of violence in games. If I bash a guys head in with a pipe in Condemned, I’m not anymore interested in trying it out in real life than I was before playing the game. (Granted, this is me, and its pretty safe to say I have an abnormal interest in bashing things with pipes), not anymore than playing DOA makes me want to pick a fight with a biker. Forza doesn’t turn me onto the idea of going two hundred miles an hour down the highway (or Mainstreet), and despite having put over three hundred hours in the various GTA games (and Saint’s Row), I have yet to steel a car. I got dragged down the street by a truck once, but it had my groceries in the back and I was just trying to stop it to get them out. Totally not the same thing.
In the end, I think it really comes down to the individual. If a videogame is going to inspire you to climb a tower with a rifle, it’s a pretty safe bet that you were messed up well before EB games sold you the disc. If you’re squeamish, and violent games upset you, congress is an awful extreme solution when all you have to do is not buy them. If there are games you don’t want your kids exposed to, don’t expose them to it, it’s really that simple.
This shouldn’t be a national issue, and its only being used as one to detract from the more complicated problems the world is facing. There’s absolutely no evidence to support the position of people proclaiming video games the digital anti-Christ, and until anyone can prove they represent an actual danger, I think its an issue that should be buried and replaced by something more pertinent.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, all the video games I’ve been playing as… research… have told me that I need to go kill a hobo.
Posted on Sunday, November 05 @ 22:38:00 EST by reaper
Great post C-Nub. I would like to add so far all the legislation written and inacted into law has been ruled unconstitutional by the courts. Most recently being last month:
Washington, DC (October 12, 2006) – In a ruling issued October 11, 2006, Judge Robin J. Cauthron, US District Judge, Western District of Oklahoma, handed down a preliminary injunction halting the implementation of Oklahoma’s law which prohibits the sale of video games depicting “inappropriate” violence to minors. In the decision, the Court stated that plaintiffs presented strong arguments that the Act contains unconstitutional content-based restrictions and that the Act's language is unconstitutionally vague.
“This marks the ninth Court decision in the past five years to enjoin restrictions on video games," said Doug Lowenstein, president of the ESA, the trade group representing U.S. computer and video game publishers. “We're grateful for the preliminary injunction and look forward to prevailing in the effort to permanently strike down the law.”
The ESA and Video Game Voters network are fighting for our rights support them.
http://www.videogamevoters.org/
http://www.theESA.com
Re: C-Nub takes on Violence in Video Games; Geezer Style (Score: 1) by Psiquiatra4753(alopezroca@Adelphia.net) on Monday, November 06 @ 13:43:48 EST (User Info | Send a Message)
Cool message. I feel the problem is with those games that present outrageous violence and torture as an END. Duke Nukem had a story line, there were good and bad characters.Its like in certain rap or reggaetton videos. The word KILL, KILL, KILL is repeated as the beat (Cadence). This will assuredly desinhibit any individual who is frustrated,isolated and angry into feeling that it's cool to "kill the motha**f**ah beeaachh!!!!!!!!!!!". I grew up with Tom & Gerry,yet I cant recall hitting anyone with an iron kettle. Beep Beep was associated with the sly roadrunner outsmarting the coyote and the best ACME money could buy. People began going Crazy over The board game, Dungeons and Dragons. Hell, I recall a few cases of suicides because their characters had died. I feel people have to have a life outside of the fantasy gaming provides. Then, when Im crawling to kill a sniper in Battlefield 2, or bracing myself with magic to face a Son of Diablo, I'm experiencing a healthy emotion. And if it's with a great group of people you actually get to speak to, well thats just the frosting on the cake!! Hmmm pretty long but ok I guess, psiquiatra47
That was really good stuff. Although my favorite line was "Ten years ago, if you told someone you had an MMORPG, they’d probably wonder what kind of medication you were using to treat it.".. LOL
In response to "Forza doesn’t turn me onto the idea of going two hundred miles an hour down the highway (or Mainstreet)", I will say this:
I remember playing racing games at a friend's house, then going home, and finding that I really had to watch my speed. While we could laugh at the "realism" in that game (this was 1996-ish), the fact was, I was immersed in the game, the "fantasy escape", and when I had to go back to reality, at least a part of my brain was still saying "go faster!"
I still have not had the urge to take a plasma pistol to someone's head, or pick a fight with a biker, or...
Re: C-Nub takes on Violence in Video Games; Geezer Style (Score: 1) by RoundeyeSamurai on Tuesday, November 07 @ 13:04:48 EST (User Info | Send a Message)
