Mark Boal

Software Etc. and at least four other retail chains are carding kids under 17 on Kingpin sales. But teens can buy hundreds of other Mature-rated titles at these same stores, so what makes Kingpin special? Kingpin is the first killsport game to be released since the shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., and carding is part of a new industry strategy to avoid criticism and Congress.

Bills before Congress and in four states would restrict the availability of violent electronic games and punish retailers who sell violent material to minors. But — just as Web publishers are voluntarily adopting privacy policies to avoid new consumer protection legislation — game makers see the handwriting on the wall, and are attempting to preempt new laws by regulating themselves.

Not too long ago, computer games were a big ($5.5 billion) business with a low profile. But in the post-Littleton world every violent game is guaranteed some media scrutiny. No firm wants to be accused of fostering homicidal tendencies. But before the Littleton murders, game design firms “>Xatrix Entertainment and Interplay had together sunk millions of dollars into developing Kingpin. Stopping production was not an option. Instead, they are attempting to sidestep criticism by launching a spin campaign that argues that Kingpin was never intended for minors.

But the game obviously caught the fancy of Dave and his friend, and it is certainly adrenal enough to suit 14-year-old tastes, or adults with an inner teen. To play you must recruit gang members in a fantasy ghetto, where women loiter under streetlights and winos slump in the shadows begging for booze. You can tell the bums to “fuck off,” but curse at the wrong “bitch” and she attacks with a pipe or pistol. Bludgeon her if you want to survive, then pat down her corpse for cash.

Violence against women, illegal guns, casual alcohol use, curses and gang warfare: This list would provoke the wrath of any moral crusader. It’s no wonder Interplay loaded Kingpin down with more warning labels than any computer game in history.

Apart from the giant yellow sticker on the box, there’s a message during the install asking minors to turn back. It also comes with a password-protected low-violence version that bleeps out profanity. Perhaps most telling is the missive from Xatrix president Drew Markham that appears during the load up. It reads, “In light of the recent acts of youth-related violence that have taken place across America we thought that you should know how ‘Kingpin’ was initially conceived. ‘Kingpin’ was never intended for children. This is a game with mature themes made for a mature audience. There was never any attempt to market or influence children to buy ‘Kingpin.’”

Interplay is not the only firm looking for a new image. The entire industry wants a new, more virtuous look and has embraced a ratings system as a sign of its responsibility. Most games already display a rating from the industry-backed Entertainment Software Rating Board, be it “E” for everyone, “T” for teen or “M” for mature, meaning 17 and older. But most consumers are unaware of the ratings, and perhaps not by accident.

If ratings systems were followed and enforced, the industry would lose hordes of young gamers. But in the wake of Littleton, and the media backlash against gaming, that’s a risk that some manufacturers are willing to run.

Soon the Interactive Digital Software Association trade group will blitz the media to tout its rating system. “It simply doesn’t have the visibility and the awareness that it should have,” says Doug Lowenstein, president of the IDSA. “When you talk to everyone from reporters to politicians, and these people think that there isn’t a system, then it tells you have work to do.”

But there’s more to this campaign than informing the press and politicians. Its real goal is to stop legislation.

Bills that would criminalize the sale of violent games to minors are making their way through the legislatures of Florida, Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania. Congressman Henry Hyde, R-Il., floated a bill that would have made it a crime to sell or lend to children under 17 any books, videos, magazines or any other materials that contain explicitly violent content. That scheme was tossed aside a few weeks ago, but another plan in the Senate is still very much alive. Called the “21st Century Media Responsibility Act,” this sweeping bill would require movies, music CDs and video games to share a common rating system that not only suggests an appropriate age, but also provides a description of the content inside. If the bill passes, retailers who sell “Mature” games to minors would be punished with $10,000 fines. The bill is the brainchild of Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., and is cosponsored by Senator Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., whose jihad against games began in 1994 when Mortal Combat was maximum gore.

Also on the horizon are two studies, one ordered by President Clinton on marketing violence to children, and the other commissioned by Congress on the health effects of electronic gaming. Both of these studies were initiated soon after Littleton, with the promise of saving America’s children from the scourge of media violence.

But despite that mission, in the age of small government, no federal agency will be set up to enforce the study’s findings. Politicians, however, are more than happy to pressure the industry into regulating itself. And if Kingpin is any measure, the industry is responding.

“There is this feeling that government will say, ‘We gave them a chance and they didn’t do it, so now we have to regulate for them,’” says Lowenstein of the IDSA. So the group’s current position is that “We would prefer if ‘Mature’ games were not sold to people under 17.”

This view assumes that industry control is somehow less pernicious than government intervention. But as it happens, the government is constrained by the Constitution, whereas the industry is at the mercy of public opinion. The courts consider violent games a form of speech, protected from government meddling by the First Amendment, and the industry is confident that even if those state or congressional bills pass, they will be struck down in court as unconstitutional. Still, to avoid an expensive day in court, gamers are arming themselves with the argument that the government needn’t step in, as game makers are already censoring themselves.

No matter how well-meaning, censorship always looks clumsy in retrospect. Consider this call to control the culture: “The tendency of children to imitate the daring deeds seen upon the screen has been illustrated in nearly every court in the land. Train wrecks, robberies, murders, thefts, runaways, and other forms of juvenile delinquency have been traced … [and] the imitation is not confined to young boys and girls, but extends even through adolescents and to adults.”

That passage was written about films in a popular periodical called Education in 1919. Such remarks were common in the early days of cinema, as the culture grappled with a strange and exciting new medium. But these days, the censors have a harder job, thanks to technology. They can card at the cashier, but if somebody like Dave really wants to, he can easily go around the checkpoint. The Kingpin demo can be downloaded by anyone — and, of course, no one checks IDs when you buy games online. At least, not yet.

But the American media has ignored this slightly ghoulish gold rush. Instead, coverage plays up Boris Yeltsin bickering with the G-7 in Cologne, or President Clinton
bickering through the headlines with a French minister. Such tiffs are practically made for
television. What’s more telling is the silent consensus that by spending in the
region now, the West can pull out profits in the future.

Take the rebuilding infrastructure business. It’s nice work if you can get it,
but even more enticing for entrepreneurs is the prospect of owning
the industries in Kosovo outright. Factories are in miserable shape, of course,
but disrepair only brings the price down. The fact that these industries are
still technically owned by the Yugoslav government seems to mean little to the
leaders of NATO countries. “What we will do in Kosovo, as soon as we get a legal
structure in place, is start privatizing,” says a high-ranking official in the
State Department. “To do that you build financial institutions of some sort, and
perhaps a stock market.”

Privatization candidates include Kosovo’s electric plants, which power 25 percent of
Serbia, and mines worth the equivalent of a quarter of the area’s total economy.
As of three months ago, these operations were under Belgrade’s control. Now
ownership is an open question that will be answered by an interim multinational
government, probably headed by a Swede with a background in banking and a steady
hand. He’ll certainly have to cut the pie delicately. “European companies hungry for
these equity enterprises will be lining up,” says Michael Djordjevic, president
of the Bank of Southeast Europe. “The returns could be fabulous, going anywhere
from 20 to 100 percent in a very short time.”

The outlook gets even rosier considering that the initial $500 million EU package
will be followed by $1 billion more over the next two years. Even that $1.5
billion is small change compared to what’s needed. Balkan economists say that a
full revival of the region requires a later-day Marshall Plan, with cost
estimates ranging between $100 billion and $500 billion over the next decade. The idea sounds
fanciful, but momentum for it is growing as Europe realizes the higher cost of
discord in the Balkans. At the very least, many more billions will be pumped from
both public and private wells.

Once its annual budget issues are resolved, the United States will likely issue
loans or grants to the Balkans, which will be sucked up by U.S. firms waiting to
do business. Meanwhile, Europe gets to ride the gravy train. “These are our
partners and they need this injection, so let them have it,” says Djordjevic.
“They need the employment, and the reconstruction will lead to a boost in their
economy in the same way that the Marshall Plan did for the U.S.” Since Germany
dominates the region (the deutsch mark is the unofficial currency of Serbia), it
stands to gain the most. “German unemployment is now 12 percent,” says
Djordjevic, “but after reconstruction it may fall to 6 percent, that spells a
big impact on the GDP. Even a 3 percent drop is a very big deal.”

Think of the war as precursor to a dynamite jobs program. Coincidentally enough,
it took this conflict to loosen Slobodan Milosevic’s hold on the last state-run economy in
the region. “You could blame this whole war on economics,” says the State
Department source. “If Milosevic had liberalized the economy, instead of making
last stands, none of this would have happened.” But he ignored economic reform in
favor of military action, and pursued that failed strategy until it not only
crippled Serbia’s GDP but brought down the rest of the region’s growth. Did a desire
to combat Milosevic’s economic crimes factor into U.S. involvement? After all, we
forgive China’s brutal violations of human rights, so long as corporations are
free to invest.

In the eyes of the capital elite, Milosevic’s sin is less ethnic cleansing than
his practice of cleaning out entire corporations. In February, his henchmen
commandeered a factory worth $173 million from ICN, an NYSE-traded
pharmaceuticals company owned by Milan Panic, the former prime minister of
Yugoslavia. There are many accounts of similar atrocities. Now, even the Russians
are scared to open offices in Belgrade. At one time, Serbia contributed to the
region as conduit for trade. With Milosevic running rampant, many countries
diverted their traffic to new routes. But Greece and several other nations need
a healthy Serbia for their own sake. At some point it will have to be included in
the region’s redevelopment, but that looks to be unlikely as long as Milosevic is
in power. Clinton Monday said he would give Yugoslavia “not one penny”
while Milosevic was still in control.

The best hope for prosperity is to bundle the poor Balkans into a bloc, trading
under a single currency. That, at any rate, is the banker’s wisdom, as voiced
recently by philanthropist George Soros et al. But the currency Soros has in mind is the Euro,
not some Slavic dinar. And a switchover, even if it were economically feasible,
could only occur at the expense of die-hard Serbian nationalism. As it is, the
coming cavalcade of foreign firms raises the specter of Kosovo becoming an
economic ward to the EU as thousands of NATO troops prepare for a long stay in
the region.

In the minds of some Serbs, economic colonialism fits in only too nicely with the
area’s long history of conquest. “Under one negative scenario,” says Obrad Kesic,
a senior aide to former Prime Minister Panic, “the Europeans position
themselves to exploit the resources, and then all the money leaves the region.”
It wouldn’t be the first time.

The path clear, President Clinton ordered a summit with Hollywood on the culture of teen violence (oblivious to the irony as U.S. bombs pummeled Yugoslavia), while Senate Republicans announced a conference of their own. Even the digerati got a touch hysterical, with some game designers posting notices about ending digital gore for the sake of the public weal.

OK, rewind.

As of 1996, there had only been eight peer-reviewed studies testing for aggressive effects of violent video games, according to a literature review conducted in that year by MediaScope, a think tank that specializes in media violence. Of these, four found effects, three did not and one found effects for girls but not boys. (To put this in some perspective, I have a paper in my desk drawer on teleportation that cites 49 studies.)

More recent work has been done by Dr. Jeanne Funk, a psychologist at the University of Toledo, who has conducted more control-group research than anyone in the country. As both a practitioner and a parent, Funk supports labeling games for violent content; she lets her own kids play, since “it’s important for children to be part of the culture,” but “draw[s] the line at the really violent ones.”

As for Grossman, Funk tactfully points out that while “he believes in what he says,” the “research is not exactly there to support it.”

For starters, video games do not improve reflexes, which are innate. And while they can improve spatial recognition and coordination, the problem is “skill transfer”: There’s a tremendous difference between clicking a mouse in Half-Life and hefting a real eight-pound shotgun.

To put it another way, if all our GIs did was stare at monitors, Milosevic would have nothing to fear.

Putting aside the argument that computer games transform their players into soldiers, one is left with the somewhat more plausible theory that games bring out aggression among adolescents and adults. While it’s been shown that 5-year-olds, after playing a karate video game, will go around chopping at each other, young children are highly impressionable by just about any stimulus. Therefore, older kids are more interesting from a scientific perspective; but they are also more problematic to study — observing them at unguarded play is nearly impossible. So most studies of adolescents and adults have them hammer on the fire button and then answer a battery of questions.

Funk’s most recent work in this vein will be presented in public in August at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. Her study hypothesized that adolescents “with a preference for violent games would be associated with more behavioral problems, particularly externalizing problems such as aggressive behavior.” But the facts proved otherwise.

As it turns out, 10-year-old gamers who preferred a lot of violence scored higher on internalizing and anxious-depressed behaviors scales — meaning they were withdrawn, not aggressive. On the other hand, those with a preference for less violent games scored highest on the delinquent behavior scale. Shifting away from the aggression thesis, Funk concluded that future studies should focus on correlations between time spent playing computer games and subsequent depression.

This finding jibes with several older studies that correlate avid gaming with low self-esteem among boys. Oddly enough, girls who play a lot often didn’t show the same problem. Cultural constructions of gender may account for the difference, with girls feeling good when they break out of the mold of timidity, and boys feeling lousy for being game geeks.

One 1985 study of fourth-graders showed positive effects. Quoting the abstract from the Journal of Child Study: “Subjects who played violent video games exhibited fewer defensive fantasies and tended to exhibit more assertive or need-persistent fantasies than did subjects who played non-violent games. For non-aggressive females, the barrier responsible for frustration was more salient in their fantasies after playing the violent video game. Results suggest that aggression in the context of a video game discharges children’s aggressive impulses in a socially acceptable way, leaving the children less defensive and more assertive.”

A Columbine high schooler said as much when she told the New York Times, “I know this sounds weird, but some violent games are a therapy for kids.”

Why, then, the assertion in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times of overwhelming evidence? The mountains of research they are referring to was done on television and film violence — and while it’s presumed reasonable that video games would exhibit the same impact, a presumption is not exactly hard evidence. Though the few empirical studies on games are mixed — at best — facts alone cannot cool the media’s fever.

One reason for the disconnect, argues Andrew Ross, who chairs the American studies department at NYU, is how the media handles race. Ross notes that when white suburban kids go wrong, there’s enormous pressure to find a psychological cause rather than a social explanation.

“White suburban kids are assumed to have an individual psychic development that can be sidetracked into dysfunctional forms of expression, if there is some sufficiently powerful external stimulus — a video game, a lurid Web site — that can knock them off course.” But when it comes to inner-city black kids, “the explanations are assumed to be socially determined from the get-go.” By the media’s lights, “Society explains their behavior in a way that strips them of their individuality and retains only their class and race attributes” — which is why video games are never trotted out to explain homicide in inner-city schools.

In the end, says Ross, the pattern is distinctly American: “Since the early days of the republic, it has also been an elementary rule of public life for grandstanding experts and gatekeepers to hold popular culture responsible.”