Looking back on 2012 from the early weeks of 2013, it can be seen that 2012 was a very interesting year for video game politics. From the drama of the Retake Mass Effect movement to a candidate for State Representative in Maine being attacked for playing World of Warcraft, issues relating to video games gained increasing importance in American politics. However, as 2012 came to a close, video games and their relationship with the public gained an even greater spotlight in the national media in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Figures as diverse as NRA Chairman Wayne LaPierre and Obama campaign advisor David Axelrod blamed violent video games for influencing Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza to commit his actions.
This is by no means a new phenomenon. Video games have been blamed for massacres at least as far back as the famous Noah Wilson murder case in 1997, where it was alleged that a teenage boy was murdered by a friend who was imitating a character from Mortal Kombat. In fact, Florida-based attorney Jack Thompson rose to national prominence due to his anti-video game crusade in the late 1990’s and early 2000s, and powerful political figures like Hillary Clinton have been attempting legislation regulating video games for years. With such mainstream and bipartisan support for the issue, it may be a surprise to many that the allegations about video games causing violence are not true at all.
Supporters of video game regulation often point to studies such as the 2008 study of more than 1500 youths in the United States and Japan undertaken by the scholarly journal Pediatrics. The study found that “Children and teenagers who play violent video games show increased physical aggression…” This research is also supported by other studies, including ones conducted in 2006 at Indiana University and another in 2010 by the American Psychological Association. Additionally, the fact that many of the perpetrators of recent mass shootings including Adam Lanza, Anders Behring Brevik, Seung-Hui Cho, and even Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were all video gamers seems to support this data. However, according to psychologists Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson, these studies are misleading.
In their 2008 book, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth about Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do, Kutner and Olson argue that research in this area is heavily disputed and flawed. The studies which claim to display the connection between video games and violence are unclear as to what constitutes “aggressive behavior,” and they also tend to confuse long-term and short term psychological effects. The measures of aggression used in these surveys are poorly validated and do not correlate with violent acts such as assault or shootings. As Kutner commented in an April 16th, 2008 X-Play interview about the book, "You'll sometimes see kids coming out of an action movie making kung fu moves against one another, but that doesn't mean they're going to do that against the sweet little old lady down the street." Kutner and Olson then go on to point out that the vast majority of video gamers are obviously not killers, and that crime rates have actually gone down since the 1980’s, the same time period in which video games have become popular. Additionally, the research doesn’t so much as suggest that violent video games increase aggression, but rather that aggressive people are attracted to violent video games, which explains the shooters’ connections to the games. Advocates of video game regulation also tend to overlook famous video gamers who are not serial killers, including the actresses Felicia Day and Mila Kunis and the writer Terry Pratchett.
Kutner and Olson suggest that the reason behind such anti-video game hysteria tends to be that although around 70% of American households have video games, much of the electorate tends to be unaware about the content in video games, thus allowing politicians to take advantage of this and use video games as a scapegoat whenever a mass shooting occurs. An emotional public searching for answers as to why these events happen laps this rhetoric up.
Additional studies, such as those undertaken in 2009 by Texas A&M International University, in 2008 by the University of Essex, and in 2010 by Yale, seem to also contradict Pediatrics’ and the other studies’ findings. Henry Jenkins, former director of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, points out that part of the reason this area is so difficult to study is because of the fact that the studies treat the games as though they are not an art form. “In these studies, media images are removed from any narrative context. Subjects are asked to engage with content that they would not normally consume and may not understand. Finally, the laboratory context is radically different from the environments where games would normally be played,” Jenkins comments in a PBS article.
This suggests that the researchers who conduct these studies, and by extension the politicians and activists who gobble them up, view gaming as having no artistic merit. Many seem to believe that these games are simply “shoot-em-up” orgies of blood, devoid of any plot or themes. The fact that violent games such as Bioshock, the Elder Scrolls series, and the aforementioned Mass Effect series have received literary criticism and evaluation seems to be lost on advocates of video game regulation. In this sense, Kutner and Olson point out, the issue of video game regulation can be viewed as similar to other attempts at media censorship throughout history, from Anthony Comstock’s crusades against “obscene” novels in the Guilded Age, to the Comics Code of the 1950’s. While modern anti-video game activists may claim otherwise, all of these moral panics were directed at nonexistent threats to America’s livelihood, and they all tended to reduce the media they targeted to mindless provocative material promoting sex and violence, discounting many of the important philosophical themes discussed in these art forms.
Sadly, the anti-video game crusade seems to even reach into America’s highest corridors of power, with Vice President Joe Biden meeting with high level executives of the Entertainment Software Association on January 11th, 2013 to discuss what most commentators believe to be video game regulating legislation. If this claim is true, then the Obama Administration will be taking a step backwards. It will be joining the ranks of the censors and denying that a medium which was recently profiled at the Smithsonian for its artistic value is even an art form, all based on faulty data. And, this is not just the opinion of a few wayward psychologists and nutty gamers; in the landmark 2011 case Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the United States Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2 that legislation censoring video games is unconstitutional. As such, if Biden really is pursuing this legislation, then not only would he be committing an act of censorship, it would also be violating the Constitution. For the problems of today, politicians and activists should not be engaging in mindless scapegoating. No, they should look for the actual causes of crime and shootings, rather than blaming the innocent and valuable artistic medium of video games.
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