Our fair little hobby has been the subject of constant scrutiny throughout its lifespan. From the ghastly Columbine massacre incident which sparked concerns over PC blast-em-up ‘Doom’ to the belief that the game ‘Manhunt’ had inspired the murder of a teenager in London, there has always been a swirling tornado of controversy surrounding games and gaming. The latest of these involves the English county of Cheshire, where 16 schools have informed parents that they will be reported to the police and prosecuted for neglect if they allow their children to play games intended for adults, games like (you guessed it) Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto.
I think in the future, the demonization of video games will be one of those things that we collectively look back on as a society and laugh about. It seems silly to me now that back in the ‘70s and ‘80s there were people who were concerned that the table-top RPG ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ was poisoning the minds of their children. This all stemmed from the suicide of a young man named ‘James Dallas Egbert.’ He killed himself and he played D&D, so the media put the two together and that became the accepted reasoning. Does that sound familiar? It should, because that’s what happens every time a kid walks into a public building and shoots everybody after playing a bit of Xbox. Go back further to the late 19th century and parents were concerned that kids who read too much were actually mentally ill. They were locked away in asylums….for reading too much! Imagine that today. I bet most parents would love for their kids to stay at home and read all weekend. Or at least hang around in the house, dressed as a Wizard, rolling dice. Unfortunately, people need something to fear and perhaps more importantly, something to blame when their kids turn into little shits. Video games are a convenient whipping boy for the uneducated masses.
Having said that (and while I stand by my above opinion) there’s something that everyone seems to be overlooking in this debate. Perhaps it’s because you barely notice the subtle changes in things when you see them every day, but games are no longer just games and the games of my childhood are not the games of my adulthood. The very word ‘game’ implies, whether we like it or not, child-like behaviour. Playing is something that kids do. Adults do it too, but it is almost frowned upon in our society which respects stoicism so very much. For adults to enjoy playing is almost seen as being neglectful of our duties (or some such bullshit.) But we do enjoy it and the statistics back it up.
The stuff I play today is, on the whole, quite mature. As I’ve got older, my need to be intellectually and emotionally challenged by the video games I play has evolved in tandem with the industry’s ability to provide those kinds of experiences for me. I remember playing ‘Streets of Rage’ on my Sega Megadrive and thinking that it was incredibly violent and grown-up that you could fight people with baseball bats and glass bottles. But there was never any question of the motive behind the man who smashes someone over the head with a glass bottle. They were baddies and they wanted to hurt you. You were a good guy and you had to kill them. But perhaps if the game had shown a character enjoying the sadism of hurting someone with a glass bottle, would I have been old enough to process that and understand it on an emotional level? I honestly don’t think I would have.
This brings me nicely to my point. We can’t keep treating games as though they are the same as films or music or even the same as any other game. This medium is so incredibly diverse that simply stating that “violent games are bad and we’ll snitch on you if you let your kids see them” makes about as much sense as telling people that “knives are sharp, so if you let your kids make a cheese sandwich we’ll arrest you.” Some games are incredibly realistic simulations, such as any number of driving/racing games. Grand Theft Auto is not a realistic simulation of anything and anyone who spends five minutes playing it could tell you this. That’s not to say that we should simply let our kids play GTA, because we shouldn’t.
However, instead of scrutinizing the game, we should be scrutinizing the kids. We should be asking the children if they understand why Trevor is beating the shit out of someone with a wrench. Do they understand that he is clearly mentally ill? Do they understand that this lack of mental faculty has a negative implication, that it makes him another kind of bad guy, that the fact that he’s ok with doing it means that we shouldn’t be ok with him? If the kids are grasping these concepts then by playing these games they have learned valuable life lessons. I suppose the overarching moral here is that these games have intellectual merit, even the ones which seem to be dressed-up torture-porn and by denying our kids a chance to experience an emerging art form we are doing them a great disservice. A disservice which is almost as bad as not ensuring that they have a thorough and safe understanding of the concepts presented in that art form.