Monday, May 12, 2008
Violent games aren't a problem, says the computer gaming press -- while lovingly hawking the latest innovations in pixelated gore.
May 12, 1999 | I think it was on the "Crusher" level of Doom II that the joy of killing really kicked in for me.
I liked the plasma gun and the BFG, sure. But futuristic weapons seem so abstract, compared to the homey utility of a double-barreled 12-gauge. Aim just right, and you can take down two, three men in the same blast; their chests bloom with blood and gore, and they go down howling. Crack the barrel, chamber two more shells -- backpedaling and dodging all the while, as the survivors converge -- and fire again. Timed just right, it becomes a perfectly choreographed danse macabre (fire, reload, dodge, fire) on a stage you quickly turn into an abattoir.
It's been a while since I last played Quake or Doom. But when the news came out that Littleton killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were devotees of those games, and that their appalling revenge on the world was perhaps shaped in part by playing them, I had to reflect on my own experience with first-person shooters -- and acknowledge that, yes, they very likely did have something to do with it.
I should note here that I'm a lifelong game lover; as a freelance writer, I often review computer games, violent and otherwise. It's necessary to state this, because soon after the media descended on Littleton, Colo., the computer games debate devolved into uninformed, anti-game alarmism on the one hand and overwrought denials from the put-upon gaming/online community on the other. But now, with some distance on the massacre, and on the eve of the annual E3 conference -- the video and computer game industry's premiere showcase -- constructing a more nuanced conversation is possible, I think.
And necessary. Because so far, gamers and their online advocates have largely preferred instead to point the blame elsewhere, anywhere -- peer ostracism, poor parenting, access to guns and so on -- before retrenching behind a carpet bomb of false dichotomies, non sequiturs and inapt reductio ad absurdums. Slashdot columnist Jon Katz, for example, seems to think raw numbers qualify as refutation, arguing: "Tens of millions of kids all over the world play computer games ... Yet violence among this group, never very high, again has been plummeting even as online use has mushroomed." Meanwhile, PC Gamer's deputy editor, Dan Morris, offers up a winningly bizarre counter-argument: "It's a safe bet that almost every person arrested for embezzlement last year had Quicken ... Just as we would never reasonably consider banning Quicken, we cannot reasonably consider banning Quake." (How do you say "argument which seems to get me off the hook" in Latin?)
Few politicians have actually suggested banning violent games. Rather, the most common proposal is merely -- and in relation to First Amendment rights, which must remain inviolate, not unreasonably -- to restrict their sale to minors. Even if most people may play first-person shooters and suffer no antisocial consequences, it doesn't follow that all gamers will remain similarly unaffected -- especially a select number of adolescents already in a problem state. And even if there were more pressing factors involved, that doesn't mean we can't devote any attention to the culpability of first-person shooters.
In the most plausible explanation, voracious sociopathy like Harris' and Klebold's must involve a whole fetid stew of corrosive influences. But the move by gamers to reject, outright, any role for violent first-person shooters is telling -- since they've played these games, and should know better.
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