Government vs Video Games

When depictions of gratuitous violence in media come under attack after every mass killing, video games predictably take the majority of this misdirected blame, especially when the killer is twenty-something or younger. Good people who play video games, when they hear of this, are either indifferent or outraged, but no one is ever surprised. I bet no one was surprised the first time it ever happened, either. This kind of reaction might be reckless and inappropriate, but — let's be honest — it's understandable.

When a guy shoots a bunch of people, and they go into his house and find a video game in which the objective is to (virtually) shoot a bunch of (virtual) people, it certainly looks pretty incriminating. I can hardly blame the pundits and lawmakers for jumping to conclusions. More damning yet is that violent video games, unlike any of the violent movies this killer might have enjoyed, have an interactive element which puts the player in direct control of that violence. In the case of first-person shooters, it allows the player to pull the trigger.

Never mind the fact that ownership of these games is so common that their presence in the home of a killer is almost meaningless. When an innocent child plays Call of Duty and doesn't kill anyone for real, it's not nearly as newsworthy as the social outcast who (allegedly, according to some guy, maybe) became addicted to online first-person shooters before slaughtering children. People who get all of their information from the news are obviously going to have a skewed perspective. Those who think they see a correlation, and then blindly make the illogical leap to causation, don't fully realize that the video game has become such a socially acceptable pastime. They don't understand that recent spree killers who are known to have played video games did so only because they were, at least in this particular way, somewhat normal.

It's not entirely insane to draw bad conclusions about the effects of violent media when you simply haven't been told that an entire generation has been willingly exposed to everything from Mortal Kombat to Halo without a disproportionate number of individuals developing psychopathic or violent tendencies. The effortless and instant gratification that we get from video games and other computerized gadgets has only turned us into a bunch of lazy slobs. If it's true that violent crime has actually decreased in recent years, it's probably because we're too lazy to go outside and kill people even if we want to. We'd rather order pizza from our video game console and continue yelling obscenities into our headset while we 360 no-scope the kid on the other team and then brag about how tough we are.

Studies on the possible effects of exposure to violent video games continue to contradict each other, as do the self-proclaimed experts, but if video games do turn young people into murderers then it sure isn't obvious to those of us who actually play them. The gray-haired people who disagree with us have only an outsider's perspective.

Regardless of the facts, the usual scapegoat is used and abused every time a national tragedy prompts a discussion of what might be done to prevent violence. While cooler heads and logical thinking usually prevail, logic necessarily goes out the window for a period of time after every widely publicized act of senseless violence, because during such a time it's considered rude not to be ruled by your emotions. (If something terrible happens and you're not immediately calling for the public execution of the first possible suspect without waiting for a trial, you're a traitor; if children die and you're not calling for billions of dollars worth of unnecessarily legislation, you just don't care about children.) Proposals to restrict the content or sale of video games inevitably pop up here and there, and we all argue about them until our faces turn blue. However, by the time these proposals hit modern interpretations of the First Amendment like a brick wall, we've already forgotten about them, and things go back to normal until the next school shooting.

The cycle is currently in the process of repeating itself, thanks in part to last year's mass murder in Newtown, Connecticut. The push to depict the video game as a dangerous brainwashing tool has since gone into overdrive — not only because of the particularly horrific nature of this killing, and claims that the young perpetrator played too much Call of Duty, but also because violence in media had already been on the public's mind since the earlier shooting in Aurora, Colorado. After the more recent bombing attack in Boston, Massachusetts, I almost expected the anti-gaming sentiment to graduate from "video games cause violence" to "video games cause terrorism" (for it's almost a certainty that at least one of the Tsarnaev brothers had been exposed to at least one video game featuring some form of violence, and that's usually enough for a sensationalist news article). Fortunately, though, it seems that video games are only a plausible scapegoat until the T-word is used.

Regardless of which (if any) crimes can be linked to the consumption of video games, politicians are once again trying to fix the apparent epidemic of violent crime (i.e., a few high-profile cases) by campaigning for tighter restrictions on the medium. This is happening now in my home state of New Jersey, perhaps most notable today for hosting awful reality TV shows and having many of its tourist attractions ravaged by Hurricane Sandy. Am I worried? Maybe I would be if I were 12 years old, but as an adult, I'm outside the scope of any realistic attempt at regulation. Should anyone be worried? Not yet, since all of the proposed legislation I've seen is useless and inconsequential, as if government officials are just trying to look busy without rocking the boat too much. (And I guess that's normal.)

Earlier this month, for example, we heard of an assemblywoman who wants to ban playable M-rated and AO-rated games from public places. While such a proposal isn't by any means outrageous, someone clearly goofed up the details, because the idea as written is little more than a nuisance and a waste of tax money. Such a law, pertaining specifically to video games that are playable in public, could only affect arcade games and those console set-ups in video game stores. But the ESRB — creator of the M and AO ratings — doesn't even rate arcade games, and as for the playable console games in retail stores, I just couldn't care less if I tried. Last time I went to Best Buy, the games on display were kid-friendly platformers and Kinect nonsense.

To get arcade games back on the chopping block, they could just remove the references to ESRB ratings from the bill and apply the restrictions more broadly to any game featuring violence, but the popularity of arcade games is so low that passing the law would hardly be worth the effort. There are a few arcade machines at my local movie theater but nobody plays them. (And when the price of a single play has gone from $0.25 to $0.50 and sometimes $1.00, why should they? We all have video games in our homes now, and we can play them all day without losing a bunch of quarters.) There are still some standalone video arcades along the boardwalk (assuming they weren't all washed away when that hurricane blew through the Northeast), but they don't tend to have more than a few violent games. At worst, they'd have to toss the latest installment of Time Crisis or House of the Dead.

Meanwhile, New Jersey governor Chris Christie (whose high approval ratings have made him somewhat of a big deal) wants to prohibit the sale of M-rated and AO-rated games to minors without parental consent. This idea actually makes some sense, if you believe in the ESRB rating system. Of course, such a law would run afoul of a Supreme Court decision that overturned a similar law in California on the grounds that video games (like other creative works) are a protected form of free speech. For this reason, Christie's plan is likely to fail. But, hypothetically, what if a law restricting the sale of violent games were passed anyway? And what if it weren't immediately overturned by a higher court? I've composed a list of all the things that might change in my life as a direct result:

• There might be fewer underage brats in the online games that I play.
• I might need to bring my driver's license when I drive to the local video game store.

... That's all I've got.

Whenever we hear of possible restrictions on the sale of games to minors, there are those who act as if an outright ban on violent video games is in the works, and listening to all the unwarranted outrage is really tiring. Whether it's all a kneejerk reaction by people who jump to conclusions without carefully reading the news, or a genuine fear of a "slippery slope" that ends with blatant censorship, such an alarmist response is just as unnecessary and unhelpful as the actual legislation that's being proposed.

With a law in place, not much would change for most retailers and consumers, since the industry's self-imposed standards are almost identical to what our elected officials want to enforce. The ESRB recommends that M-rated games not be sold directly to anyone under 17 years old, and most retail stores already go along with this. In fact, on average, game retailers are doing pretty well at keeping these adult-oriented games out of children's hands. According to the FTC, it's easier for a minor to buy a ticket to an R-rated movie than to buy an M-rated game, so it's nothing short of ironic that my governor thinks we should be looking to R-rated films as an example of proper regulation and then "setting the same standard" for video games.

Compliance with this standard would surely be even higher if it became a legal issue, but parents would still be able to buy the games for their kids, which is exactly what they're doing now. Most young kids who play Call of Duty: Black Ops II didn't sneak out of the house and take a bus to the nearest GameStop to buy it. They got it from mommy for Christmas. The fact that so many minors are playing violent video games, while so few are actually buying them, means a lot of parents have no problem with providing the consent that the proposed law would require.

Meanwhile, parents who don't want their kids playing violent video games can easily enforce this decision at home, and this is already happening too. A kid who buys an M-rated game without an accompanying adult isn't necessarily doing it without parental permission; in fact, he or she probably does have that permission, implied or explicit, because otherwise the game might end up in the trash soon after entering the house. Some parents, of course, are just neglectful and stupid, but that's not the government's business. There's no need for state legislators to step in and raise everyone's children.

For all these reasons, passing a law to enforce age restrictions would be little more than another waste of time and money, regardless of whether video games have anything to do with violent behavior in children. On the other hand, for all the same reasons, I'm finding it hard to care whether this or any similar law is passed, now or in the future. Do violent video games cause violent behavior? Almost certainly not. Does this mean adult-oriented games are appropriate for kids? Not necessarily. Although the government might not have the right to enforce it, parents should decide what their kids play and I applaud game retailers for enforcing the age restrictions even when no law is in place. You won't hear me complaining if the government spoils the fun for a relatively small number of kids who actually manage to buy Grand Theft Auto behind their parents' backs without being stopped at the counter.

Shooting Inanimate Targets is Disgusting

I wasn't really planning to write more about the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting. My other post, written out of frustration when I had too much time on my hands, was more than enough — too much, in fact, since everything worth saying was already said before I got mad enough to say it again. (My apologies for being redundant.)

But, once again, this is just too stupid to ignore.

It seems the country is in an uproar over an iPhone game called NRA: Practice Range, allegedly funded by the National Rifle Association itself (though it was developed by MEDL Mobile). In the game, you shoot at targets in both indoor and outdoor shooting ranges. All of the targets are inanimate objects. Some of them move, some of them don't, but as far as I can tell without buying the app (and according to what I've heard from those who have), none of them bleed. Even so, everyone is pretty angry about it, either because of the timing of the application's release or simply because so many people have never seen a gun in a cheaply made video game before.

Anti-gun activists and half the journalists in the nation have been attacking the NRA relentlessly for whole month, and this game only made it worse. Personally, I don't care about the NRA, because I don't own any rifles, and I don't care much about this game, because I don't own an iPhone. But it's hard not to notice when the media collectively goes off the deep end and drowns in its own frantic panic-mongering.

I'll just post a nice example that caught my attention earlier today. An opinion piece on NY Daily News, creatively titled Simply app-alling, calls the game "truly sickening" and — echoing the words of NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre as he criticized the developers of violent video games — "callous, corrupt and corrupting." It is slightly ironic that an NRA-branded shooting game has appeared so soon after LaPierre uttered those words in his ill-informed attempt to redirect blame for shootings from guns themselves to violence in media (i.e., from one scapegoat to another)... but only slightly.

LaPierre, it would seem, has a problem with violent games, and NRA: Practice Range isn't violent. Literally no violence occurs. So while the untimely release of this game is somewhat ironic and even a bit distasteful, given the context, it certainly isn't an example of "disgusting hypocrisy, profiteering and irresponsibility."

I don't see how it's disgusting at all. It might actually be one of the least violent shooting games ever released. It makes Duck Hunt look like a nightmarish glimpse into the mind of a mass murdering psychopath.

cute little ducky... BANG

In fact, Duck Hunt would serve as a much better training tool for an aspiring spree killer, since it's played by aiming a plastic gun at the television. Meanwhile, NRA: Practice Range is played by making smudgy thumb prints on a touch screen. If we're going to write about disgusting, appalling, "truly sickening" games, we should probably start with something that actually involves killing, even something as mild as this wholesome Nintendo classic, rather than railing against the one game in which nothing gets hurt.

Somehow, though, I don't think Duck Hunt is soon to be the target of any political poo-slinging. I'd have mentioned instead a few of the many games in which shooting virtual people is the goal, but if today's journalists are so horrified and offended by fake target practice in a fake shooting range, then learning about a game in which you blow fake people's brains out might send the lot of them into a catatonic state. On second thought, that would be pretty nice. I should send them some gameplay footage of Max Payne.

Jumping in Slow Motion: The Game

Last night, I finished Max Payne. (The first one.) It took me a while, because my playing time has been cut drastically by that irritating thing called employment, but I finally finished it.

I'd previously played both games in Remedy Entertainment's newer series, Alan Wake, so I was confident in the developers' ability to create an entertaining third-person shooter. Obviously, though, the two franchises don't really have much in common aside from the presence of firearms, the fact that each game is named after its protagonist, and the amount of time you'll spend looking at the back of each protagonist's head.

Max Payne, for example, is insanely, ludicrously, hilariously violent. It was even a bit awkward, I must admit, to start playing this game less than a week after a particular mass murder which called into question (for some) the effects of violent video games on young people. Personally, I don't think games like this one are harmful at all, but the subject was still on my mind. This is exactly the type of game, I thought to myself, that would start a misinformed media frenzy if it were ever discovered in the bedroom of some kid who had gone and shot a bunch of people.

If someone told me that Max Payne, of all games, might desensitize players to violence and make them more likely to commit violent acts, I'd respond that the game is just too damn silly to have that kind of effect on people. The game doesn't take itself very seriously at all, and while some might say that's part of the problem, there's just no way that anyone could get real ideas about harming people after playing a game in which most of the shooting is done while jumping in slow motion. If a killer in the making were going to get ideas about how to commit a mass murder from a video game (which is unlikely), or if such a person actually wanted to train for such an act using video games (which is extremely unlikely), he or she would probably be found playing a more realistic shooter.

Max Payne has absolutely no respect for the concept of realism, and everything (including the violence and the motivation for violence) is consequently so tongue-in-cheek that, to me, this particular shooter almost seems like a parody of its own genre. (It some parts it even becomes a parody of itself.) Like the gameplay, the story is pretty grim, in a lot of ways — it involves drug use, corruption, government conspiracy, and a ton of murder — but there's enough humor and absurdity in the telling of that story to lighten the mood, just a little, if you're paying attention. More importantly, the ridiculous, contorted expression on Max Payne's unmoving face destroys the serious tone of the opening cinematic. I couldn't hold it in; I had to laugh. In fact, that happened a lot throughout the game, not necessarily because it was meant to be funny but because the stuff happening on my screen was so insane.

The type of carnage that occurs throughout Max Payne is only a couple of steps beyond cartoon violence. There's a bit of blood spray and some flailing when the bad guys fall down, but that's it. They even stay in one piece when they're blown up with grenades, which makes it more hilarious than tragic when a thug tries to toss a grenade at you and ends up killing himself. I should also mention that Max Payne isn't the only one with a goofy face. All of this is due in part to the outdated graphical capabilities of the game, but the developers clearly weren't aiming for realism in any case. The only hint of realism throughout the entire experience is that the protagonist is by no means invincible. If you're playing for the first time, prepare to watch Max Payne die over and over again, sometimes from a single gunshot without any warning.

Part of what made the game interesting for me is that the main character, though certainly a bad ass, is pretty fragile for an action hero. I played through the game on the easiest difficulty setting (because the others are initially locked), and the game still killed me plenty of times. Unlike some other video game protagonists, Max Payne isn't exactly a bullet sponge... and unlike some other video game villains, the ones here aren't always terrible at shooting, so you won't be feeling so great if one of them manages to shoot first. You can fill up your health bar by finding painkillers and eating them like candy — another aspect of the game which is so absurdly unrealistic that it's hard to see it as anything but lighthearted humor — but the painkillers don't work instantaneously. If you start getting hit with bullets, and the guy who fired them isn't already dead, you're in big trouble, and you'll probably be watching your own slow-motion death before you can head for cover.

The reason Max can survive to the end of the game, taking down hundreds of heavily armed bad guys along the way, isn't because he's tougher. It's because of the advantages that you, as a player, have over the game — actual intelligence, the ability to quicksave and try again when you die, and the ability to know what's coming when you do so. The game is very scripted, so it's rather predictable. If you immediately die when you walk into a room because some thug with a shotgun was waiting or you on the left, you'll know to turn left the next time you enter that room. If you get blown up by a grenade that comes flying around the corner as you walk down a hallway, you know that the same grenade will be thrown in the same spot the next time around.

Since playing the game for the first time without dying over and over again is virtually impossible, you'll have to rely heavily on quicksaving. In some places, you'll only succeed through trial and error. You can always improve your reflexes and practice your aiming, but you'll win by knowing where the bad guys are and by turning to shoot them before they appear.

The player also has the ability to jump in slow motion, shooting in mid-air, and this is the game's big gimmick. Having trouble with a particular gun fight? Try using bullet time. While it certainly isn't the end-all game-winning move, as the slow-motion feature in F.E.A.R. was, it's still pretty useful. Then again, the game was designed around it, so it's really all but necessary if you don't want to be hopelessly outgunned. Like quicksaving, it's a crutch, but it's a crutch you'll probably need to lean on in order to beat the game. If you refuse to use those crutches, you'll be putting yourself through a lot of unnecessary punishment.

In any case, despite the occasional frustration, Max Payne was a pretty interesting experience. To be perfectly honest, I didn't expect to like it very much, for some of the game's most noticeable attributes are associated today with bad game design — the scripted enemy behavior, the excessive reliance on a single gameplay gimmick, and what might be called artificial difficulty (in the sense that the player will die frequently through no fault of his or her own and must rely on save scumming to progress). But the game is still fun, in its own way. Furthermore, while much of the game is a thoroughly tongue-in-cheek embrace of senseless ultra-violence, Max Payne is still known for its great writing.

The plot isn't the most imaginative, but the protagonist's monologues — though a bit too heavy on the metaphors — are very well done. They affect the mood and the atmosphere of the game in a way not often seen in shooters, and the neo-noir graphic-novel style storytelling makes the game truly unique.

Obviously, the game is pretty outdated now, so I'm not sure how strongly I should recommend it to the average player. You certainly won't see the beauty in this 2001 game's ugly graphics if you can't compare them to the uglier graphics of the late '90s and beyond. But I hope new and future fans of the series will keep returning to this game despite its visual shortcomings. The franchise is still alive with the past year's release of Max Payne 3, and it's always best to play an entire series in order rather than simply skipping to the newest game.

Then again, I haven't yet played either of the Max Payne sequels, and I honestly can't say whether the latest installment bears any resemblance to the original.

We're All Mass Murderers

One week ago, a guy in Connecticut went and killed 20 young children, 6 adults, and himself. If you've been anywhere but under a rock for the past seven days, you've heard all about it, so I won't elaborate. It's a tragedy.

Predictably, in an attempt to make sense of it all, the media and the politicians have come up with a list of scapegoats against which the government is now being pressured to take action. You probably see where I'm going with this. It's the usual list of suspects: gun control, school security, and violence in media — specifically, in video games.

I understand the need to throw the blame around. No one wants to admit that a catastrophe like this one is almost completely unavoidable, so we narrow down the enormous list of contributing factors to an arbitrary few which might, we think, be controlled; we don't even think about the uncontrollable factors because that's just too depressing. So we say, let's tighten security at public schools, and let's tighten restrictions on guns. No one wants to accept that such a mentally disturbed and suicidal person, hell bent on taking people with him when he dies, is going to find a way to do it — even if it's difficult to obtain a firearm, and even if it's not easy to get into the building.

Take a look at this particular shooting, for example. The guy forced his way into a school which had already taken every reasonable security measure. The doors were locked so he shot through a window to get in. Short of multiple armed guards at every entrance (a ridiculously infeasible solution), what were they missing? Metal detectors at the doors, a common placebo in a post-Columbine world, obviously don't help when someone comes in shooting everyone on sight. Maybe bullet-proof glass would have helped, but then he might have crashed his car through the doors, or used a bomb, or waited until the kids went outside for recess. The reality of the situation is that there's no way to make a school impenetrable.

Likewise, there's no realistic way to keep weapons out of the hands of dangerous people. We can try, but there's always going to be another tragedy that occurs despite whatever precautions we take. Bad people are going to get their hands on guns for as long as guns exist — which, by the way, is forever and always, because it's too late to stop them from being invented, manufactured, and sold to millions of people. I could go and steal a gun right now, from a legal gun owner, and kill a guy for no reason, and it will not have mattered what the gun laws were or how the gun's original owner obtained it.

So yeah, blame guns... but be aware that blaming guns only works if your solitary goal is to assign blame. If you actually want to get things done and solve problems, it's pointless. To use a classic (or perhaps trite but still valid) argument, even a total ban on guns would only disarm those civilians who obey the law, and murderers typically don't. Obviously, this is just an example to illustrate the futility of trying to place limits on something for which there's already a black market, and I'm aware that the goal here isn't to repeal the second amendment. Nobody whose opinion is worth a nickle actually wants to ban guns altogether, for then we'd truly be at the mercy of the thugs who still manage to get them. The sensible approach, anti-gun folks say, is to take a careful look at gun regulations and see if they need to be adjusted.

There's a lot of talk about smaller magazines, for example, but reloading isn't that hard, especially when the innocent children you're shooting aren't fighting back. In a perfect world, the ultimate goal of gun regulation would not be to make criminals kill us more slowly, but to keep guns only in the hands of law-abiding citizens. In reality, that's a pretty tough job. Everyone's a law-abiding citizen until his or her first crime, and if that first crime is mass murder then we're boned. If only real life were more like The Minority Report. If only we could know who the criminals are in advance and take away their rights accordingly. But there are some realistic precautions we can take. For example, perhaps the shooter's mother, from whom the guns were stolen, should not have been allowed to have firearms in the same house as a person who was known to be mentally ill. Although I suppose one doesn't always know when ones offspring is crazy enough to shoot up a school, dealing with mental health is probably a good place to start.

And that's what matters, really. The guy was crazy, and we might never know for sure why he did it. Yet, in looking for reason where none exists, politicians have been quick to point instead to a culture obsessed with violence — yes, the culture in which nearly all of us live healthy and functional lives without committing mass murder — and this, of course, is where video games are mentioned. After all, the shooter in Connecticut played video games, according to news reports. That's right, he played violent games, with guns in them, and that must have driven him to kill people... because, as we all know, that's a totally normal reaction to violent video games... and it's not like playing video games is totally normal behavior for an entire generation or two. (In case you missed the sarcasm, what I'm saying is that the killer's possession of violent video games is neither significant nor newsworthy, but that doesn't stop a bunch of technophobic old people from directing a large portion of the blame at the one thing they truly don't understand.)

I shouldn't need to point out that life-long exposure to war-themed, assassination-themed, murder-themed video games (and movies and books) has never given me any desire to kill a bunch of people in real life. But why not? Shouldn't I be going on a killing spree right now? I've killed so many virtual people in video games that, if they were real people, I'd be worse than Hitler. I'm a virtual mass murderer, just like everyone who ever played a first-person shooter. I grew up on shooting things. Even so, I turned out just fine, and I know a few million people who can say the same. Maybe it's because I know the difference between reality and fantasy. Maybe it's because I know the difference between right and wrong, even without the help of some religion to continually threaten me with the idea of eternal damnation. Maybe it's because I'm not mentally ill.

But hey, that doesn't really matter now; conservative politicians and sensationalist newscasters know that video games cause violence, because that's the only explanation for what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School, right? A crazy guy played video games, and therefore video games made him crazy? Well, that's what we're supposed to believe, but I don't. If someone is evil enough or crazy enough to actually murder 26 people, he certainly doesn't need to play video games in order to get the idea of using a gun as his instrument of death. Furthermore, it's fairly obvious that people who don't play video games are vastly overestimating a first-person shooter's ability to immerse the player. Contrary to what pundits and crackpot psychologists will claim, players are aware that it's only a game and, in the absence of some crippling mental deficiency, they won't be led to believe that really killing real people with a real gun is just as fun and harmless as competing against friends in some crazy deathmatch-style game with cartoon violence and infinite lives.

The shooter played video games just like every other 20-year-old guy I know. There are reports that he was obsessed with them — that he spent all day in his basement playing Call of Duty — but if he truly had a video game addiction (and if such a thing even exists), that's more likely a symptom of his mental illness than a contributing factor. Surely we should all recognize that the act of playing Call of Duty, one of the most popular video game series of the past few years, is not a warning sign that we should hope to use in order to predict school shootings. At least, I certainly hope not. Call of Duty: Black Ops sold 5.6 million copies worldwide in a single day, and 13.7 million copies to date in the United States alone.

That's a whole lot of potential school shootings. If video games create murderers, we should all be soiling our pants and heading for the bomb shelter. Fortunately, the available data doesn't really support the idea that violent video games cause violent acts. (Some further reading here.)

But I'm not too bothered by the blind insistence (regardless of the absence of any reliable evidence) that violence in media is destroying the moral fabric of our society. That's an opinion you're allowed to have, as far as I'm concerned, though I do strongly disagree. What really bothers me is that the people making these claims just don't know anything about video games. If they had pointed solely to the most gruesomely and graphically violent first-person shooters in their quest to find something to blame, then at least their arguments would be coherent. Instead, intentionally or not, the media is once again portraying all of gaming as an amoral pastime for misanthropes, while failing to realize that some of the most popular games of the past decade — I'm looking at you, Portal — simply aren't violent at all.

Things made some sense when they singled out Call of Duty, a game which does, in fact, put players in the role of a soldier who goes around shooting people (though, more accurately, the soldier shoots enemy soldiers in a time of war). But even if they hit the nail on the head, here, I think it was blind luck, since it's pretty clear that most of the people calling for a boycott or a ban on violent games can't even tell one genre from another. Immediately after the shooting, people were so quick to blame Mass Effect — a role-playing game better known for its sex scenes than its shooting — that a mob-like raid on the game's Facebook page began before the real killer was even identified (and ended shortly thereafter).

The media also pointed to StarCraft II, a real-time strategy game, and I think this is especially ridiculous. Not only is this not a mindless murder game; it's not even a shooter. As a strategy game, it's all about resource management, map control, and positioning of troops. Furthermore, StarCraft is to Chess as Call of Duty is to beating your head against the wall. You could judge StarCraft based on the number of virtual "people" who die in a typical match — surely, that number is well into the hundreds, or even thousands — but the player isn't assuming the role of a guy with a gun. The player is the commander telling all the guys with guns where to go. Since real-time strategy games like StarCraft don't put a gun in the player's hands, the experience absolutely does not bear any resemblance to walking into a school and murdering a bunch of children, not even to the sickest mind.

So yes, the game is violent in the sense that its central theme is armed conflict, but it's an idiotic example to use if you're trying to draw some tenuous connection between a mass murder and the killer's enjoyment of interactive media. To some, I guess, the presence of any violent theme is bad enough. But most of these "violent" games, I think, aren't simply violent for the sake of eroding our children's sense of morality. The typical video game has a story, every story involves some form of conflict, the most dramatic conflicts tend to be violent, and violent conflicts in the modern world begin and end with the pull of a trigger. Want fewer war-themed games? Let's have fewer wars. It's not that we should just give up and blame human nature, but we can't expect every video game to be full of super happy rainbows and sunshine either.

Video games consistently imitate life, so even if life does imitate video games on rare occasions, you can't say that video games are the source of all our problems. And, again, it's nothing if not completely illogical to blame video games for a mass murder just because the murderer was one of a billion people who play them. (I bet he also took history classes in high school, but I'm not blaming those history teachers and their lessons about war, because there's no real correlation, let alone any evidence of causation.) There isn't even a very good reason for the news people and the politicians to pick on video games, in particular, so much more than other forms of media that supposedly glorify violence. What about movies and TV shows?

You could say that video games are special because of the level of interactivity that's missing in other forms of entertainment, but I'm beginning to doubt very much that this has anything to do with it. No, video games are special because they're the "new" thing that too many people still don't understand. Fifteen or twenty years ago, they would have blamed rap music. Fifteen or twenty years before that, they would have blamed comic books.

But why does it matter what the news people think? It's not like they're actually going to persuade the federal government to ban violent video games. What they might do is try to keep violent video games out of the hands of minors, and if they want to do that, they can go right ahead. They've already been trying that for a long time, though. In theory, minors can't actually buy M-rated games from most stores, because these stores voluntarily enforce rules regarding the ESRB ratings, but most minors have these things called parents, and parents invariably buy video games for their children without even looking at the ratings.

If young, impressionable children playing violent games is indeed a problem, then irresponsible parents are the cause. They buy games like Grand Theft Auto for their 10-year-old kids, and then they turn around and complain when they see how violent the games are. If they educated themselves and paid attention to the ratings, there would be no complaints, because the video game industry is already holding up its own end of the deal. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised that parents ignore ratings, because most parents are old people, and when I say "old people" I'm not talking about age; I'm talking about the fact that they don't know what's going on because they didn't grow up playing video games. As a result, they think video games are just toys, exclusively for children. So they think every video game is appropriate for children, and they're shocked when they find out the truth.

And that's why we have this funny situation in which video games are, according to gaming-illiterate folks, appropriate for no one. If you're an adult and you play video games, they say "you're too old for that!" If you're a kid and you play video games, they say "you're too young for that!" What's the appropriate age?

I say it's any age. There's a video game for everyone.

I think the average adult's completely inadequate understanding of video games is the source of a lot of confusion. They see that Black Ops is the most popular game, so they assume that every game is like Black Ops. But this is just so far from the truth that I don't even know where to start. So I won't start. I'm not even going to waste my time suggesting a list of wholesome and non-violent games for old farts to play in order to broaden their understanding of video games both as an entertainment medium and as a form of artistic expression. They should sit down and find their own way like the rest of us did. It's not hard. All you have to do is look past the mainstream garbage for one second.

Until they do, I'm going to disregard everything they say. Honestly, would you listen to a guy's proposal for a ban on violence in movies if you found out he had never watched a movie in his entire life? Of course not. So why would you listen to a guy talk about violent video games when you know he's never played a video game? I wouldn't, and you really shouldn't.

---

Update: December 31, 2012

I haven't written anything new on this stupid blog for the past ten days, so instead I'll just post some additional reading here. Though I don't agree with everything contained within the following articles, I found them somewhat interesting:

Senator Calls for a Study of Video Game Violence
Violence and Video Games in America
The Numbers Behind Video Games and Gun Deaths in America
'Halo 4' Won't Make Your Kids Violent: Why Parents Should Play Video Games With Their Kids

(Wait a minute... why is the best gaming-related journalism coming from a site like Forbes?)