Violence and Misconceptions

Jan ´04
07 9:16 pm

Happy New Year.
I was over at Metafilter and they had a post about how Penny Arcade’s Child’s Play didn’t get the media coverage they expected.

As these things somehow usually tend to go, a comment was made that mentioned game titles like, “”Back Alley Rapist” or “Innocent Citizen Pummel-Fest” or “Arson Party 2004” or “Digi-Chicks n’ Tits” ” and then a follow-up post that said, “These games that allow players to beat cops, rape prostitutes, stomp innocent people and anything else of the ilk are absolutely irresposible and disgusting.”

My first response was to post a comment, but since metafilter isn’t letting new people join I couldn’t, so I did the next best thing and wrote about it here.

Arson???? Raping Prostitutes??? Is there ANY game EVER that features actions such as this??? If so, please tell me. Now I don’t want to take this guy to task. He is not alone in holding these ideas about videogames. I have heard the thing about raping more than once. I am assuming that this guy is referring to Grand Theft Auto III. However, if there is any raping in the game, I have yet to find it yet. Again, if there is, let me know.

There is also the big bad guy of beating cops. Yes you can beat cops. But as far as I have played the game, that is not the point. Are there ANY missions in Grand Theft Auto III that directly involve violence against the police? If there is I haven’t gotten to them/it yet.

The thing that frustrates me is that over at metafilter, while people are attempting to correct him, as of yet, no one has pointed out the factual errors in his assertions. Let me be clear, as someone who has been playing videogames since PONG, who subscribes to 3 different videogame magazines, watches G4TV, X-Play on TechTV and who considers myself a videogame expert, To the best of my knowledge, there are NO games that feature arson, or rape. Yes you can have consensual sex with prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto III, yes you can kill anyone, including police and prostitutes even if you have just had sex with them, but those features are NOT the point of the games. In fact I had heard so much about this getting a prostitute and then killing her to get your money back feature, I tried to do it, and I couldn’t figure out how to do it! (Of course there is always the possibility that I am just a little dense)

That these rumors persist points to a serious issue with how many people perceive videogames. Here we have one game, two if yo could Vice City, that involves the ability to kill people including officers and prostitutes and yet we have people decrying ALL videogames. If you are going to be against Grand Theft Auto III, then fine, be against that game, but do not assume that all games are the same, and please, if you are going to say negative things, then at least be factually correct. More important, if you witness someone saying things about videogames that are exaggerations or are simply factually wrong, call them on it. Tell them that they are wrong, ask them for a clarification, ask them to name the games that they are talking about.

Now I am aware that to a certain extent I am preaching to the choir. Most regular readers of this blog (assuming I have regular readers, that is) know this. Regular readers, hypothetical or not, also know that I have a facination with Google, and one of my main goals in posting this is that by mentioning GTA and violence and rape that the mighty Google algorithm will pick up this post and maybe just maybe at least one person who really does think that there are videogames that include rape will see that otherwise.

Finally, it really amazes me that people are so concerned and afraid and reactionary about videogames. In an attempt to see if maybe there really was some sort of rape in GTA that I just hadn’t seen yet.I did a google search for: video game rape prostitute. Go to google and search for those terms. That web sites use those terms to get hits, and that people might use those terms in looking for web sites like that is “10,000 times worse than the worst thing” that happens in ANY videogame.

About Bryan-Mitchell Young

On Art and Violence

Now that the semester is winding down I’ve got a bit of time to blog (and write my last couple dissertation chapters and then revise all of them and write the intro and conclusion chapters…). A couple things have happened (and are in the process of happening) that have the gaming world buzzing: Roger Ebert wrote about videogames again and the Supreme Court is taking up the case of California’s law forbidding the sale of videogames to minors.

Regarding Ebert, he ends by asking, “Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art?” which echoes my own call for all of us to stop caring about “art.” Tons and tons of people have tried to convince him he’s wrong — so many in fact that I don’t even want to bother hunting down links to some of the stories that do it. I’m not interested in arguing with him because I don’t really care if he thinks games are art or not.

However, it is very disconcerting that he seems to think that he can judge games by looking at screenshots. Would he write a review of a film based on the text on the back of the dvd box? That’s pretty ignorant to think that he can judge games in that manner.

Unfortunately, this is just the top of the iceberg because look at the picture at the top of his post. Now I have no idea if he picked that picture or not. I would say that he probably didn’t but he did pick the rest of the pictures in the post so perhaps he did. Regardless, the picture didn’t just appear by itself. Someone chose that picture. What is in that picture? A kid. So someone whether it was Ebert of just some random web guy, wanted to pick a picture of a gamer and they picked a kid — once again perpetuating the stereotype that games are for kids and in this instance also seemingly indicating that games are in and of themselves childish. Wow. That’s pretty sad.

OK, now onto the Supreme Court…

I’m pretty confident that the Supreme Court will say this law is unconstitutional not only because lower courts have consistently ruled that laws regulating videogame sales are unconstitutional but also because of the recent Supreme Court decision declaring a law banning animal cruelty videos unconstitutional.

Today the Diane Rehm Show had a segment on the Supreme Court taking on the Videogame law regulating videogame sales and had Leland Yee, the California politician behind the bill, Craig Anderson, the guy who has never met a form of media that didn’t cause aggression, and a couple other people I don’t remember. Now, I’ve previously criticized Anderson’s vague use of the term “aggression” so I was pleasantly surprised that Diane Rehm’s first question to him was “what is the difference between agression and violence?” Anderson initially tried to avoid answering the question but then Rehm re-asked the question and Anderson admitted that while violence is generally understood as an extreme form of aggression, it is very rare for aggression to actually turn into violence. I think that it really key because in that statement Anderson (who also in this CNN video says that videogame-caused “aggression” isn’t really any worse than film or television-causes “aggression” ) says that videogames don’t really make kids violent.

If the most well known person who thinks videogames cause aggression doesn’t think they make you violent then that makes the case that they are so bad that we need laws against selling them much harder to prove.

Personally, I look forward to the SCOTUS shutting down these kinds of laws once and for all.

…well that and Jack Thompson getting involved and saying some crazy things…

Movies can be scary too…

Allow me a non-videogame-related rant here… It is still about moral panics surrounding children and media though so it could easily have been about videogames instead of movies.

I caught a story on the local NPR station last night about someone threatening a lawsuit against Redbox because they sell “R-rated” movies. I searched for something about the story and apparently it got picked up by a few local news outlets including the Indianapolis Fox Affiliate and the Louisville ABC Affiliate. According to stories the whole thing is being stirred up by Vanderburgh Country Prosecutor Stan Levco.

Of course there’s two little details that neither of the two stories linked to above or any of the other stories I saw seemed to mention: First, The MPAA rating system “is a voluntary system” and the ratings are not legally enforced. The only possible grounds for a lawsuit that there would be would be under obscenity or pornography laws. Levco almost certainly knows this. So why is he causing a stir? That leads to the second missing detail: Levco is running for re-election.

So this is just a ploy to get into the headlines so that Levco can say he is “fighting for families” and concerned about “family values” without having to do anything. The minute I heard this story I immediately wondered if the guy was up for re-election because that’s the only time public officials try to start legal proceedings related to media. I guess Levco couldn’t find any easy videogame targets.

Heaven forbid that any of the media outlets that aired this story would take two minutes to wonder why Levco was doing this or anything… That’s some good reportering there…

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