Violence in Video Games - Essay Example

Violence in Video Games To kickoff the discussion, the historical significance of video games may be traced back to the year 1948 when the idea of the video game was patented by Thomas Goldsmith and Estle Mann. Ten years later, William Higginbotham’s Tennis for Two became the first known video game that was put on display to the general public, but it was only in the year 1972 that the Magnavox Odyssey became available as the initial consumer video game console. None of the early games that existed during the 1970’s and in the mid 1980’s could be regarded as “violent” because even if the video game depicted violence (such as the Atari boxing game), the game was unrealistic and much tilted away from the real experience of the activity. ‘Boxing’ involved tiny “men” with square limbs who fought one another through a series of repetitive movements. (History, 2007) The world of present times has witnessed a change – for the worse. Our young ones have been enticed into a world of their own, one which is filled with terror and brutalities. To put it in a meticulous manner, the violence ‘imparted’ through the video games is just too much to handle and it is about time an end to this epidemic has to be discerned, for a better and prosperous tomorrow. Today for a gamer, video games resemble mere dots on a screen. By the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, personal computers were becoming much more powerful and with the introduction of the Nintendo Entertainment System, to some extent more realistic games started to make their mark. The characters in the games began to take on more “human” (physical) attributes; they actually looked human so to speak. In the light of an understanding which is reached between the ethical norms of video games and the people at the helm of affairs calling the shots, in recent years there have been many attempts to either censor video games or to limit access to them by children and young audiences. (Outlaw, 2007) Some have even linked violent video games to a greater propensity for murder. (CBS, 2005) Thus the difference between video game simulation and actual reality began its long progress to the current situation in which some of the most advanced video game systems, such as the Playstation 3, have high definition graphics that approach the point at which the characters being controlled by the gamer could be mistaken for real human beings in a film. As video games developed during the 1970’s and 80’s and then literally exploded in the 1990’s, different genres of video games started to appear. While gamers often disagree on which category individual games ought to be placed in, there are several main types into which most games clearly fit. There are Action, Fighting, Racing, Role-Playing (RPG), Strategy, Sports and Shooting games to name a few. Many of these have some ingredients of violence involved embedded within them and this has caused much of the controversy surrounding the video game market and the related regimes. When one speaks of the relevant industry leaders, Nintendo, PlayStation and more recently the X-Box consoles take the lead in reaching their specific target markets. The customers usually have a choice of buying a single game for whatever console they happen to have. Competition among the three major players in the gaming industry: Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony have spurred innovation and advancement, bringing about much more complex and realistic games that appeal to a wide range of the population. Currently the dominant age-group for game-playing is young males under the age of twenty years, although many of them seem to carry on playing games well into their adulthood as the sales of both new systems and games to the 20-40 age-group is on the rise. The video game industry can undoubtedly be described as one of the major, if not the most significant form of entertainment at present in the Western world in general, and within USA in particular. Coming to the quarters of the emergence of violence within the video games’ arena, one finds that the development of such (violent) video games has become increasingly complex, realistic and imaginative in terms of the types of aggression and brutality being presented to the target audiences. Early “shoot-em-up” games involved fairly simple plot lines in which the player would merely shoot at everything he (and seldom she) saw in front of him, somewhat similar to the type of shooting that occurs in an amusement arcade. However, as computers and increasingly dedicated game consoles, became increasingly complex and more powerful, so did the games started to expand in terms of their range of activities which were available towards the characters and the type of violence they would indulge in. Role-playing and strategy games started to be mixed with the more violent ‘killing’ games in order to create complex worlds in which violence, while often extreme, would be a part of a sophisticated, remarkably realistic world. Thus one of the most famous, and criticized video games, the Grand Theft Auto series has opportunities for a wide variety of violence from ordinary shooting to beating up, to torture to sexual violence, but all is placed within a complex plot-line to state the least. Such is the negative effect of video games that it could be documented in the statement of the ‘killer’ as "life is like a video game, sometimes you’re gonna die," thus suggesting that the value of life is close to zilch. This is not only mind-boggling but also asserts the fact that the kids have got it all wrong! The CBS News article also points to the fact that such violent regimes within kids can actually lead to their becoming murderers since their behavioral psychology is tuned in such a manner that it does not find solace until the acts of video games are translated in real life. The article in essence brings to light the issues that the child might face in times of violent upsurge and as to how this could lead to mass killings, especially within schools and college campuses. In the recent times, this meticulous trend has been on the rise. On the same token, violence is recognizably relevant to today’s society – the gamer can play a role that in which he could conceivably go out and mimic within the real world. Some violent games involve fantasy-playing in which the character moves within an imaginary world, perhaps related to a fictional environment (such as the Middle Ages in The Lord of the Rings) or puts them in the position of a non-human creature or on some occasions even in the form of an animal. An example of this is Jaws: The Revenge in which the gamer plays the role of the shark rather than of a character trying to kill it as might have been expected. As the shark, the gamer dwells in a strange underwater world in which it needs to eat fish to keep going, it can attack people, boats and other animals for a reason (as part of the plot) or for no reason in entirety. Thus one section of the game involves what is termed “free swimming” in which the player can swim around the ocean and attack people, slowly ripping them into pieces or swallowing them whole if they so choose. The aspect of violence has thus moved on to simulations ever since. Subsequently video games have become increasingly violent, and now offer a whole range of simulated violence that would assuage the most developed imagination possible and yet they set that violence within a complex environment in which quite a lot of thought is often the requirement of the day. Criticism has been centered with respect to violent video games since the time there have been age-old (but resurgent) attempts courtesy the various groups and individuals to examine different forms of entertainment and to censor them when they are considered as unethical, in either a normative or applied sense. But as Kristin Kalning suggests, researchers have shown that those areas of the brain that are responsible for emotional arousal, including violent tendencies, are aroused while playing violent video games. (Kalning, 2007) Reinberg offers similar findings within research studies so as to form a link here. (Reinberg, 2007) The people who criticize video game violence from a purely normative to a purely applied form find a continuum between the two. The idea that video game violence is an absolute wrong as it coarsens society in general and makes young people desensitized to violence is perhaps epitomized by the organization called MAVAV (standing for Mothers Against Videogame Addiction and Violence in Underground Video Game Cultures). On its website MAVA paints an alarming picture, comparing video game addiction and addiction to violent videogame in particular as “comparable even to drug and alcohol abuse” and accuses the videogame industry of marketing and promoting “hatred, racism and the most disturbing trend: clans and guilds, an underground video game phenomenon which closely resembles gangs”. While obviously well-intentioned, those who take an absolute normative stance against video game violence often seem to descend into a form of unintentional self-parody that is rather amusing for someone not involved in the group. Thus on the homepage of the MAVAV website the organization informs the reader about “gamer plays 28 hours straight to Beat the Burning Crusade First”. (MAVAV, 2007) This article states that a 24 year-old French gamer “by the alias of Gawell played 28 frightening hours straight to beat the Burning Crusade expansion pack, a video game which experts predicted would take months to complete”. (MAVAV, 2007) In all apparent seriousness, MAVAV announces that they have “previously raised the threat level to red in preparation of the possible dangers, such as this, from the Burning Crusade expansion pack”. (MAVAV, 2007) This kind of criticism of video game violence seems to actually be a reflection of a much wider and deeper mistrust of modern society within the members of the organization. The idea of having a “threat level” for new videogame releases attempts to put videogame violence within the same category as terrorist violence with its constantly changing threat levels and brutality scales. As with terrorist violence, it is the “threat” of violence that seems to worry MAVAV more than its actuality. As is the case with most ethical arguments however, most of those who are opposed to video game violence claim to be so because of the supposedly damaging affect upon the gamer as well as the society that he lives within. This applied ethical point of view is that video games desensitize the players to violence and/or make them more likely to commit violence in real life. There are many varied and often contradictory explanations for the supposedly harmful effects of violence videogames propounded by these critics. For example, one segment of the critics seems to consider that videogames in general and violent videogames in particular are “bad” because they take the person away from “real” life to live out their fantasies. Thus the makers of the multiplayer online game World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment) are criticized for making a game so complicated and difficult that it will take “nearly several months of a player’s life to complete” (MAVAV). But the same critics suggest that these games will make the children and teenagers who play them more violent in real life and would impact their personalities negatively. There is a contradiction here: how can a person find time for gang activity and/or other acts of violence if they are spending virtually every waking moment not at school or work playing video games? Again, most of the critics lack the academic credentials and/or the neutrality and a general sense to examine the causal relationship between videogame violence and actual violence. This causal relationship is necessary if the person is attempting to condemn violent video games based upon an applied ethical, rather than a normative ethical standpoint. To be fair to those opposed to video game violence, there are cases in which acts of violence have been committed that seem linked to video games, but in a sense that actually discounts a causal link. For example, the Columbine High School killings of 12 students and 1 teacher were committed by two young men who had played thousands of hours of a first-person shooter video game that had been modified to have the same lay-out as their high school. But of more relevance were the dozens of hours the two teenagers spent practicing shooting with real guns in the forests of Colorado. In this case, as with many others, it seems as though video games were used to practice violent acts which the perpetrators were already planning to carry out. (Columbine, 1999) They were useful dry-run for the murders rather than a causal agent. In fact this case may suggest, in a bizarre sense, that the conditioning offered by videogames can actually limit the potential number of killings. Thus when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold actually started shooting people, they stopped within a few minutes when they could have actually killed hundreds. The reason that they stopped is unclear, but it may have been because the killings were not similar to the clean, clinical and bloodless killings of the videogames. Harris and Klebold may have been conditioned for videogame killing, but not actual killing. (Columbine, 1999) Concern about videogames is merely present at the end of a long line of supposedly seductive and corrupting influence upon youth that starts with Socrates being forced to commit suicide for teaching young men dangerous ideas, and moves through books, theatre, paintings, photography, film and so on to the computer revolution. Strasburger suggests that the ethical arguments against videogames are, at least in part, based upon the fact that constant exposure to violence can condition children, at least partially, towards the desensitization in the ranks of violence. As he further suggests, there is a long distance between this fact and proving a causal link between videogame violence and actually committing a violent act. The gap between thinking about something and doing it is thankfully still quite vast. It is a paradoxical but undeniable fact that the more violent a videogame is, the more complex is its structure and thus greater strategic skills are needed to complete it. “Violence” in this sense does not correlate with a simplistic calculation of the number of violent acts in the game: by this token a Tom and Jerry cartoon would be the most violent form of film available, but rather the sophistication, realism and impact of the violent episodes. Steven Johnson argues that the most violent games are actually those which best teach skills that are needed in the real world. The violent, complex adult games require a sophisticated, analytical mind in order to complete them. The fact that the strategy guide for Grand Theft Auto III is 53,000 words long and that “learning the boundaries, goals and controls of a given game is a highly demanding one that calls on many different areas of cognitive function.” While this might be considered doubtful by some, a recent study involving both gamers and non-gamers suggests that visual acuity and selective attention are actually improved by playing videogames. (Green, 2006) As Green suggests, “action-video gaming is capable of altering a range of visual skills” and all of these alterations were considerable improvements from the skills of the non-game players. Specifically, game-players exhibited more than 20% increase in attention span over non-game players on a series of tests. The videogames that these players had been playing for usually one hour a day for at least a month before the tests included Grand Theft Auto 3 and Counter-Strike, two videogames regarded as being the most violent and thus criticized by those seeking to censor them. The causal link being identified here is not in terms of violence and increased visual ability, rather between the concentration required for the game and visual complications that the brain must process in the course of the game. However, the “fight or flight” elements of the brain suggest that adding an element of violence (and thus potential ‘death’) to the videogame leads to higher rates of involvement and concentration within the game environment. Essentially, the more violent a game is, the more likely a player is to become highly involved within it. This is an applied ethical point of view regarding videogames in general, and violent videogames in meticulous. Improving visual and cognitive skills within individuals, especially at a young age is a desired outcome. In one test that Green undertook with players there was a more than 60% difference in accuracy between gamers and non-gamers: 80% correct versus 20% correct. Such a massive difference suggests that not only are the existing skills being improved but perhaps brand new types of visual acuity and skills are being created by the videogame manufacturers. A peaceful, happy videogame that occurs in a world in which all the characters live joyfully together will hardly make for a very interesting gaming experience. But as Jennifer Wolf (2007) suggests, “choosing age-appropriate video games for your children is an extremely important step in preventing your family’s exposure to strong, graphic violence and mature themes.” The simulation of violence may also act as a type of therapy that enables a person to live through violence without actually having to commit a violent act. Thus a simulated piece of violence within a videogame will act as a deterrent to actual violence rather than an encouragement for it. (Anderson, 2003) The theory that simulated violence may act as a block to actual violence is controversial but may be related to the behavior of many different societies and even animals in essence. Videogames may be the ritualized combat of the Twenty-First Century if seen in the broader contexts. In the context of the ethical constructs drawn in line with the whole discussion, an aspect that comes to the rescue of supporting the violent videogames could be remarked as both normative as well as applied in terms of nature. This revolves around the idea that freedom of expression is central to all other freedoms that are enjoyed within a free and democratic society. There is a reason that the first amendment to the US Constitution is the one which guarantees freedom of speech. Majority of people may well find violent videogames objectionable and parents have the right to stop their children from playing them, or to even stop them from playing any videogames at all for that matter. But the right to stop such games cannot extend to the supposed right to stop others from enjoying these games as they see fit. Applied ethics suggests the “slippery slope” doctrine here. Thus violent computer games are ethically acceptable because they are a part of a society in which all forms of human activity and expression are regarded as correct unless they are specifically harmful to others. The ethical correctness of the activity is found within the fact that it exists and is allowed in literal terms. A diversity of views and activities guards against the abdication of expression to the totalitarian few. As Anderson (2003) suggests, a lot of research still needs to be done on the effect of video games upon people, both violent and otherwise. Thus in the end, it would be befitting to state here that the video game culture has to be brought under serious litigations and the rule of law has to play its active part in making one and all comprehend the negatives attached with this peril. If proper measures are not enacted in due course of time, the young ones would resort to crimes and terror-related antics right from the very beginning. The need of the hour is to realize our responsibility and instill a sense of empathy and understanding within our own selves, get out of our shells and explore the realities that seem to embody our lives. We ought to make a move for the better since there must be some light at the end of the tunnel. Works Cited Anderson, Craig. “Violent Video Games: Myths, Facts and Unanswered Questions”. http://www.apa.org/science/psa/sb-anderson.html “Can a Video Game Lead to Murder?”. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/03/04 DSilva, Roy. “The History of Video Games” http://www.buzzle.com/articles/history-of-video-games.html “Europe to ban sales of violent video games to kids”. http://www.outlawnews.com. Hess, Monica. “Little Bang Theory of Violence: It All Begins With a Toy Gun”. http://news.propeller.com/story/2007/11/11 Kalning, Kristin. “Doe game violence make teens aggressive?” http://www.msnbc.com/id/16099971 Reinberg, Steven. “Video game violence goes straight to kids’ heads.” http://www.livescience.com/healthday/536261.html Wolf, Jennifer. “Safe Video Games for Kids”. http://singleparents.about.com/od/settinglimits/tp/Safe_Video_Games.htm. http://www.mavav.org Davelier, Daphney and Green, Sean. “Action Video Games Increase Vision Twenty Percent” http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=2764 Lineberger, Robert. “Video Game Violence and Confederate Gender: Effects on Reward and Punishment Given by College Males”. Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, 1999 Cicchirillo, Vincent. “Effects of Affective Orientation and Video Game Play on Aggressive Thoughts and Behaviors”. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Vol. 49, 2005 Lachlan, Ken. “Popular Video Games: Quantifying the Presentation of Violence and Its Context”. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Vol. 47, 2003 Word Count: 3,356 Read More