Topics: Gaming, Video Games, Entertainment News
On the long drive back from Secaucus, I kept thinking about all the things I should have said. I had just gotten my ass whupped on “Donahue.” Looking for comfort, I called my mother on the cell. She thought my suit looked good and my hair was combed straight. Somehow, it didn’t help.
I am the director of MIT’s new comparative media studies program. I’ve been writing about video games for more than a decade, have testified before the Senate Commerce Committee and the Federal Communications Commission, have conducted workshops with game designers, spoken to PTA meetings and the American Library Association, and been interviewed by more reporters than I can count. I agreed to appear on “Donahue” to talk about games because I knew I should have owned the issue. But I blew it.
The first thing I told my wife after I got off the phone from my first conversation with the “Donahue” producers was that I was flying to New York to get beaten up on national television. She asked if she should have my head examined.
But the producers were so, so reassuring. They wanted to have an intelligent discussion, to avoid sensationalism, to give me a chance to make my arguments. They would have some representatives of the games industry and someone from one of the media reform groups. One producer almost convinced me that “Donahue” was a serious news discussion program.
I really wanted to believe. I remember Phil Donahue publicizing the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace long before Anita Hill; I remember his program as one of the first to allow gays, lesbians and bisexuals to talk openly about discrimination. I recalled how he quit the talk-show business in disgust and how they lured him back with the promise that he could be a progressive alternative to O’Reilly. There were signs all over the Boston subway telling us “Donahue’s Back. Be Thinkful.”
That ungrammatical slogan should have been the first clue that something was wrong with the new “Donahue.” But I had also watched the opening episode: Phil was trying so hard to escape the “wimp” label that he was practically frothing at the mouth. “Donahue” was mimicking the style of right-wing talk television as if that style didn’t carry its own insidious political messages. Marlo Thomas’ hubby had been lured to the dark side of the Force.
So, yeah, I should have known better. I did know better, sorta. I did it anyway. And after the fact, the only person I could kick was myself. I was ambushed, and forgot how to fight back.
I knew what the activists opposed to gaming violence would say — that computer games are too violent and are bad for young people. I was ready to tear them apart on the evidence. Despite all of the publicity about school shootings, the rate of juvenile violent crime in the United States is currently at a 30-year low. When researchers interview people serving time for violent crimes, they find that they typically consume less media than the general population, not more. A 2001 surgeon general’s report concluded that the strongest risk factors for school shootings centered around the quality of the child’s home life and their mental stability, not their media exposure.
The field of “media effects” research includes around 300 studies of media violence. But most of those studies are inconclusive. Many have been criticized on methodological grounds, particularly because they attempt to strip complex cultural phenomena down to simple variables that can be tested in the laboratory. Most found a correlation, not a causal relationship, which means they could simply be demonstrating that aggressive people like aggressive entertainment.
Only about 30 of those studies deal with video games specifically. And if you actually read the reports, most responsible researchers are careful to qualify their findings and are reluctant to make sweeping policy recommendations. None of them buy a simple monkey-see, monkey-do hypothesis. But the activists strip aside any qualifications, simplifying their conclusions and mulching together all of those contradictory findings. What they want is the aura of scientific validation, since that provides cover to all of their liberal allies who wouldn’t support the Moral Majority but love to sound off about cultural pollution.
Activists exploit any data point and any tragic event as grist for their cause. They will cite studies which show that 8-year-olds have difficulty separating out fact from fiction and use them to justify restricting 17-year-olds’ access to violent entertainment. 90 percent of American boys play video games, so it’s a pretty good bet that if the killer is an adolescent boy, they can find the proof that he was a gamer.
Parents are demanding that the government do something even if it’s wrong, and once we reach that point, we tend to do all the wrong things. This is doubly dangerous. First, constitutional protections make it unlikely that the government is going to take decisive action against the media industries. So all of the fears get redirected onto the kids who play these games. We may not have an epidemic of youth violence in this country but lots of adults are ready to lock up teenage boys and throw away the key. Second, every moment our government focuses on the wrong problems, they take away time and resources that could be used to combat the actual causes of youth violence. Banning games doesn’t put a stop to domestic violence, doesn’t ensure that mentally unstable kids get the help they need, doesn’t stop bullying in the hallways, and doesn’t deal with the economic inequalities and racial tensions that are the real source of violence in American culture.
But, during my 15 minutes on “Donahue,” I never got to say any of this. I was intellectually ready for this discussion, but nothing prepared me emotionally. I was the captain of my high school debate team, but debating on “Donahue” is a whole different ball game. The first thing you’ve got to do is throw away the notecards.
I walked tall into the studio, having been reassured once again by the producer that they weren’t planning any cheap shots. They lied.
No sooner do I sit down then I glance at the teleprompter and get a preview of what Donahue had in store for me: “I want to show you a picture. This is 13-year-old Noah. While reenacting the video game Mortal Kombat, he was stabbed to death by his friend.” I hear the producer coach Donahue on how to speak with Noah’s mother so that it looks like she called spontaneously when they really had prearranged the call. I hear him reassure Daphne White, spokeswoman for the Lion and the Lamb Project and my sparring partner for the show, that he has some especially gristly footage from Grand Theft Auto 3 at the ready and she clucks with glee. And then, whoosh, we are going live in, five, four, three, two, one, seconds — and you’re ON THE AIR. I stare blankly into the camera as a freight train comes barreling toward me.
I hear Donahue explaining about how some school kids got shot in the back of their heads because their slayers had learned about “kill zones” from a video game. I find myself wondering why anyone would imagine a kid needed to play Quake to learn that you can kill someone by shooting them in the back of the head when just moments before, MSNBC was interviewing a former Mafia hit man.
Then, the first question goes to White, who uses it to remind viewers that she is a concerned mother. Never mind that I am a father and have raised a son successfully through his teenage years. On Donahue, activists are moms and intellectuals are presumed to be childless.
White explains how parents across the country had purchased Grand Theft Auto 3 for their children without any idea of its distasteful contents. Hello! The game is called Grand Theft Auto 3. It’s rated M for Mature Audiences — not appropriate for children under 17 — “violence, blood, strong language.” The hit men and prostitutes are right there on the package. If you are a thoughtful — er, I mean, “thinkful” — parent, how much more information do you need before alarm bells start going off in your head?
White notes that the Federal Trade Commission had cited overwhelming evidence that video games were aggressively marketed to youth. The same FTC study found that 83 percent of all video game purchases were either made by parents or by parents and children together. Moms and dads still control the purse strings on what remain high-ticket items in most family budgets. As parents, my wife and I took responsibility for knowing something about the media we bought our son. We didn’t expect the storekeeper to protect us from ourselves.
And suddenly, it’s my turn. I had composed a little speech debunking the evidence but it seemed beside the point because her last speech was backed by nothing more than her personal distaste for Grand Theft Auto 3. Uncomfortable with the black-and-white framing of the discussion, I search for middle ground, praising the Lion and the Lamb Project for helping parents to make informed choices. And I really meant it. Education, not regulation, is going to ensure that parents get to decide what kind of media their children consume. Maybe we could all work together to improve the quality of resources available to parents.
But seeking middle ground was a classic liberal mistake. On these “Crossfire”-style programs, any compromise is read as weakness. Make no mistake about it, everything here works to exaggerate the differences between you and the person sitting on the other side of the table. It isn’t a conversation, a discussion or even a debate by any classical standards. You are opponents, whether you want to be or not. The producers actually keep you in separate rooms before they bring you on the air. They encourage you to interrupt each other and to show as much passion as possible, because what they want is controversy and entertainment. The producers rattle your cages until your blood is pumping and you want them to go down. They flash up captions underneath your image and you have no say over how they shorthand your position. When you cede a point, you can almost hear the folks on your own side booing.
Then, Donahue spooks moms with a clip from GTA3. You can tell he enjoys it: “We’re going to kill a cop, or more than one cop, and a prostitute … This is gratuitous violence here. We’re beating, beating. We’ll get a little blood here in a minute. The blood, you’ll see. Look at this.” He shows it over and over like we were watching the Zapruder film. Of course, any violence we see was staged by the show’s producers, this being a game and not a movie. If Donahue really believed watching these scenes was harmful to minors, why was he showing them without parental warnings during what used to be considered the family hour? Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
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