William N. Everly
Professor Jake Khoury
UNIV 112
21 September 2014
When Violence Isn’t Alright in Video Games
Since their sales boom in ’98, video games have become an exceedingly huge form of art
(that is, works of skill created for the purpose of entertainment) in most first world countries.
Many people identify as gamers because of the rise in social acceptance and accessibility of
video games, as is apparent in the popularity of gaming apps for smart phones. A heated debate
has ensued for quite a while over the effects of videogames, especially on minors. To prevent
this, Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) was established for parents to help choose
the right games for their kids. While a large number of people have come to enjoy and accept
these games, there has also been a rise of using video games—such as the Call of Duty® series
as—a scapegoat for violent crimes. This obviously is not the majority, but the opponents are
determined enough that it could still present an issue. In the struggle against violence, these
opponents have sought to limit game contents severely in terms of violence or to eradicate
violent video games entirely, even though an effective ESRB rating system already monitors the
age at which children play games and suggests parents buy games suited for their age. This
solution, however, presents major problems in terms of freedom of speech. Previous movements
such as SOPA (the self-proclaimed Stop Online Piracy Act of 2012 that tried to remove all Mrated games), the American attempt to censor pornographic and copyrighted material on the
internet, also attempted to censor virtual media and met huge resistance. This remains worrisome
because if a precedence of censorship is established, the courts may continue censoring in future
cases, and the only question is not the popular opinion, but that the elected representatives have
clearly sought to censor it--although next time the amendment could be a hidden “rider” that
piggybacks on a more important and lengthy documents. It must be conceded, though, that there
is a logical limit to the freedom a developer can be allowed to have. In general, critics should not
have a bearing on what a developer can or can’t make until their game encourages a specific,
real-life act of violence.
In the general public, it has been found that video games do not cause violence, so game
developers should not be as limited in what they create as critics may suggest. The movement
against gaming became so well-known that several studies and statistics started coming out
around 2005. Every statistic compiled showed that video games and violence show no trend. In
“Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth about Violent Video Games and What Parents
Can Do” article, Kutner, PhD and Olsen, ScD, co-founder and a co-director respectively of the
Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media, and through a cross-sectional
study, showed that those that bullied were more likely to have played M-rated video games.
while this may raise questions in the opponents of violent media, this is not a rational concern
because the study in no way states that gameplay made these children violent. This study only
suggests that violent children prefer violent media, not that the violent media is spawning violent
children. Take for example that a known bully is asked to choose a game. He’s not going to
choose the puzzler, he would likely pick the violent game. That doesn’t mean the violent game
made the bully what he is, but that bullies play them. As for the nonviolent children, shown in
studies by the President of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, Thierer and some four other
surveys with aligning data ("22 Charts & Graphs on Video Games & Youth Violence."), the
trend for decreasing violence was consistently shown to be declining as game sales increase,
which indicates that video games are a positive influence on the culture of youths as a whole.
However, by Christopher Engeldhart and companions at the Department of Psychological
Sciences in the University of Missouri, suggests that “media violence exposure can cause
desensitization to violence” (Engeldhart et al). Their hypothesis was that when a youth subject is
exposed repeatedly to violence, their reactions to violence become less severe and are therefore
more prone to violence. While they do use a reliable methodology for measuring aggression by
letting the participants choosing the amount of discomfort an opponent feels, there were a few
issues with this article. The largest problem with this paper is primarily that although the general
statistical significance is “p<.01”, the specific video game-to-aggression significance is only
“p<.07” (Engeldhart et al), which is not notable by common practice, because it’s higher than .05
or .01, which means that there is a statistical deviancy of 7% from the null hypothesis. In
layman’s terms, 7% of the subjects in even the most extreme quartiles did not follow the
suggested correlation in a laboratory setting. Though some may argue this as nitpicky, a modern
philosopher Michael Sandel, would disagree. As he posits in his TEDtalk, the method for
determining ethical justification of a thing or action is “to reason about just distribution [specific
action] of a thing, we have to reason about, and sometimes argue about, the purpose of the thing”
(Sandel). In this case, the “thing” is empirical science and the purpose is to find undeniable truths
in the world. Due to the complex nature of the environment we are placed in, the majority of
scientists are in agreement that any methodology has errors, and after five percent, the error
becomes too great to consider as reasonable data, as is common knowledge among statisticians
and researchers. As Engeldhart and supporters may argue, this data still dictates further study.
While I do relinquish this point, induction indicates that the studies are likely to agree with
previous studies showing video game sales and violent trends as an inverse function (“22 Charts
& Graphs on Video Games and Youth Violence”). These studies have abided by a common trend
that as annual sales for video games increase and more youths play these games, the violence
those youths commits decreases. Although it’s not a strict subject-specific study, the statistics
show what’s happening on a massive and universal scale, which indicates that video games are
helping and not hurting.
These concessions and rebuttals do raise an important question: where is the line drawn
for what isn’t allowed, and why? The only obvious answer is that what should not be allowed is
what specifically requests converting virtual violence to real violence. That is, if a game
suggested the assassination of a living person in their likeness, that game would need to be
bowdlerized. While the thinker Sandel did call for a movement towards purpose (such as the
entertainment of a videogame) in his TEDtalk, he balanced this with also suggesting that an
equal component of seeing “the qualities that are worth honoring and admiring and recognizing.”
In such a case, the honorable qualities of self-restraint weigh strongly against just entertaining.
This is not because of the desensitization effect that Engeldhart describes, though, because even
desensitized children still have functioning moral capacities. A good soldier may not flinch at a
burning body, but this does not cause them to burn the bodies of any person that irritates them.
While obviously soldiers have developed moral reasoning prior to their exposure, it has never
been shown that youths adopt the morals of the media they enjoy in their free time. Furthermore,
the analogy does not focus on the moral compasses, but rather the linkage of desensitization to
carrying out primal desires of violence. Any child old enough to wield a controller is old enough
to know that hitting is bad, and being used to seeing people being hit won’t change that. Moving
on, the censorship of suggesting real-world violence stems from a positive correlation that
innately aggressive people tend to like aggression in their media (“22 Charts & Graphs on Video
Games and Youth Violence”), thereby giving the wrong people the wrong idea. The problem
does not even truly lie in video games here, but in the deductive fact that if you suggest a crime
to enough people, an outlier may eventually take it to heart. Because of this unfortunate
principle, it’s best to stay on the side of fiction. The only ideas given in fiction-based games are
trophes that already exist in everyday lines of thinking—no one sees a knight stabbing a dragon
and suddenly learns that people can be stabbed, it’s knowledge that children gain at an infantile
age.
In terms of ethical justification, only very extreme cases of violence should be prohibited
from video games and only if they encourage the player to take the violence to real life. This
claim holds specific significance in the world of virtual media and in classic arts because of the
trend of censorship becoming contagious. This problem continues to have prevalence since its
emergence in the late 90s, after a large escalation in the realism of these games. Under these
ethical guidelines, children have effectively been monitored by their parents and videogames do
not pose a threat to anyone. More societal refinery can further limit the violence, though. This is
why videogames must be limited in very precise ways, and only in ways proven to reduce the
violence rate of general society.
Works Cited
Engelhardt, Christopher R., Bruce D. Bartholow, Geoffrey T. Kerr, and Brad J. Bushman. "This
Is Your Brain on Violent Video Games: Neural Desensitization to Violence Predicts
Increased Aggression following Violent Video Game Exposure." Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology 47.5 (2011): 1033-036. Science DIRECT. Web. 24 Nov. 2014.
ProCon.org. “22 Charts & Graphs on Video Games & Youth Violence.” ProCon.org. 18 Feb.
2010. Web. 12 Oct. 2014.
Sandel, Michael, narr. The lost art of the democratic debate. TEDTalk, 2010. Web. 10 Oct. 2014.
Silke, Andrew. "Deindividuation, Anonymity, and Violence: Findings From Northern Ireland."
The Journal of Social Psychology 143.4 (2003): 493-99. EBSCOHOST. Web. 24 Nov.
2014.