(Originally posted for The Voice of Heard on December 21, 2012)
Yesterday, I read a
Gamespot article about Senator Jay Rockefeller introducing a bill that
would call the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to study the violent effects
of video games on children, an area in which numerous studies have been done in
the past that are either poorly designed or show no correlation between violent
video games and aggression. This came in the wake of the recent shooting
in Newtown, Connecticut, which raises some serious questions. What does
children’s exposure to video games, violent and otherwise, have to do with
the actions done by the mentally unstable man responsible? Professional studies
and works like Grand Theft Childhood by Lawrence Kutner and
Cheryl K. Olson have consistently found no link to playing video games and
psychological instability. Yet, there are still a few politicians pressing
for more studies to find a link between the two, which I consider to be a
waste of time and money.
As if another call for researching video game violence wasn’t
enough, the vice president of the National Rifle Association (NRA),
one of the most influential firearms lobbying groups in America, also blamed
violent video games for the shooting, according
to today’s Gamespot article. He even went as far as labeling the video game
industry “a callous, corrupt, and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and
sows, violence against its own people…that is caught up with the music and film
industries] in a race to the bottom…[a competition] to shock, violate, and
offend every standard of civilized society.” As a gamer and a member of the
video game community, I find those remarks to be insulting; they make
Craig Anderson’s biased research conclusions seem polite. Granted, there are
some business issues within the video game industry that the gaming community
is struggling to deal with, such as the used games market, the rapidly
increasing use of downloadable content (DLC), relying on dated business models
to manufacture and sell games, and the recent questionable ways in which Capcom
and Ninja Theory have been advertising DmC: Devil May Cry, a
game produced by the former and developed by the latter set to be released in
January (which I will be covering in a future entry). But given
the research bill proposal and the remarks by the vice president
of the NRA in the wake of a widely reported, and undeniably
horrific, shooting that took place at an elementary school in which 20
children and 6 teachers were killed by a mentally unstable gunman, this is
scapegoating of video games, violent and otherwise, taken to an unprecedented
extreme. I know a good number of people who enjoy playing video games and know
the difference between fantasy violence and real-life violence. I am also
certain they have families and that they find the overall incident appalling. I
have autism, a social communication disorder that affects how I interact in
society, but that does not make me any more prone to being desensitized by
video game violence than a normal person. I don’t know how to protest against
this scapegoating since all I can do right now is stick to my routine of
playing video games. This, at least, informs whoever reads this as to who I am
as a human being who also cringes at the thought of children dying at the hands
of someone as depraved as the gunman of Newtown, Connecticut.
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