Having gone through a series of lectures and classes leading up to the official opening of the video games lab at school this weekend, and having talked to a number of people not of an age to have grown up with video games during that time, I have had more than my share of conversations about video games and violence. I have begun to formulate my take on the topic. I am posting it here, once, and then I don’t want to talk about it with anyone, anymore, until they’ve read this post and its revisions and comments. I swear I am going to print out a card which has the permanent URL for this post and just hand it to anyone who walks up to me with a question about violence on their lips.
Much as I am sick and tired of having to live with a market dominated by video games with violent and sexist content (see Don’t Make Me Be That B!tch), I am tired of having to give the same spiel over and over to people who assume that just because these games dominate, they can tar all games with the same brush. This is really, really, REALLY not what I want to spend my professional career doing. I want to make good games, which in my estimation means games which make people think.
(I first posted a version of the following to a thread in my Technology and Human Development course.)
First of all, I think way too much energy is being spent talking about the relationships between video games and violence. If you do a Google Scholar search for “video games” you get about seven thousand results, HALF of which are about violence or deleterious health effects. Significantly less is to be found on possible applications of the technology. I think our ideas about video games and violence have less to do with empirical evidence than with our society’s preoccupation with violence and with classist attitudes about mass media.
We’re making a couple of mistakes in thinking about violence and video games the way we often do in
academia. One is thinking that EXISTING video games will be educational, which they will NOT aside from those made to teach. We don’t ask the bulk of TV to be educational; we don’t ask movies to be educational; we don’t ask music to be educational. They’re entertainment, and we should stop looking for educational content in media which are not intended for education. (Believe me, I am happy to talk about cultivation effects, agenda-setting, and other idea-shaping ideas that mass media have, but there’s a difference between looking for school-like educational content in games and seeing that all forms of communication have the power to affect our conceptions of the world. Those are two different conversations, and we should keep them apart until school stops being a domain unto itself.)
Another mistake is not considering the full range of video games. There’s video game versions of Scrabble and Tetris, soccer and tennis, historical simulations and dance games, and the list goes on. The biggest gaming demographic, in fact, is middle-aged women playing card and puzzle games with their friends online. Younger women do it too. So a lot of the time when we talk about violent video games in forums like this we are implicitly saying “We play computer games, which are different — they’re acceptable. Those console games you play are for kids and for men, and they’re violent, and we don’t understand them. They’re not acceptable.” It behooves us to overcome this divide — it’s bad for communication and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as girls continue to grow up believing they are “not good at games” and missing out on the technological skills involved in setting them up
and the privileged male discourses that go on in communities surrounding them.
Many existing games are violent because violence is far simpler to program than social interaction. It is much easier to program a response that runs [IF grenade sprite overlaps with tank sprite THEN show explosion animation] than it is to get a character to believably fall in love with you based on your skillful writing of love sonnets. A lot of the times people generalize way too far and say more cartoony games like Super Mario Brothers are violent, when the underlying code or idea is really no more violent than target archery, or even a game of tag.
I attended a lecture recently in which Henry Jenkins, an MIT professor, said that what we as a society really need to do is begin to talk about violence and describe what kinds of violence we deem acceptable and unacceptable. He said we can’t just say “all video games are violent and we deplore them, end of story.” Our kids are gonna feel like they can’t talk to us if we don’t know any better than that. They see in many games that violence is something the “good guys” use as a last resort when people or places they love are under attack. And honestly, I think kids (beyond, say, the age of seven, which becomes a sort of dividing line in the literature on TV and violence or judgements of reality) know the difference between Mario Brothers cartoon violence and, say, World War II simulations. What they may *not* understand, if we’re not being explicit about how we feel about violence, is the contradictions inherent in our country’s tacit acceptance of violence — including as a “peacemaking” or “democratizing” force — in the real world. (I’m with Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine on that one — I think our societal ambivalence about violence is just as much to blame as media violence.)
We need to be able to express under what conditions we think violence is acceptable and understand what uses fantasy violence might have in child development (consider the catharsis hypothesis). We need to do this even if we are pacifists (which I am). And then, start studying which formal features of video games might be useful for education instead. We need to look beyond existing games and start thinking what excellent educational games would look like.
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