Violent Games Beget Violent Opinions

In the mixed up, back-and-forth spitfire debate that is violence in video games, there is one constant of life that cannot be denied: charts make everything easier to understand.

Even our favorite attorney, —who wows with eloquent and professional pet names for gamers such as “nitwit” and “knucklehead pixelantes” on the LiveJournal community GamePolitics—can follow this lovely graph, based on statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice.

A straightforward view such as this is refreshing in the jumbled warzone of debate made up of politicians, parents, and all others who stand with or against games with gore and guns. The trouble with this never-ending argument, (I realize the irony of extending it with this post), is the mis-assignment of guilt to the games instead of to the disillusioned or naïve player—if it even is a player in the hot seat—who reenacts their violence.

I don’t think anyone is going to claim that Harvest Moon has turned me in to a homicidal threat; but sometimes, after a stressful day, I like to come home and axe my cows in the face. And they don’t seem to mind—they still give me milk and “Seem happy today.” There’s no cause – effect present, my actions have no consequences. At least in a game like Grand Theft Auto, I experience and know that when I attack someone with a knife, they will bleed and die, as long as I hit a sweet spot. And that I will then be in immediate danger of punishment and reprisal for my actions, often by the legal authorities. Anyone who claims they were encouraged into aggression by violent video games is demonstrating an inability to relate action to result. It’s like walking into an emergency room and when asked “Why did you set your arm on fire?” responding “Because I burned my finger on the stove last week.”

Anti-video game advocates had a stronger argument when games were less realistically violent: not only because of the fascinating data listed in the chart (which I reference again because it is so ultra-keen), but because of this lack of lessons in causal relation. In its time, Beavis and Butthead was one of the most controversial and “they’ve gone too far” shows on television. The duo had a repertoire of idiotic and dangerous stunts to their names, none of which ever prevented them from making it home in time to mock music videos while slapping each other on their uninjured faces. And they were the first to receive blame for numerous real life acts of idiocy, until it was later revealed the perpetrators had never watched their show. Still, the result was an even more clear-cut warning before, and during, each episode that viewers should not be lemmings on Beavis and Butthead’s cliff of absurdity.

Of course, putting a giant subtitled warning across a game of Counter-Strike or Halo 3, “Shooting people in real life will hurt them. Do not shoot real people,” may take something away from the experience. The problem is that we shouldn’t have to: the “violent video game” card should have been removed from the Blame Game deck long ago. But no matter how much data, research evidence, and simple explanations of the two are offered to the finger-shakers of society, games are still under scrutiny. It seems that those critics of violent games are as incapable of discerning fact from fiction as the children they purport to protect. The true danger here are those mentally incapable of separating their video game life, or their cartoon heroes’ lives, from the tangible everyday. Activists who cannot distinguish a complicated world with many different influential, societal reasons for violence from that virtual world they subscribe to in which there is one true Evil and its demise will save our souls, are the perfect subject of their own fears. They’d probably even make great gamers, if they wouldn’t go around axing cows because a two-dimensional farmer said they could.