|
 Print |
Who’s in charge of violent video games?The designers of video games are often unscrupulous. Industry ratings lack teeth. Governments feel it's all too hard. The last line of defence is mom and dad.
Kevin de Souza is at the end of his tether. Before his eyes, the boys
he teaches at Strathmore School in Nairobi, Kenya, are turning into
couch potatoes. “Some of them look like couch potatoes while others
think like couch potatoes. Their young minds seem to be deadened by
continuous exposure to action and violence.” The problem? Kids’ obsession with gaming on their PlayStations and Xboxes – or, if they are relatively deprived, on their computers. Thirty of the forty 9 and 10-year-olds in his class have a computer at home. And some of what they are seeing is far from wholesome. Admittedly, de Souza’s kids are upper middle-class. But if things are like this in a “developing” country, what are they like in the most developed? Much the same, it turns out. London Oratory School housemaster Pedro Virgili has found it necessary to write to parents alerting them to the dangerous concoction of violence, sex and drugs in the R-18 games many younger boys are playing. He worries that “many parents are not only blissfully ignorant of their contents but, because they are only ‘games’, somehow they think they are not harmful”. In Australia, Redfield College teacher Martin Fitzgerald worries more about the kids accessing pornography on the internet than about the 11-year-old who tells him frankly that a video game is “really cool” because “in one part a guy gets his head blown off and all this blood comes spurting out”. But he does wonder about the conversation a teacher had with a nine-year-old at the school: Teacher: What’s your favourite video game? Grand Theft Childhood The boys in these schools are not exceptional. They are like millions of others around the world who spend more and more of their time on gaming. The United States Centres for Disease Control reports that young people aged 2 to 18 spend, on average, over four hours a day with television and similar media.(1) Childhood is spent increasingly indoors. On a typical day a youngster is six times more likely to play a video game than to ride a bike.(2) 
It is easy to see why. Action games and the thrill-a-minute, anarchic
world they open up at the push of a button seem tailor-made for teenage
boys. Intriguing, amusing and shocking by turns, they provide hour upon
hour (a new game, Killer 7, can take 15 hours to play right out) of
extreme action — combined with the taste of forbidden fruit.The action can indeed be extreme, when it comes to bludgeoning foes to a bloody death, but it is the forbidden fruit element that has been highlighted by the recent furore over hidden sex content in one of the Grand Theft Auto series. The pornography Martin Fitzgerald is concerned about (there are an estimated two million porn sites on the internet, up from around 50,000 seven years ago) (3) is turning up in games. Grand Theft Auto is one of the most popular game franchises in the world, earning its American owner Take-Two Interactive revenues of nearly US$1 billion in four years.(4) Though supposedly aimed at the 18-35 male demographic, the series is very popular with younger boys, like those at Strathmore, London Oratory and Redfield. Promotional literature for GTA: Vice City announces: “Be it flying over the city distributing porn flyers, smashing windows in a local mall or delivering cocaine to a drug lord, you’ll never get bored in this town… And yes, you can take new weapons, such as a chainsaw and lay them into anyone, or for that matter you can grab machetes, samurai swords, screwdrivers or hammers.” And that’s not to mention the sexed-up females who feature prominently in the series. In the US, the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) – the industry’s self-policing unit – gave this game, complete with prostitutes and pimps, an M rating. The restriction is voluntary and there is nothing to stop a younger person buying, let alone playing the game. In Australia the federal Office of Film and Literature Classification rated it MA15+ — the highest rating a game there can receive – with the prostitutes removed. The UK censor gave GTA: Vice City an rating which suggests that it is suitable only for people over 18. When the San Andreas episode came out last October – full of shootouts, carjackings, street beatings and drug use – it quickly sold more than five million copies in the US. The ESRB rated it M like its predecessor. But last month it came to light that a modification — or “mod” — could be downloaded from the internet to unlock sequences of simulated sex. Rockstar, the game’s developer, claimed initially this was all the work of hackers, but later conceded that the sex scenes were on the disks as shipped to retailers.(5) 
The outcry from family advocacy groups and politicians has forced the
ESRB to reclassify San Andreas as AO (Adult only, or R-18), with the
result that all mainstream retailers in the US, including Wal-Mart,
have removed the title from their shelves. This is not enough for some
critics of the video game industry, already agitating for censorship
since the Columbine school shootings of 1999 were linked with video
games. The Governor of Illinois has signed a bill making it illegal for
anyone in the state to sell or rent a violent video game to anyone
under 18, and Senator Hillary Clinton has proposed a similar Federal
measure. In Australia the government censor has banned San Andreas, although more than half a million copies have already been sold in that country. This has caused a counter-furore from fans – including one who lets his 8-year-old play the game (“but I won’t be downloading the hack for him”) – and free speech advocates.(6) Defenders of free speech have been vocal in the US as well. Two Pennsylvania State University academics argue there is no credible proof that video games are harmful to children or cause violence, and that legislating against them would create a false sense of security. They point out that all previous attempts in this direction have been thrown out by federal courts.(7) Some doubt remains as to whether Rockstar Games made a genuine error in this case or deliberately tried to subvert the rating system. “Easter eggs” and other unlockable sub-plots are built into many games, but “mods” are created by amateurs and hackers who alter the game’s original code. Yet the industry encourages these hobbyists because their work extends the life of a game. According to Dan Morris, editor-in-chief of PC Gamer magazine, few mods are malicious: “More than 99 per cent is a benign extension of the game itself, or absurdly silly.” (8) That maybe true, but the GTA mod saga has made one thing clear: there is more to video games than meets the eye, and certainly more than most parents bother to find out. Parents have to interest themselves in this part of their children’s lives, especially since they are usually the ones providing the hardware and software. The parent trap PlayStation has had a big impact on the boys at Strathmore School, says Kevin de Souza. Parents face very real “kid pressure”. One 13-year-old refused to have his birthday party at home and his parents only later found out later it was because they did not have a PlayStation. The boy had been telling his friends he had a PS and an Xbox at home, and stood to lose a lot of face if the truth became known. “Our society is quickly evolving,” says de Souza. “Parents don’t have time to deal with their kids, so anything that will be a replacement for the love they should be showing is welcome. One boy I deal with has three PlayStations – one was sent to him by an uncle in the United States, another given him by his father and the third a gift from his mother. Money is not an issue. Once you’ve dealt with the kid pressure you stand a better chance of having a pleasant day.” Parents may justify their peace-at-any-price approach by telling themselves that at least their child is safe at home playing a game, and so they might be, up to a point, with real kid games like Pac-Man. But a title like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and its graphic packaging ought to warn parents that something more than a game of cops and robbers is involved. Yet when Strathmore showed a parents’ meeting a half-hour clip from that game, most mothers were outraged. “They claimed they did not know games not only have violence but also bad language and sex,” says de Souza. The London Oratory School also had to spell out for its (mostly Catholic) parent community what was wrong with Vice City: “It is quite clear what a negative impact all of this can have on the mind of a young person. Just as important is the conflicting message it gives them in relation to the Christian values and ideals which are part of the school ethos and which you are obviously trying to emulate as well in your home environment.” Pedro Virgili says he appreciates the difficulty parents have in monitoring everything their children watch. This difficulty is even greater with video games because although more adults than children play them (half of all Americans now play and the average age of gamers is 30), the majority of parents – especially mothers, on whom the main burden of supervision falls – most likely do not. And don’t even want to. A study done recently for the British Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association found that parents felt disconnected from the world of video games and showed little interest in this aspect of their children’s lives. They were more concerned about the number of hours their kids spent on games than on what type of game they were playing.9 This study and another in New Zealand showed parents were ignoring industry classifications and a significant number even bought the games for their under-age teens, apparently believing them to be mature enough to handle the content.(10) The industry, of course, is happy to shift the onus of censorship onto parents. Rockstar Games is at present trying to salvage its reputation (and its profit margin) — not by promising clean content in future, but by undertaking to educate parents. “Our top priority is to make sure retailers and parents understand the rating system.” Company spokesman Rodney Walker warned that games for mature players make up the fastest growing segment of the industry.(11) If the industry is not going to clean up game content, free speech concerns will see to it that official censorship will not either. As far as censorship goes, parents are it. Good in moderation Industry and free speech advocates, not to mention millions of fans, accuse those with concerns about the media of making a whipping boy of video games, and there is probably some truth in their accusations of “technophobia”. There is nothing inherently bad about video games; used in moderation they can be a legitimate source of fun and may even serve more constructive purposes. 
On this premise Christians have begun to carve out a niche market in
the game scene and there is even something called the Christian Game
Developers Foundation. At their conference in Portland, Oregon, last
week fledgling companies from around the world showed off new titles
focusing on morality and Bible stories.Wired News reports: “In adventure game Timothy and Titus, from Australian startup White Knight Games, players assume the roles of the two disciples of St Paul who spread the gospel throughout the ancient Mediterranean. Instead of the health and weapons points used in other role-playing games, players collect love, hope and faith points to power their missions. When they meet foes, instead of fragging them as in Halo 2, the disciples earn their halos by praying for them or using the ‘finger of God’ to convert them.” (Predictably, the demands of the genre tend to trump biblical accuracy: In the historical version of their story, Timothy was martyred by pagans, but both saints live through all levels of the PC game.) On a more prosaic level, action games have been shown to improve hand-eye coordination. A University of Rochester (US) study found they “can give a person the ability to monitor more objects in their visual field and do so faster than a person who doesn’t play such games”. However, the authors noted that “exercises that demand prolonged attention, such as reading or solving math problems, are likely not helped at all by excessive game playing”.(12) Children who spend a lot of time outdoors have longer attention spans than those who spend a lot on time with TV and video games, says Frances Kuo of the Human-Environment Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois.(13) A recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that kids aged 8 to 18 were packing eight and a half hours of dealing with all kinds of media, including books, into 6 hours, 21 minutes, by multi-tasking: watching TV while playing a hand-held video games, for example, or listening to music while doing homework. Imagine what that is doing for their attention span.(14) Faced with increasing concern about the effects of video games on children, enthusiasts have taken to writing ingenious defences of the technology. US pop science writer Steven Johnson claims that games require concentration, forward planning, lateral thinking and sustained problem-solving amounting to a “cognitive workout” that can benefit mental development. Games like Sim City, Age of Empires and Civilisation could be adapted for educational purposes, he says. That may be, but the title of Johnson’s book – Everything Bad is Good for You – suggests that he may be inclined to overstate the case. (15) In Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever, Americans John C Beck and Mitchell Wade praise video games for cultivating self-esteem in the form of beliefs that, “You’re the star,” ”You’re the boss,” “You’re an expert,” and “You’re a tough guy.” Gamers “are so confident of their skills, in fact, that they believe they don’t have to work as hard as other people,” say the authors, apparently seeing this as a virtue.(16) In The Obesity Epidemic, Australian academics Michael Gard and Jan Wright defend video games against the charge that they contribute to childhood obesity. Gard says: “Evidence shows that kids who use technology the most are actually more likely, not less likely to be physically active.” Games are the way kids unwind after playing sport, he claims. (17) The other bad news Tell that to Kevin de Souza and you are likely to get a hollow laugh. The sheer time his boys squander on games amazes him. One told him that, on average, he plays for 12 hours on his PlayStation on Saturdays, which pretty well rules out sport. When de Souza suggests to such a boy that gaming is fine in moderation, he may show a flicker of interest, but to get him to develop other interests is much more difficult. “To suggest that he learns to play the guitar, or how to program a computer, or to read novel is easy. But all these things require an effort – an effort that exceeds the strength of a couch potato who is used to plonking himself in front of an electronic screen for 12 hours.” The opportunity costs of excessive gaming – the benefits of other pleasurable, instructive and healthy activities that one is forfeiting – are only the beginning of the bad news about video games. Aside from the moral issues already indicated in this article, there is a growing litany of ills identified by research. Despite claims to the contrary, it is generally accepted that new electronic media are a major pull factor in the trend towards a more sedentary life and increased obesity – up 100 per cent in the US since 1980 – among children and adolescents. Attrition from youth sports programs begins among 10-year-olds and peaks among 14- to 15-year-olds.(18) Obesity itself has been linked with earlier puberty among girls, but an Italian study has also implicated screen media. Researchers at the University of Florence say the reason is that prolonged exposure to artificial light reduces the body’s production of the sleep hormone melatonin, whereas experiencing regular intervals of natural sunlight and darkness increases it.(19) Violent video games increase the risk of aggression in children, according to some research. Four studies published in February 2004 in the Journal of Adolescence agreed on this.(20) They found that kids who play violent games tend to see the world as a hostile place, become argumentative and aggressive towards others and show less empathy in real life situations. Douglas Gentile, the lead researcher in one study, said there were many risk factors for violent behaviour, but media violence was the easiest for parents to control: “We can just turn it off. We can say, ‘No, you can’t play that game’.” (21) A laboratory study of men aged 18 to 26 at the University of Aachen in Germany concluded that video games may “prime” the brains of players for violence. MRI scans found the same brain patterns in players “killing” “terrorists” as in those committing real acts of aggression. (22) Weaned on video games It’s the youngest children, however, who are of greatest concern. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, half of all 4- to 6-year-olds and 14 per cent of children aged three or younger in the US have played video games. This has been facilitated by developments such as EyeToy, a video camera accessory for PS2 which dispenses with thumb sticks, triggers and buttons to allow children to play simply by moving in front of the camera. In line with trends in the mobile phone industry, this looks like an attempt to get children hooked on video games as early as possible. 
Yet, because of the risk of obesity and aggression, the American
Academy of Pediatrics says children under six should be limited to one
or two hours of electronic entertainment per day, and children under
two, whose brain development is at a critical stage, should not be
exposed to these media at all. Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have, in fact, traced a link between the electronic screen and aggression to pre-schoolers. In a national sample of 1266 four-year-olds, those who watched the average amount of television for the group – 3.5 hours per day – were 25 per cent more likely to become bullies by the age of 11 than those who watched none. And children who watched eight hours of TV a day were 200 per cent more likely to become bullies. Lead researcher Frederick Zimmerman suggests that violent animated videos and cartoons are desensitizing children to violence. The same must be true of video games. (23) Whether these media are violent or not, the time they consume is time not spent in reading or being read to, in being taken to the museum, in eating meals with their parents and talking to them – things that in Zimmerman’s study reduced the risk of bullying. Various surveys show that parents are aware of the risks of letting the electronic screen play nanny to their kids, and concerned, but are too busy working to do much about it. The Xbox family? 
Ultimately, most problems affecting children can be traced to
deficiencies in parental leadership and supervision. Working mothers,
absent or uninvolved fathers, lack of gender equality in the domestic
set-up and unscrupulous marketing are variously blamed. While couples
and societies are debating these questions the home environment is
being subjected to a more or less subtle takeover.In a long and thoughtful essay in The New Atlantis (24) , Christine Rosen suggests that video games are merely one component of the entertainment and technology industry’s holy grail: the digital living room. She cites a Time magazine interview with Bill Gates in which he expresses the hope of seeing digital music, photos, and movies and television on demand grow out of the Xbox platform. “You gotta get in there because certain members of the family think it’s a must-have type thing,” said Gates. “But the way to cement it is as a family experience.” Microsoft has even developed an acronym for this effort: DEL or “Digital entertainment lifestyle.” Says Rosen, “It is also a lifestyle we are rapidly embracing, as television replaces the hearth and new technologies from cell phones to the Internet mediate every dimension of home life.” In many homes the displacement of real life by digital life has already gone too far. Perhaps when it moves from the boy’s bedroom to the living room, mum and dad will say, “Enough.” Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet. Notes (1) Healthy Youth (2) “Childhood pastimes are increasingly moving indoors.” USA Today, Jul 12, 2005 (3) "Online Recreation". Technology Review. August 2005. (4) “Grand Theft Auto makers admit pornographic content,” Independent, Jul 20 (5) “Rockstar Games to reach out to parents,” PR Week Worldwire, Aug 1 (6) “Red light for auto erotica,” Sydney Morning Herald, Aug 1) (7) “Target real violence, not video games”, by Robert D Richards and Clay Calvert, Christian Science Monitor (CSM), Aug 1 (8) “What lurks inside video games,” CSM, Jul 18 (9) BBC News online, Jun 24 (10) New Zealand Herald, Jun 20 (11) PR Week Worldwire, Aug 1 (12) Nature, May 29, 2003 (13) “Childhood pastimes are increasingly moving indoors,” USA Today, Jul 12, 2005 (14) "Kids Say Parents Don’t Set or Enforce Rules on Media Use". Kaiser Family Foundation. March 9, 2005. (15) The Guardian, Jun 2, 2005 (16) Christine Rosen. “Playgrounds of the Self.” The New Atlantis. Summer 2005 (17) The Telegraph (London), Jun 3, 2005 (18) Healthy Youth (19) “Television watching may hasten puberty,” New Scientist, 28 Jun 2004. (20) The Lion and Lamb project (21) Globe and Mail (Toronto), Feb 19, 2004 (22) BBC News, Jun 22, 2005 (23) Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, Vol 159, p 384 (24) Christine Rosen. “Playgrounds of the Self”. The New Atlantis, Summer 2005. Want to read more articles by Carolyn Moynihan Click on the links below
subscribe donate
We depend on you! follow us
 our shop |
|
Home MercatorNet |
