The "debate" about violence in games is heating up. It is the subject of Senate sub-committees, media pundits, etc. On the one hand, this blame-game drives me mad – the irrational finger-pointing and the "it must be broke, we have to fix it" mentality – these are tiring spew to my ears. On the other hand, when I am honest with myself, I think that I have avoided this issue out of convenience for years. People have brought it up at parties when they found out I made computer games, but I usually avoided the debate or had what I now feel are spurious first-amendment non-answers. I have never once been witness to a serious discussion of this in a game-company meeting, and I know that such a discussion is a rat-hole of enormous dimensions. Admittedly, I am no longer sitting in on design or management meetings in any game company, but I suspect that the issue is still not being debated – that we are all blissfully ignoring it. I want to open the proverbial can of worms and see what crawls out.
I see some major paradoxes in game industry thinking. No one can possibly deny that we are creating ever more realistic violence. (Standard disclaimers for those games which are the exception… but let’s not get side tracked, we all know what the hard-core audience is buying). The player in many games is a first-person homicide machine. Yes, we create all this in a world of fiction and metaphors. Yes, it is virtual and not real. Yes, it may be cathartic. Yes, some games track karma and promote "moral" play. But, we can not simply blow this off with simple-minded rationalizations. We are smart enough and moral enough people to actually think about this.
The first amendment protects our right to create these games. This is a statement that few dare to take exception with. Now, for a more controversial statement. As intelligent, thoughtful, moral people, we have some sort of responsibilities under the first amendment. For those that take an immediate negative response to this statement, let me offer the following thought experiment:
If it were absolutely 100% unquestionable that some aspect of your game was causing 0.01% of players to commit homicide, would you still add that feature? I think that most of us would say "No". Thus, the argument boils down to opinion on the effect of virtual violence to which I will return shortly.
However, I think that this "effects debate" is not the whole story. For example, I observe that as a general rule (generalization disclaimer again) we don’t make games which include elements of rape, incest, racism, hate, etc. These things are "tasteless" and thus find their way out of good game designs before they are even created. Apparently, no further rationalization is needed to eliminate these elements. Yet, (you know what I’m about to say) blood-gushing homicides repeated ad-infinitum in choose-your-favorite-doom-clone are not tasteless? War games where thousands of little virtual men get splatted like lemmings are not tasteless? Why and when did we "decide" this? How do we justify this dichotomy?
Back to the effects of violence debate (I’m hereby christen this the "effects-debate"). First, I have not read the primary research that a lot of people refer to about the effects of violent games / images. Nor, I suspect have any of my friends in the game industry. (This isn't from lack of trying, I might add. The references I've found so far are in such obscure journals, things like The Journal of Pediatric Psychology, that I have been unable to locate them yet!) We need to read these, and I plan to do so when I can get back to a decent library. An example of research that I've heard about third or fourth hand was described as a study with very young children which measured their tendency to play "more violently" after exposure to violent games or images. Again, I don’t know what the real research is, but I’m willing to bet that "inadequate" barely even begins to describe it. There are so many issues here, that it is overwhelming.
Since I don’t have any research at hand, much less applicable research, let’s turn instead to analyze "standard arguments" which I have used sans evidence. These I give the name "rationalizations" because it is an accurate description as well as deliberately confrontational. I have used all of these rationalizations myself either verbally or in my own mind, so I am not attacking anything in the rebuttals but logic and opinion, specifically my own.
All good fiction involves conflict. Person-to-person conflict is the most common story telling element. Games, despite all the pointy-headed definitions of interactivity, are easily compared to story-telling fiction. Thus games, like stories, will always involve conflict.
Rebuttal: As I pointed out before, we almost never use rape, incest, hate, or racism as primary conflict elements under the "tasteless" argument. So, why don’t we do the same for homicides? A story about conflict need not involve gratuitous homicide; it is an unimaginative cop-out to say otherwise. As my 8th grade English teacher wrote when grading a short story I wrote (despite the fact that I probably misspelled every other word): "Wow! A story that didn’t include a murder! A+."
The consumer is and should be the ultimate decision maker. The market has decided it likes a little of the "ol’ ultra-violence" (as it was called in A Clockwork Orange), so who are we to argue? We owe it to our shareholders to maximize profit.
Rebuttal: Pornography sells well too, but anytime I’ve ever heard this come up in a design meeting it seems to be brushed off as unacceptably tasteless. "Not something that fits our brand" is a marketing restatement of the same thing. "Maybe another porno brand" which never seems to materialize because, at heart, most of us in the game industry have a little more taste than that.
A further and more powerful rebuttal exists in the "if it was unquestionably hurting people" thought experiment above.
As for the shareholder argument – hogwash. This kind of reasoning can justify anything no matter how deplorable. "We maximized profit of this automobile by skimping on the quality of steel in the safety-belt mechanism. Our shareholders are so pleased!" … "We maximized profit by eliminating costly ‘safety devices’ in our nuclear power plant. Our stock price went up 5 points!" … "We maximized profits by cheating on our taxes. Our shareholders think we’re geniuses!" For those who say: "as long as you aren’t breaking the law, it’s OK" – you better not be the same set of people who are against "more government regulations." Surely we have a moral obligation to the health and safety of our customers before all else whether or not we are regulated; and if not, let the litigation begin!
Healthy people know the difference between reality and fiction. Unhealthy people are going to find violent motivations in anything, be it music, books, games, everyday life. Efforts at self-censorship are pointless exercises in do-goodiness which are only cathartic to the developers, and are of no use to the consumers.
Rebuttal: You can not prove a rule with an exception. Yes, almost no one is a killer. Yes, it is hard to argue that games make killers. Yet, we can not say sans research what the effects of our games are. Maybe they push 1% of the population 100% over the edge. Maybe they push 100% of the people 1% closer to the edge. We know so little, we don’t even know how to define "push" or "the edge". Nevertheless, it is hard to argue that mindless repetition of homicide does not somehow reduce people’s disgust with the action; for if this were not the case, the military could not train otherwise healthy people to become killers though mindless repetition of bayoneting dummies and shooting silhouettes – both virtual actions which train for the non-virtual. (According to several oblique references in the media [eg. Harper’s July 99 Index] I’ve heard the military is supposedly using some doom-a-like to train soldiers. But, I bet these claims are distorted or exaggerated. Again, this is existing research that we should know about.) If nothing else, maybe games as well as all other virtual violence (TV, books, etc.) are numbing everyone to the point where little to nothing is disgusting. What are the social consequences of this numbing, this belief that violence is banal? (Despite all the game playing, apparently I’m not completely over the edge yet: I almost threw up in my living room in 1995 when I saw a Hutu behead a Tutsi on CNN – but then again, maybe I would have actually puked if I hadn’t seen this played out virtually so many times before).
We all have natural violent emotions. Releasing these in a virtual world is a lot better than releasing them on our peers. Violent play is a natural part of childhood development as well as, perhaps, daily adult life. Computer games are just a high-tech version of cops & robbers or cowboys & indians.
Rebuttal: Same argument as above. We have no evidence whatsoever that this is the case. (None that it isn’t the case either.) It may feel that way to each of us, but again, only controlled research would reveal the true effect. However, I shutter to think what the protocol for such research might be. I am skeptical that definitive experiments could be designed to answer these questions, but I have not actually put much thought into it either.
Everything is violent: movies, TV, the real-world! Games are a tiny drop in the bucket. The problem is "society" which is "un-fixable."
Rebuttal: Maybe so, but obviously if everyone thinks this way then it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Moral people take responsibility for their own actions. You can’t just say it is OK to do something because everyone else does it without robing yourself of some dignity.
Adults can think for themselves, they know the difference between the real and the virtual. As for children, with less life experience, it is a parent’s responsibility to make the call.
Rebuttal: Forget the effects-on-kids issue, it is an irrelevant distraction. We don’t know what the effects on anyone are, adult or child. Many intuit that it is more significant on children, but we have no evidence of this. This whole truth-in-labeling and child-protection stuff is a big diversion that allows Congressmen to tell their constituents that they’re doing something when they aren’t – because they legally can’t. The protect-the-kids movement is a classic constitutional road-blocking technique. I.e. – a small breech in the bulwark of the first amendment has been opened up under the auspices of "protecting children." Lawmakers see the weakness and pile up behind the breech trying to push through laws which accomplish more than "protecting children" and then let it go to the courts where, if they get lucky, the justices will over turn or expand the precedents.
Anything can be used for evil. You can pick up a copy of the Bible, and whack someone over the head with it. We, authors, creators of ideas, are not responsible for the misuse of our products or ideas therein.
Rebuttal: Reach deep inside of yourself and ask if you would be truly at ease working in the marketing department of Smith & Wessen firearms when your boss proposes an ad campaign to target children. OK, what about working as a middleman for Ukrainian mobsters selling nuclear weapons? If you can honestly say that you would have no "end-result" moral dilemma (legality arguments aside) in such extreme cases, you have a colder heart than I do. Obviously, game violence is not in the same ball park with selling weapons ("not even the same fucking sport" as was said in Pulp Fiction) but the argument against the moral absolutism of "no responsibility" is still valid, I believe.
Rebuttal: Because someone else is a murderer, it is OK to merely torture? Absurd.
There’s probably more rationalizations than those eight, but I leave it at that. I want to make it extremely clear: I AM NOT ARGUING THAT GAMES CAUSE PEOPLE TO BECOME MORE VIOLENT, OR ANY VARIANT OF THAT SENTIMENT. I am arguing that 1) Rationalizations sans evidence I have used in the past are on shaky ground. 2) We are at least mildly hypocritical to eliminate some violent elements on tasteless grounds, but ignore homicide 3) Enough reasonable suspicion of a causality link between virtual and real violence exists to warrant high quality research. 4) We have a moral responsibility to address the question. 5) If there is evidence of causality, we have the moral and probably legal obligation to address it. 6) If we don’t address these issues ourselves, someone else will. Industrial precedents for this are numerous, of course; a few examples: tobacco, guns, cars.