Video Games and Violence, Is There a Connection?

With all the violence in the world today, what with Terrorism, the War in Iraq, and many murders right in our own backyard, people have begun to wonder where it comes from. What is it exactly, that allows one person to take the life of another? Lately, the blame has fallen on violent video games such as Bully (in Europe, Canis Canem Edit or Dog Eat Dog in Latin), and the Grand Theft Auto series. Rockstar, a company who has been creating games for Sony and their Playstation games consoles, produces both. Kristin Kalning points out that Rockstar is “… a company that’s made a lot of money targeting suburban teenage boys and gotten tons of press by angering soccer moms. And they’ve done it successfully for nearly 10 years.”

Ten years is a long time in the gaming world. When Playstation first came out, its major competition was the Nintendo 64 game console. A study done in 2001 by Dr. Kimberly Thompson and Mr. Kevin Haninger observed and recorded the violence as a percentage of game play time and the number of deaths per minute. Thompson and Haninger also attempted to answer the question, “Are video games becoming too violent?” They explored the trends of the two most popular series of the time, The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Brothers. In the Legend of Zelda series, “… each successive game has progressively less violence and fewer deaths per minute. Super Mario Bros. showed a less clear trend.” Thompson and Haninger didn’t fully explain this, but it would seem to mean that the games had either more violence, didn’t change at all, or had a change so slight, the data was only a few points different. Their study also found that there was an average of 4.8 deaths per minute in the Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

In the 1990’s everyone was affected by playing Super Mario Bros., but not many people paid attention. Super Mario Bros. was, after all, a fictional game that everyone loved. Now, people are trying to ban Bully because of the violence. In Bully, wedgies and baseball bats are your weapons, whereas in the Grand Theft Auto series, you can run people over in your stolen car. While people have tried to ban Grand Theft Auto, there was even more opposition to Bully before it even hit the shelves. A Florida attorney, Jack Thompson, filed lawsuits against Wal-Mart and Rockstar calling Bully a “Columbine Simulator” (Lane, Learn to be a Bully).

While Bully has been called a “Columbine Simulator,” there are other video games that provide training. In Re-Mission, you fight leukemia cells and bacteria using chemo rockets, bacto blasters, and pain medicine applicators. This game involves violence, but towards cancer cells. Tim Holt, creator of World of Warcraft, has visions of forest fire simulation games. “Fighting a fire is dangerous and expensive, and it’s not something you get a chance to do very often. The best place for a simulation is something that’s dangerous, expensive, or hard to do.” The soldiers who play Tactical Iraqi would more than likely agree. Tactical Iraqi teaches soldiers the importance of body language when speaking to Iraqis. For example, addressing two men with one’s head bowed is a sign of respect, a “gaining of points,” whereas using a thumbs-up, a positive gesture in our culture, can be taken as a sign of aggression in Iraqi culture, a “loss of points” (Kalning, Serious games provide learning, training).

Points are the base of most video games. The earliest video games from Atari and Nintendo were all about points and high scores. It was always fun to go to the local arcade and see if anyone had beaten the ultimate high score. Points are what make video games fun and exciting. When a child plays a game, he/she isn’t worried about how to get the points, only that they do get the points. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a retired Marine Corps psychologist, author, and teacher at West Point, gave a comment about some of today’s video games, “For 5,000 years of recorded history, we’ve hit each other with wooden swords. But now when I play violent video games in a virtual reality-- a hyperreality-- I blow my playmate’s head off countless thousands of times. Do I get in trouble? No; I get points” (Carter, Vice, violence and video games). This gets one to thinking; maybe the question should be rephrased. Maybe, instead of, “Are video games too violent” it should be something along the lines of, “Can there be a nonviolent way to get points?” In The Sims 2 for PC, one gains aspiration points when one does something for one’s Sim. For example, the Sim, we’ll call him Bob, wants to eat a bowl of cereal. By clicking the action button on the refrigerator, one has told Bob to fix himself a bowl of cereal. When he eats the bowl of cereal he gains 500 aspiration points which can be used to gain important items. There was no violence in getting those points at all.

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