Video Games: What Every Parent Should Know
By Marty Toohey
WASHINGTON, Nov. 21, 2002–Today is the biggest shopping day of the year, and between now and Christmas, thousands of parents will buy their children violent video games, unaware of a simple fact:
The U.S. military, history’s most efficient killing force, uses commercial games like the enormously popular first-person shooter Doom to train soldiers to unhesitatingly pull the trigger in wartime. They call them “multipurpose arcade combat simulators.”
But those games are used in conjunction with a whole range of training methods, including ones teaching restraint, so that fact alone doesn’t link violent video games and violent behavior. Or does it? Many experts link violent video games with violent behavior, while others say there’s no link at all. The evidence is inconclusive and open for interpretation.
So what’s a parent to think?
Retired Col. David Grossman, formerly an Army Ranger and West Point psychology professor, says that violent video games, particularly arcade-style shooters with plastic guns, don’t give children the desire to kill. But he says they give them the ability, just like military training, by imparting motor skills and conditioning to overcome natural inhibitions.
“Remember, these people are the professionals…and these games are good enough for them,” Grossman said of the military. “Certainly, not every kid who plays violent video games will become a killer, but the risk is unacceptable.”
His stance is mirrored by the American Medical Association and other public health groups but is questioned by many behavioral scientists and media critics. The common rebuttal, and one arrived at by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), is that yes, studies show that children who play violent video games exhibit more aggressive behavior. But those studies haven’t established a cause-and-effect relationship. It could simply be that aggressive kids choose violent video games, or that any activity that stimulates children can make them more aggressive. There’s also disagreement about whether laboratory aggression translates to real-world violence.
Video games are an $8 billion-a-year industry that is mostly self-regulated. In 1994 the industry established an independent agency to rate games for content, and even Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who holds an annual ceremony lambasting lowbrow forms of media, calls it the best rating system in the entertainment industry.
Not all video games are violent: 90 percent of games are rated acceptable for everyone.
But the ratings are advisory only and often moot in arcades, where most parents don’t accompany their children.
Industry statistics show that 90 percent of households with children have video game systems. Children in those households play the games an average of 10 hours a week. This year, almost half of all parents expect to give a video game as a present.
THE PERFECT RATING
Joanna Dark strides through the laboratory halls and past the bodies of guards she’s gunned down, her path illuminated by the flickering overhead lights, her echoing footsteps the only sound.
Dark, star character of the video game Perfect Dark, is controlled by a human player seeing through her eyes and down the barrel of her assault pistol. She can’t find anyone left alive; she’s killed even the harmless scientists. Blood from victims is splattered on the walls.
But she hasn’t found the data chip she’s looking for. It’s very frustrating.
As she retraces her steps, Dark pauses over the crumpled body of one of the scientists, aims and blows an extra hole in his skull.
As blood pools around the scientist’s head, a hail of unseen gunfire rips into Dark. The control pad convulses and a curtain of blood drops across the screen.
These scenes litter Perfect Dark, and Sonny, a 12-year-old in Eugene, Ore., said he and his friends used to play the game fairly often. Perfect Dark, one of the top-selling Nintendo games of 2000, and Half Life, a similar personal computer game from 1999, are rated M, meaning they may contain content unsuitable for children younger than 18.
Yet Sonny has downloaded Half Life variants online, and his friend traded with a schoolmate for Perfect Dark. He also could have purchased it in many stores around the country.
IT’S UP TO YOU …
Video game ratings are advisory only, meaning a store can sell any game to anyone, regardless of age or game content.
“We’re giving guidelines for parents,” said Doug Lowenstein, president of the Interactive Digital Software Association, which represents the video game industry. “What we’re saying is, ‘This game may be unacceptable for children under 17.’ ”
Despite no proven cause-and-effect link between violent video games and violent behavior, the industry wanted “to give parents the tools to make their own decisions about what to buy their children,” Lowenstein said.
In the early 1990s, the industry identified adults as a potentially lucrative market and began producing edgier games. But it wasn’t always clear which games were designed for adults; in response to public pressure, the industry created the Entertainment Software Rating Board in 1994. The average age of video game players is now 28, according to industry statistics.
The board used movie ratings as a model, but parallels must be drawn carefully; video game content is not always analogous to movie content. A video game rating of M does not equal an NC-17 movie rating.
The video industry says it’s spending more than $1 million annually on public service advertising. Towering images of Tiger Woods are currently appearing in movie theaters around the country, urging parents to check the ratings.
“We definitely have a responsibility to ensure parents know what they’re buying,” Lowenstein said. “But let’s not forget that 82 percent of parents,” according to the FTC, “are involved in the purchase or rental of games. So this notion that millions of 12-year-olds are out buying violent games without any supervision is just one of those great myths of game retailing.”
Lowenstein continued: “There’s nothing mysterious about picking up a game like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and seeing an M rating on the box and descriptions on the back,” which include warnings for blood and gore, violence, strong language and strong sexual content. “Those make it awfully hard for a parent to look at a game later and say, ‘I didn’t realize.’”
Industry research concluded that randomly sampled parents find the rating system both adequate and user-friendly, but an American Academy of Pediatrics study found that 90 percent of parents don’t check the ratings on video games their children wish to buy.
Virginia, Sonny’s mother, is among that 90 percent of parents. She keeps a close eye on what games Sonny plays, but that it’s tough sometimes, because he can play them at friends’ houses or over the Internet when she’s not around.
“I just don’t see anything good coming from playing those violent games,” she said.
TARGET MARKETING
In 1999, following the spree of school shootings around the country, the FTC found that the video game industry actively marketed violent games to children like Sonny.
In the following months, the industry created the Advertising Review Council, which works with the rating board and is empowered to penalize companies on behalf of the industry. It has decreed that video game companies should not advertise M-rated games in magazines where 45 percent or more readers are younger than 18, or on television shows where 35 percent are younger than 18.
Although violations aren’t common, the council can levy penalties ranging from a simple fine to refusing to rate future games produced by the offending company, which would damage the company’s reputation.
Still, the FTC and the video game industry don’t always see eye to eye. The FTC makes it known occasionally that it would like to see advertising that children could potentially see cut back even further.
But “there is no [law] that establishes what percentage of readership will make a publication suitable to advertise in,” Lowenstein said. “More than half of the readers of these magazines are adults, and they’re seeing an advertisement for a product that is perfectly legal.”
IN STORES NOW
Grossman says government should make the product illegal, at least for children. Like cigarettes, alcohol and pornography, he says violent video games are only acceptable for adults. He also argues that First Amendment rights didn’t extend to items like “The Assassin’s Handbook,” and shouldn’t apply to violent video games, either.
Lowenstein disputed this, saying: “If they start censoring video games, where will they stop?”
Many stores, like Circuit City, order their retailers not to sell video games to children younger than the age recommendation, and Lowenstein said the industry supports their efforts.
The FTC said stores frequently sell games to children who don’t meet the age recommendation, but that industry efforts are resulting in less of these sales.
Connecticut Gov. John Rowland vetoed a bill in 2001 that would have prohibited arcades from letting children play shooter-style games, saying, “I believe that violence in our society is a real problem that deserves meaningful answers, not new feel-good laws that are impossible to enforce.”
The American Medical Association (AMA) advocates increasing public debate about violent video games, but said censorship isn’t the answer.
DEBATING THE EFFECTS
Virginia, Sonny’s mother, had this to say about violent video games:
“When the boys play video games for a length of time that’s overboard, they get kinda snappy and grumpy, and it just seems like it escalates to a lot of hitting and aggression.
“But,” she continued, “I can’t really prove if it’s the games or just too much of the games.”
That’s the ongoing argument in a nutshell.
Here’s a snapshot of opinions:
In 2000, the AMA and several other public health groups said violent media, including video games, can lead children to aggressive behavior, desensitization to violence, nightmares and fear of being harmed.
Dina Borzekowski, a Johns Hopkins University professor who studies the relationship between media, children and violence, said that even without a proven cause-effect relationship, the research correlating aggressive behavior and violent video games should give parents pause.
“Given that there is a proven association, why buy them?” she said.
But other experts disagree.
The high-profile Canadian psychologist Jonathan Freedman has been called “the anti-Grossman” because of his contention that violent video games do not cause violent behavior. But Freedman, who is highly respected in many circles, has also had his credibility questioned because the Motion Picture Association of America, an entertainment industry lobbyist group, funds him.
Experts outside industry payrolls also dispute Grossman’s theories. Vaughn Rickert, president-elect of the Society for Adolescent Medicine, said people certainly can be conditioned to commit violent behavior, but also called Grossman’s cause-effect thinking too simplistic and “speculation at best.”
“It’s too big a leap for me,” Rickert said. “There are too many other variables involved.”
Author Douglas Rushkoff, who has studied and written extensively on media’s impact on society, also said a cause-and-effect assessment is too simplistic.
“Of course parents should be involved in their children’s media choices – particularly children under the age of 13,” Rushkoff said. “But…young people understand the difference between play and reality.”
Several studies, including one by the U.S. surgeon general in 2001 and another by the Australian government in 1999, found that evidence linking violent video games and violent behavior is minimal at best.
Army spokesman Ryan Yantis also disputed Grossman’s line of thinking, particularly the assertion that soldiers are conditioned to kill.
“Our simulators train our marksmen to become better marksmen,” Yantis said. “That’s it. A soldier may have to make the decision to use deadly force, but it’s never an easy one to make.”
American Medical Association spokesman Edward Hill has compared Freedman and like-minded academics to scientists paid by the tobacco industry to prove that cigarettes aren’t harmful. Lowenstein counters that the AMA is “furthering an agenda of preconceived notions and appealing to ignorance and fear.”
MYTHICAL QUALITIES
A theory known as catharsis and touted by the video game industry suggests that video games help people blow off steam and work out aggression.
Although Freedman has said his training as a psychologist leads him to believe that theory is probably not true, he also said it’s just as likely that video games help people vent aggression as build it.
“My guess is that both sides are right,” he told pop culture magazine The Adrenaline Vault: “that some individuals, under some circumstances, at a given moment in their lives, are on the verge of committing a violent act. And some of those people are pushed over the edge, perhaps, by violent television…and some of them are prevented from going over the edge, cathartically, by it.”
But that theory was discredited long ago, and research actually suggests the opposite, that we learn behaviors by seeing them and practicing them, said Antonius Cillessen, a psychology professor at the University of Connecticut-Storrs. His opinion is shared by many mental health professionals.
The video game industry “is just wrong” about catharsis and “the science just doesn’t support it,” Cillessen said.
Statistics also debunk another myth: that society has become more violent as video games have become more popular. The murder rate in the United States has declined since the 1980s, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Justice Department statistics show that since 1994, the year video game sales boomed, the aggravated assault rate among 10-17-year-olds has slowly declined. So as video game popularity has increased, youth violence has actually decreased.
Some experts say the decline is proof that violent video games haven’t increased violence. Others argue that societal efforts, such as education, prevention and increased incarceration, have simply offset the effects of violent media.
A COMPELLING ARGUMENT …
In late 1997, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, a freshman at Heath High School near West Paducah, Ky., son of a prominent attorney and allegedly an avid player of violent video games, left his family’s large brick home and arrived at school as an early-morning prayer session was ending. He walked into the crowded foyer and fired eight shots from his .22 caliber Ruger semi-automatic pistol, killing three girls and wounding five other students.
His accuracy rate was a staggering 100 percent. Eight shots, eights hits. Five head shots. Three to the upper torso. He shot his girlfriend between the eyes.
In Oct. of 1998 Carneal pleaded guilty but mentally ill to three counts of murder and six lesser charges, and was given a life sentence, the maximum penalty.
Grossman, the former West Point psychology professor, cites this incident in support of his theories and points out two unusual things, in addition to Carneal’s uncanny accuracy: First, while the normal tendency is to shoot a target until it drops, Carneal calmly shot each victim only once, according to eyewitness accounts, a practice mirroring video game tactics, where hordes of enemies require just one shot to kill. Second, Carneal’s shots were either to the head or torso, areas that many shooter games award bonus points for hitting.
Grossman also provides the following FBI data: Untrained shooters have an accuracy rate of about 7 percent at a distance of 21 feet in real-life situations; trained law enforcement officers have an accuracy rate of about 20 percent under those circumstances.
“I trained the Texas Rangers, the California Highway Patrol and a battalion of Army Green Berets,” said Grossman, who hails from Jonesboro, Ark., site of a 1998 middle school massacre in which four girls and a teacher were shot to death and 10 others were wounded. “When I told them of Carneal’s accuracy, they were stunned. Nowhere in the annals of military or law enforcement history can I find an equivalent ‘achievement.’ ”
Carneal had learned to shoot a rifle at 4-H camps, but apparently his only experience with handguns like the Ruger, which he stole from a neighbor, was at a practice session a few days beforehand targeting a rubber ball.
School shootings, like ones perpetrated by Carneal or Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris in Littleton, Colo., in 1999, are complicated, and even the world’s foremost authorities are engaged in a fierce debate about the causes and solutions. Was it violent media? Was it social estrangement? Bad parenting? How are they linked?
Grossman’s point: Video games didn’t make Carneal want to kill. But they gave him the skill with the lightweight, low-recoil Ruger .22, which Grossman called “the perfect weapon to transfer skills learned in arcade shooters.”
BUT …
Carneal, who is now 19, recently told the Louisville Courier-Journal that all sorts of things affected him, including bullying and perceived parental neglect. But he said violent media wasn’t one of them.
“People want one simple answer – I can’t give it,” he said.
And courts recently dismissed a $33 million lawsuit the families of the slain girls brought against two Internet pornography sites, three violent video game-producing companies, including the maker of Doom, and New Line Cinema, which produced the 1995 film “Basketball Diaries,” in which a character dreams of gunning down his high school teacher and several classmates. The courts concluding that the companies couldn’t have known that somebody would commit such a crime after viewing their products.
SO…
What is a parent to think?
The few unanimous conclusions: Know the rating system used for computer games and know what your children are playing and watching.
The Entertainment Software Rating Board maintains a web site, www.esrb.org, which explains the rating system and has a searchable database. The board also maintains a hotline: 1-800-771-3772.
Beyond knowing the rating system, opinions diverge.
Virginia, for her part, is trying to keep violent games away from her boys, at least until they’re older.
For now, it’s up to parents to decide whom and what to believe. But no matter the final decision, know the ratings.
Otherwise it’s a shot in the Dark.
Published in The New Britain Herald, in Connecticut.
