Category Archives: Games and Society
The Politics Of Video Game Violence
Last May, a user of the social media discussion website Reddit posted a 2005 video of then-senator Hillary Clinton arguing for age regulations with violent video games. In the video, Mrs. Clinton argues that children playing violent and sexually explicit video games display “increased aggression.” The post sat at the top of the subreddit /r/Gaming, which boasts some 10 million subscribers, many of them mocking the idea that playing violent games turns users into violent people by imagining other activities similar to playing violent games and becoming violent.
Clinton’s opponent in the 2016 Presidential Campaign, Donald Trump, said almost the same thing about video games as she did, but a decade later.
Video game violence & glorification must be stopped—it is creating monsters!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 17, 2012
It is easy to see why video game players defend a favorite pastime, but why do so many others target video games when there has long been violent content in our other forms of entertainment — movies, television, sports, and even fairy tales?
The basic claim is that video games are more likely to affect people’s behavior than more passive forms of entertainment for three reasons:
- Games are immersive: when we play video games, we are not just watching violent acts, we commit them.
- Games are repetitive: while the violence within a movie or television show may last only a few minutes, the violence in video games is content.
- Games reward violent behavior: a violent criminal in a show will probably eventually get his comeuppance, but in video games give players points and achievements for committing violent acts.
Thus, opponents of violent video games say that such games train players to become violent.
It cannot be denied that players can become very aggressive while playing violent video games. According to a 2001 study reported in the journal Psychological Science, children who play violent video games experience an increase in both the physiological signs of aggression and aggressive behavior. These are findings that Mrs. Clinton alluded to in the video, leading her to state that “We need to treat violent video games the way we treat tobacco, alcohol, and pornography” while promoting the Family Entertainment Protection Act, legislation that would have criminalized the sale of games rated “Mature” or “Adults Only” to minors.
However, a relationship between virtual aggression and real-life aggression isn’t necessarily cause and effect. For example, it may be bullies in real life also enjoy being bullies in virtual life, so they play violent video games. But it was not the video games that caused the bullies to become violent in the first place. The American Psychological Association concluded in 2015 that while violent games increase aggression, there is a lack evidence to say it extended to criminality or delinquency. The results of other studies trying to decide if there is a causal link between violent video games and violent behavior is inconclusive.
So, if the relationship is uncertain, why are politicians so quick to blame video games, especially after a violent incident perpetrated by children such as with the Columbine High School shooting, after which the media revealed that the two killers played a lot of violent video games?
When a tragedy such as this occurs, the public looks to its leaders to take action and prevent such a thing from occurring again. After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, the media reported that the shooter, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, played violent video games, President Obama directed the Center for Disease Control to study the best ways to reduce gun violence and asked Congress to fund research into the effects that violent video games have on young minds.
Unfortunately, complex problems like gun violence rather have simple solutions. And rarely do we agree on what the proper solution is. Democrats often say that the solution to gun violence is to put restrictions on gun purchases, while Republicans will say that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” and arguing that a breakdown of the family and religious values is a cause of criminal behavior.
Yet violent video games seems to be a subject that both Democrats and Republicans can get behind. Beginning in 1992, the U.S Senate held hearings on video game violence and the corruption of society due to the popularity of violent video games like Mortal Kombat, causing the game industry to create the Entertainment Software Ratings Board to rate game content.
The establishment of the ESRB was a good thing for the game industry, but politicians have less noble reasons for advocating restrictions on violent video games. It gives them a cause (violence in our society) to talk about when campaigning, as well as an easy solution (banning violent video games). This makes the candidate look heroic and caring to many of their supporters and constituents.
Fortunately for game players, they do have an advocate on their side. In 2001, the United States Supreme Court struck down a California law that would have imposed a penalty to retailers for selling M-rated games. There decision that effectively gave video games the same free speech rights as books, movies or television shows. It established that video games were a protected art form.
Of course, the battle is far from over, because as I wrote above, there are no easy answers to complex issues. But that hasn’t stopped politicians from trying to find easy answers, particularly in this election.
Looking Back At The Virtual Reality of The Lawnmower Man
Last Thursday at The Los Angeles Film School we held a private screening of the film The Lawnmower Man, which is a 1992 science fiction film about an experiment in virtual reality gone wrong. One of our alumni knew the film’s director, Brett Leonard, and asked if he could host a screening of the director’s cut of the film followed by a question and answer session with Leonard. I had never seen the film before but seeing it was on my bucket list due to my interest in virtual reality, and I suggested that we screen it on the same day that we have our monthly Game Fair, where one of our student teams was demonstrating a virtual reality project of their own.
Based on a Stephen King film of the same name (although according to King himself, bearing “no meaningful resemblance” to it), the film stars Jeff Fahey as Jobe Smith, a simple-minded gardener (the titular “Lawmower Man”), and Pierce Brosnan as Dr. Lawrence Angelo, the scientist who decides to experiment on him. Dr. Lawrence Angelo has been running experiments in increasing the intelligence of chimpanzees using drugs and virtual reality, When of the chimps escapes using the warfare tactics he was being trained for, Dr. Angelo finds a human subject to work with when he spots Jobe mowing his lawn.
Dr. Angelo makes it a point to redesign all the intelligence-boosting treatments without the “aggression factors” used in the chimpanzee experiments, and like the protagonist in the story story Flowers for Algernon, Jobe soon becomes smarter, for example, learning Latin in only two hours. The story also has a resemblance to Altered States, where Jobe develops telepathic abilities and eventually becomes a being of pure energy. Jobe uses the lab equipment to enter the mainframe computer, to become a wholly virtual being, Angelo then joins Job in virtual reality to try to reason with him. but Jobe overpowers and crucifies Angelo, then continues to search for a network connection to escape. Each eventually escapes their entrapment in virtual reality, and the film ends with Jobe ringing hundreds of telephones all around the globe to signal his birth as a being that now resides in every networked computer system.
The story may be a bit derivative, but how prescient were its quarter-century old predictions about virtual reality? Much of the technology was dead-on to where we are today. Characters were connected to computers by wearing helmets with visual displays for seeing the virtual world, gloves allowing users to manipulate virtual objects, touchscreens for operating the computer controls, and hand-held controllers for additional input.
Unfortunately, time has not been kind to the film as the virtual reality graphics themselves are now primitive by today’s standards (although at the time they were state-of-the art, the eight minutes of computer generated special effects taking seven people eight months to complete on a budget of $500,000). Also, the film did not anticipate bluetooth, as there were wires everywhere, and characters were locked into giant gyroscopes, apparently so that they could tumble through the ether when other characters punched them in virtual reality.
As far as the application of virtual reality goes, the film explored its uses for therapy, education, and training, which are indeed three fields for which virtual reality is being developed today. Of course, for dramatic purposes this is all made menacing by the use of a not-properly-tested drug as well as an evil military overseer that introduces aggressiveness factors into the treatment with the inevitable disastrous outcomes.
So, is this a film worth seeing if you are into virtual reality and its depiction in cinema? Unless you are a diehard science fiction film buff, I suggest taking a pass now that we have the real thing to now available to play with. Brett Leonard told us after the screening that he was developing some virtual reality applications with his team. I trust that he’s learned from both this film and his 1995 similarly-themed film, Virtuosity, of the dangers of virtual reality, and it will be interesting to see what benefits filmmakers will bring to the medium.
After all, the film did inspire the scrolling action game The Lawnmower Man (1993) for Game Boy, Genesis and SNES as well as the full-motion video adventure game The Lawnmower Man (1993) for DOS, Macintosh and SEGA CD , which used clips from the movie and is a direct sequel to the movie, since Its plot begins. The adventure game Cyberwar (1994) for DOS and PlayStation is a non-FMV sequel to the FMV game. Now technology is at a point where I don’t expect to play the movie, I want to be in the movie.
David Mullich 