Most of the experts I know see the value of superheroes, action figures, and slapstick cartoons. But the mere mention of gory video games provokes a very different reaction. After a passionate defense of superheroes at a conference panel, one developmental psychologist paused and then said with special vehemence, “But I don’t think video games in which the player is induced to shoot at other human beings are ever good for anyone.” A psychiatrist who helped me with my research cringed slightly at the mention of Quake and said, “There has to be something wrong with a person who’d want to look at that.”
Once, on a cable news channel, I debated a New York state senator who was pushing legislation to ban violent video games for children under eighteen. I talked about the benefits many teenagers have found in various sorts of games–not realizing that the producers were running images from a gory first-person shooter game on the screen as I spoke. When I watched the tape later and heard myself saying, “I know of many kids who thrive in the gaming culture” as bullets blew through skulls and blood went flying, I was appalled at my own words.
Nothing sets off our revulsion like explicit gore. Nothing triggers our worries about how our kids may turn out than watching them gun down real-looking people on screen. It’s understandable that hypotheses suggesting that video games are training our children to be killers have garnered tremendous publicity, even though the evidence doesn’t support them. It’s understandable that the Joint Statement on the Impact of Entertainment Violence on Children would expect “that they may be significantly more harmful” than other media. It’s understandable that when we learned that the boys who attacked their classmates at Columbine High School were heavy players of shooter games, we assumed the games had helped make them killers.
But when concerned adults condemn entertainment that millions of well-adjusted young people love and insist is perfectly good for them, we owe it to the young people–and ourselves–to learn more about it. When I launched my exploration of bloody video games I felt as though I were taking a journey into one of the darkest recesses of contemporary youth culture. But the more I got to know those games and the people who played them, the less I saw to fear. Ultimately I’ve come to feel that video games are the least powerful and least dangerous of all forms of entertainment violence.
When we encounter something new, we try to understand it in terms of other things already known to us. In a powerful book, On Killing, U.S. Army psychologist Dave Grossman described operant conditioning methods used during the Vietnam War that resembled some of today’s video games and revealed that some military units are now using those same video games to train soldiers. He argued well for the effectiveness of using animated but human-looking targets, the rapidity of a game, and instant rewards for quick shooting as tools to desensitize soldiers to the human dimension of what they were doing–and he asserted that video games are doing precisely the same thing to our kids.
There are problems with Grossman’s argument, however. Effective conditioning requires structured application and a well-controlled environment, which is scarcely what gamers are experiencing when they’re fiddling with a video game in their own rooms or messing around an arcade with hundreds of other kids. Grossman frequently quotes B. F. Skinner, who developed operant conditioning, but doesn’t mention one of the essential human truths that Skinner himself acknowledged: our reactions, unlike those of dogs or rats, are pro-foundly affected by the feelings, thoughts, and meanings that we assign to the stimuli in our environments. All the military training Grossman described takes place in an authoritarian environment in which the soldiers know full well that the purpose of the game is to make them better killers; they generally want to cooperate (especially in a volunteer army), and every message they hear is, “Kill for your country.”What our kids are doing with their video games is playing, and they know it. Games have always been a part of military training, and nearly all competitive games have a warlike subtext. Wellington said that the Battle of Waterloo “was won on the playing fields of Eton,” but cricket and rugby haven’t turned subsequent generations of Etonians into killers. Just because shooter games remind us of real shooting and military training doesn’t mean that kids experience them as such when they play, any more than they experience plastic army men or chess pieces as real warriors.
After a decade of these games being played by millions of kids, Grossman and other critics have provided no evidence of the effects they have predicted. Certainly video games haven’t had any significant impact on real-world crime.“The research on video games and crime is compelling to read,” said Helen Smith, forensic psychologist, youth violence specialist, and author of The Scarred Heart. “But it just doesn’t hold up. Kids have been getting less violent since those games came out. That includes gun violence and every other sort of violence that might be inspired by a video game.” The contemporary style of the first-person shooter game hit the market with Castle Wolfenstein in 1991; Doom and Quake, still by far the best-sellers of the genre, followed in 1992. The peak of shooter-game play by teenagers was from approximately 1992 to 1995, by which time the games’ sales had dropped, and they’d gone from being the fad of the moment to one of many genres in the industry. Violent crime dropped during those years. We’ve now had time for those millions of game players to reach adulthood, and the generation of “killer kids” predicted by the games’ critics never materialized.
“There’s no connection between video gaming and violence in the profiles of the kids I see,” noted Smith.“In fact, the lower-income kids who make up the great majority of violent kids usually don’t have any interest in games–and they couldn’t afford the hobby even if they did.” Both her practice and her survey show that extremely angry and violent kids often show interest in violent music, Web sites, and movies, but rarely in video games. “I don’t discount the influence some media may have on very hostile young people,” she concluded. “But there just doesn’t seem to be any connection with games.”
A few studies of adolescents have found a correlation between heavy video game use and various sorts of delinquent behavior. Among teenagers, unemployed boys who aren’t great academic achievers are more likely to amuse themselves with video games; unemployed boys who aren’t great academic achievers are also more likely to misbehave. Kids who work for high grades, play sports, do community work, and have jobs often play Quake, too, but they don’t have the time to show up as “heavy users” in a correlative study. Several laboratory studies have recorded increases in aggression in young people after playing video games. Those studies, however, have had the subjects play for limited times, usually fifteen minutes, and then stop abruptly–a situation guaranteed to frustrate anyone in a high-suspense, high-adrenaline game. And the readings have been taken immediately after the kids have finished, when their arousal is as heightened as it would have been at the end of any competitive or exciting experience. The research process itself may create the reactions it measures.
Then there’s Columbine. The planned, systematic way in which Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris attacked and slaughtered their schoolmates made it the most horrific of all the teen rampage shootings. We needed an explanation for it, and the discovery that Klebold and Harris loved these as yet little-known shooter games provided one. The boys apparently reprogrammed their copy of Doom to simulate the slaughter they were planning and used the game to practice for it. Those hours upon hours spent shooting imaginary foes very likely made it easier for them to make their terrible fantasies real. But some perspective is needed.
Based on the data of Dr. James McGee, an authority on the “classroom avenger,” there have been sixteen rampage shootings at schools by adolescents in recent years, involving eighteen boys. Only at Columbine, the thirteenth of the rampages, did the perpetrators turn out to be heavy game players. A few other boys liked shooter video games to one extent or another, though less, in every case, than they liked target shooting with real guns. Most of the shooters showed no interest in games at all. Other elements were much more common to the eighteen boys: bullying by peers, hostility with or dissociation from parents, suicidal threats, and fascination with news coverage of earlier rampage shootings show up among all of them. Several shared a preoccupation with Adolf Hitler or other symbols of historical violence, certain angry rock songs and violent movies, and real weapons. Klebold and Harris’s costumes and rhetoric were unlike any in the games they played, but they owed an obvious debt to earlier school shooters (especially the first nationally publicized shooter, Barry Loukaitis of Moses Lake, Washington) and to right-wing extremists. The news and history seem to have been far deadlier influences on them than the unreality of Doom.
Significantly, Loukaitis and other early school shooters were fascinated by the many earlier workplace rampages of adult men. In fact, school shooters resemble adult rampage shooters in nearly all important respects: demographics, personality types, the pattern of perceived slights and escalating grudges leading to the incidents, fascination with media notoriety, and even the sorts of comments made during and after the shootings. School shootings appear to be a case of teenagers imitating their elders. Those adult rampaging killers, who have erupted periodically since the late 1970s, have never been linked to video games.
Like the Beatles song that Charles Manson claimed inspired him to murder or the poetry that Timothy McVeigh quoted to justify his bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, shooter video games have sometimes been plucked and twisted by troubled souls to give some shape to the rages within them. Sometimes they seem to help such people contain their rage. Sometimes they aren’t powerful enough, and they may become part of a rehearsal for murder and suicide. But to condemn them because they lend themselves so easily to such terrible uses is to fail to understand their place in the lives of modern teenagers.
Helen Smith’s principal objection to theorists who try to link video games to real-life crime is the same as mine:“They’re not listening to the kids.” Critic Dave Grossman asked in one chapter title, “What Are We Doing to Our Kids?” But not once did he ask the kids, “What are you doing?” He has viewed gamers not as imaginative people using a mechanical toy but as cyborgs whose reactions are determined by the machine. “In video arcades,” he wrote, “children stand slackjawed but intent behind machine guns and shoot at electronic targets. . . .” I don’t know what arcade Grossman went to, but it would take a Zen master to play a video game slack-jawed. What gamers describe to me as the “video game face” is quite the opposite: twisted by tooth-gnashing, jaw-jerking, and occasional open-mouthed suspense. More experienced gamers may be tense and stoic, but they are viscerally, emotionally engaged in competition, choosing to devote their leisure time, money, and a great deal of effort to becoming better at a game. Most contemporary gamers are also involved in social and intellectual processes far more complex than merely playing in an arcade.
In talking to gamers visiting the annual Game Designers’ Expo in Silicon Valley, reading the research, and playing the games myself, I’ve been struck by how different the video game world is from my preconceptions. The games are becoming remarkably creative. All the successful first-person shooter games now allow users to design their own “maps” in which the battles will take place, to create new “levels” with customized backgrounds and challenges, and to choose their own “skins,” the physical appearance of their game selves. One teenage gamer led me through a communal tournament fought in the land of Oz by two Nazis, a cowboy, a mercenary, a teddy bear, and a loaf of bread. Although the basic story line remains the same–the player has to find his way through labyrinthine structures and fight off ambushing opponents to reach a distant goal–gamers are essentially scripting their own adventures.
According to Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a leading authority on adolescent development and the originator of the concept of “flow states,” any media experience that demands activity, interaction, control, and emotional stimulation is far more constructive than a passive experience like watching television. Traditional forms of entertainment, such as storytelling, puppet plays, and live musical performances, challenge children to more vital intellectual and emotional states by requiring that they bring more imagination and more of their own psychic contents to comprehending material than do the electronic media, which typically supply prepackaged information. Csikszentmihalyi noted that the simpler video games, “those that involve primarily piling up as many cadavers as possible,” offer more than television, but not much more. “However, the newer, more complex video games,” he said, “give players worlds to explore and decisions to make that can stir some of the emotions of discovery. They may prove to be very valuable forms.”
I experienced those emotions of discovery when I had a young player lead me through a level of Quake 3. We picked our way through the claustrophobic corridors of an abandoned castle, vigilant every moment to the possibility of ambush–although the attacks were far from constant, leaving us more time to dread them than to relieve the suspense in action–when suddenly we came to a staircase. We shot our way through one more pair of zombies and raced upward to freedom. Stepping through a door to the battlements of the castle, where the black stone suddenly fell away to reveal a vast sunset, filled me with an elation of freedom and courage. I wanted nothing more than to plunge into the next level.
Gaming is also becoming an increasingly social activity. Gamers talk and e-mail incessantly about strategies and shortcuts they’ve discovered, plan communal tournaments, pass around copies of PC Gamer magazine, and invite friends over to see their new games. Although “heavy gamers” may stick to their own esoteric cliques, most gamers are part of adolescent society and use games as icebreakers and bonding mechanisms. Most gamers now prefer not to play alone against the computer but against other gamers by way of multiplayer consoles or Internet-based games that can include dozens of players at once. The video game, at this point, becomes an athletic competition for kids who may not be able to throw far or run fast. Its players aren’t cyborgs being conditioned by a machine but competitors assessing their own and their opponents’ skills: who’s quicker, who knows the “map” better, who can strategize most intelligently? Afterward there’s usually a lot of talking or e-mailing about how the tournament played out and why. Gaming isn’t a complete social life, but it can be a vital piece of one, especially for kids who don’t fit well into other juvenile cliques.
Not surprisingly, then, gaming is also becoming a steadily less male-dominated world.“Heavy gamers” are more likely to be male, but among preteens, nearly as many girls as boys own and play video games–even the more violent games. As Dr. Jeanne Funk’s focus groups with children suggest, girls tend to like violent games less than boys, and they prefer to use the word “action” for what boys call “violence,” but they commonly play even the gorier shooting and fighting games in social situations. Unlike some violent music and movies, video games generally don’t appeal to the more aggressive teenagers. As one game-industry marketer put it, “Heavy gamers are nerds. There are some borderline tough kids who also game, but the real bad-asses look down at this as kid stuff. Gamers are reasonably bright but not big achievers, hang with other gamers and don’t like to attract too much attention. They can be socially clueless, self-absorbed, and arrogant, but one of the main reasons they disappear into the gaming world is that they want to avoid real-life trouble.”
Perhaps, then, it should have surprised me less than it did to learn that the extreme violence and realistic gore that disturbs us so much really doesn’t matter much to the gamers. Studies show that if a gamer is given a choice between a gory game that doesn’t challenge his skills and a non-gory one that does, he’ll usually choose the challenge over the gore. Some of the best-selling first-person shooter games, such as Goldeneye with James Bond, feature bloodless violence in old-time Hollywood style. The ultraviolent games now account for less than 10 percent of the game market, and industry surveys show that few gamers specialize in them but typically play a wide variety of types. One fourteen-year-old gamer I talked to listed his five favorite games as Quake 3, Half-Life, Starcraft (science-fiction strategy), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (humorous adventure), and Tony Hawk Skateboarding.
“Gore is at best a tertiary appeal of shooter games,” said Dallas Middaugh, an editor of many books about gaming and a gamer himself.“ Game play is by far the most important element–the difficulty, the strategy required, the complexity of variations, the suspense. Next comes the overall environment and appearance of the game world. Gore just adds a bit to the realism and visual impact.”
Some game designers have tried to cash in on the negative, but lucrative, publicity that bad taste brings. One, Soldier of Fortune, successfully stirred up controversy with its sadistic portrayals of Americans attacking Vietnamese and Latin American villages, thus glorifying some of our most haunting atrocities. After a flurry of publicity, however, it faded in the marketplace. One adult gamer told me, “It wasn’t challenging enough. Your opponents were too weak. It was all shock value, and gamers resent that.”The shooter games that have remained successful are more fantastical and less vicious, and pit the player against more overwhelming odds. In Half-Life, the player is an innocent scientist who has to fight his way through hundreds of invading aliens and soldiers sent by a corrupt government. In Quake 3, he is a normal human battling a legion of zombies. These games are not about slaughtering victims but about killing monsters.
Video games are most threatening to adults who have seen images of them but never tried to play them. When I first saw the games, I saw animated people being blown away by the dozen. But in just a few minutes of play, I saw that the whole point of the game is suspense: “I” was in constant danger and had to battle through overwhelming odds to survive. The experience of shooting an opponent is one of relief, not cruelty. One teenager put it simply:“The purpose of the blood is just so you can see if you’ve hit your target. You need to be able to tell that to play the game.”
I went into this research expecting to find that kids were processing rage through their games, and that’s what the psychologists and psychiatrists I spoke with told me to look for. It made sense: if a kid wants to shoot holes in imaginary enemies, he must be blowing off anger about something. Certainly there are angry gamers. Several therapists have brought me cases of young people who have suffered abuse at home or at school and have, consciously or not, turned to video games as a safe arena in which to act out fantasies of retribution. Dr. Craig Anderson, who has testified before Congress and other governmental bodies as one of psychology’s leading critics of media violence, has revealed that he has been the object of so many raging e-mails from gamers who resent his criticism of their hobby that he’s begun to fear for his safety. In such cases, the games may not contribute to the anger, but they don’t seem to dispel it either. As I got to know more gamers, however, I began to realize I wasn’t seeing much rage. I was seeing a fair amount of tension, repression, and irritability–but never the fury or dissociation or seething depression of some of the kids I’d met who were into gangster rap, death rock, or real guns.
Even in crowded, low-budget downtown arcades gamers tend to be quiet, patient, and self-contained. I once watched a quartet of black high school kids in an arcade in a working-class California city. The two boys made a point of being absolutely cool and composed, whether they were shooting bad guys or choosing their next game. The girls were more playful. One, in a glitter-paint “Diva” t-shirt and cornrows, fought her way through a level, put her hand on her hip, drew her gun back effetely like James Bond, and chirped, “Damn I’m bad!”They were all politely intrigued when I introduced myself and told them what I was researching. I asked what they got out of gaming. “It’s fun!” said the girls together. “It feels good to be good,” said one of the boys. And did they ever get involved in real violence? The other boy smiled condescendingly.“We’re not stupid,” he said. When I ask gamers what they feel when they decide to play a first-person shooter, most have a hard time identifying an emotional state at all, but those who do never mention anger. They talk about tension and boredom beforehand, suspense and excitement during the battle.
An adult gamer, Oscar Munoz, finally made sense of it for me: “You can’t be angry when you play a video game. You have to be calm, or you’re going to get wasted. I’ve played against other gamers who get pissed, overreact on the controls, and it’s over. It’s like softball. You’re seething with rage at the pitcher and you think, I’m gonna cream that ball, and what happens, you overswing. It’s all about being alert, focused, but loose, having fun. Staying cool, even when guys are coming at you with guns.”
Munoz is a progressive political activist, an advocate for increasing the legal and political access of poor and nonwhite Americans, and a self-described “closet gamer.” “My buddies and I played a lot of Wolfenstein and Doom in high school,” he said. “We were inner-city kids, not great athletes, we wanted to have something that was ours. We didn’t want to get in trouble but we didn’t want to be geeks. The games were our thing. They were hard, and they were bloody, and a lot of the jocks and tough guys got into them, too. But we played better than them. That gave us something.” In college Munoz thought he should be more serious, so he put his games away. Pretty soon, though, he discovered that they were his best avenue to relieve stress. When he chose politics as a career, he started using them regularly to wind down, especially after difficult wranglings with city governments and community programs. He discovered that some of his fellow activists felt the same, and they brought a game console into their offices.“Our work is very intense, high-stakes, detail-driven. We need to blow off steam at the end of the day. We bond over them, too–shared suspense, shared laughs. Our work piles up a lot of annoyances between us, and we need those out of there to keep going.”
A screenwriter named Sam Hamm, writer of Tim Burton’s Batman and Henry Selick’s Monkeybone, was one of the few adult game players I knew in the early 1990s, when the first wave of sophisticated shooter games was coming out.“Doom is the only game I’ve seen,” he said, “that has the real quality of a dream.” He described the feeling of immersion in its unreal world, the almost unbearable tension of waiting for unseen attackers, the release of attack, counterattack, and moving on–or of “dying” and coming back to face the suspense again. The realism of the violence, he made clear, was essential to surrendering himself to the dream state.
Shauna is a high school junior and a gamer. She uses multiplayer consoles to play against friends in her room, and she goes on-line with her computer to play anonymous gamers on the Internet. She likes car-racing games and Gex, but she said that when she’s especially tense, as when she comes home from her part-time retail job, she prefers what she calls “realistic fantasy games.” Some of those are shooters, some are adventures like Oni Musha, in which a samurai battles monsters, demons, and evil warriors in medieval Japan. When the samurai swords hit their marks, blood flies and limbs roll. “It’s a world I can go into,” she said. “With movie-quality graphics and realistic gore, everything looks real enough for me to feel like I’m there. It’s spooky, things I’d never want to see in reality. But that’s why it’s such a good fantasy. I am that warrior, I’m in that world, but I can handle anything.”
Then there’s that function of gore that has attracted teens and preteens as long as commercial entertainment has existed: to make them feel tough and grown up. I know a boy named Jake who announced when he was twelve that he wanted Half-Life. He’d read a review in a gaming magazine that said it was the most sophisticated shooter game yet, with great game play, significant replay value–and luridly rendered bloodshed. His favorite video game until then was Starcraft, and his favorite part of it was designing the “game maps” with a friend, hours of collaborative world-building to which the climactic spaceship battle was only a punctuation mark. Otherwise his tastes ran to Disneyland, Weird Al Yankovic, Mystery Science Theater, and his pet cat. He was a strong-willed kid, and he had regular conflicts with his mom, his bossy older sister, and occasionally even his mellow dad, but his anger was appropriate and well expressed. The family was close, and he got along well in school. Suddenly, though, he wanted to shoot animated soldiers and watch the blood fly.
“What do you like about that?” I asked him. “Gore!” he said. “Why?” I asked. “It’s cool!” he cackled. Jake would tell whoever listened that he loved gore. It made his mother squirm. It bugged his sister, who found everything about the culture of young boys annoying. It drew expressions of bemusement from his father, who liked to read Jane Austen, listen to Bill Evans, and avoid roller coasters, hard rock, and anything else too viscerally disturbing. Until then, Jake had been the little kid in the family who was squeamish about spiders and afraid of the skeletons in the Indiana Jones ride. Suddenly, as he found himself heading for the disquieting new world of adolescence, he wanted to be the tough guy. His parents understood that and had faith in him. They told him that if he still wanted Half-Life when he turned thirteen, they’d get it for him. They were true to their word, and for a month or so he virtually lived to play Half-Life.
When I talked to him six months later, however, he said his favorite game was again Starcraft. He still liked Half-Life, but only enough to play it about once a week. I asked him if he was losing interest in the gore. He snorted, as only a thirteen-year-old can snort. “I’m not into the gore,” he said. “You were,” I said. “I was not,” he said. He insisted that he was into the game play, the difficulty of the levels, the strategy, the suspense. The more adult-oriented games are the most challenging to play, and they also happen to have the most gore. The “gore level” of most games can be adjusted, he explained, and he always set them to “normal.” “I tried ‘low,’” he said, echoing other gamers I’ve talked to, “but then you can hardly see the blood. You can’t tell if you hit your target or not.”
I asked him why he doesn’t set them to “high,” and he answered, “It’s distracting. And just kind of . . .weird.” He told me that he only knows one other kid who sets the gore to “high,” because he thinks it’s funny. But Jake finds him “weird,” too. I asked, “You’re telling me you find the gore disturbing?”“A little bit,” he said quietly. He added that he knows other kids who feel the same. When I asked why he thinks the gore is there, he rallied with a bit of adolescent bravado: “It’s part of violence, right? It would be a lie not to have it. And violence has been afflicting our society for thousands of years. It’s what’s on people’s minds.” I asked him if it’s on his mind. Quieter again: “Well. Yeah. I mean, people commit violence all the time. It’s on the news constantly.”
When I asked him about Columbine Jake gave me a response that could have come from an editorial in a gaming magazine: “Those games have been played by millions of people, and only two of them did that. Only two out of millions. I’d say the problem was with those two people, not the games.” Then I asked him if he ever thought about school shootings when he played. “Welllllll,” he said, and I heard that same impishness in him that I heard months ago when he first told me that gore was cool. “One of my friends and I spent a long time trying to create an Unreal Tournament level based on our school!” As much as I trusted Jake, that raised the little hairs on the back of my neck. I asked him why, and he said, “The architecture at my school is really strange. The walls are orange and blank, and the bars in the gates look like they were built to withstand a nuclear war. It looks like a prison.” I asked him if he felt confined there. “Not much,” he said. “We just thought it would be exciting to have the whole place torn inside-out by this ultimate death battle!”
The daily tension of school can be intense for a sensitive kid, and few experiences would be as liberating as turning that school “inside out.” In the consequence-free fantasy of a game, kids can make themselves grown-up, powerful, and free to blow the walls off their daily prison. After a game like that, the real school might be much more likable. This is a very different use of pretend violence than the calming of anxieties through repetition–but an equally helpful one. The same child may use games to contain his feelings at some times, and to act them out at others.
Gore, as we’ve seen, has many functions. It can express hostility. “Duke Nukem was obviously a game designed by a guy who couldn’t get girls to go out with him when he was thirteen,” said Dallas Mid-daugh, “and this was his way of saying, ‘Take that!’” It can provide a powerful compensation for young people who feel especially frustrated by a culture of restraint; kids who don’t feel free to act up in real life can feel a great release when they blow an enemy apart. It can release tension around subjects that polite conversation doesn’t allow us to explore; a bloody video game can seem honest, fearless, and refreshing for confronting what adults are squeamish about. It can help young people set themselves apart from parental society and bond with their peers.
It can also add a quality of “realism” to play that helps older children and teenagers immerse themselves in it. The fantasy states these gamers describe remind me of playing “war” in the front yard with my friends when I was eight or nine. Although all I saw in reality were my friends groaning and falling down, what I saw in my mind was as bloody as anything in today’s video games. I knew that people bled and died in real wars. I knew my father had fought in the war. I remember asking him once if he’d really killed anyone–and hoping that the answer would be no. When I was young I could play through my mingled excitement, curiosity, and discomfort. By the age of ten, though, it was no longer possible to lose myself in the game. Suddenly I didn’t see bullets and blood in my mind’s eye; I saw myself as a goofy-looking kid running around yelling on the lawn. Video games allow people to go on playing past the age of self-consciousness.
The danger of these games is that by enabling people to immerse themselves so completely in play, they may make it hard to climb back out. The typical video-gamer plays only five or six hours a week, and the activity most often sacrificed in favor of gaming is television watching. But there are gamers who play five or six hours a day, who sacrifice their social lives and school performance and every other constructive activity. This seems to be most true of fantasy role-playing games, in which players become unique characters on the Internet and participate in long adventures and relationships with other gamers. But among standard video games, the first-person shooter games seem more likely than most to take the place of some gamers’ real lives. They create such a viscerally compelling but controllable reality that the quiet tensions and messy ambivalence of reality can become increasingly unbearable by contrast. Gamers tell me about going into a “tournament” with the intention of passing a few minutes and finding that two hours have suddenly gone by. Some take that as a reminder to manage their time more consciously. Others go back in at the first opportunity.
“Some of my adolescent patients speak of being ‘addicted’ to video games,” said Lynn Ponton.“I don’t like to use the word addiction, but it is habitual behavior. They use video games to contain their anxiety. And the games will do that for them for quite a while. But with time they can also desensitize them. The players need more and more stimulation to contain their anxieties, which not only keeps them from dealing with the causes of their anxiety but can actually increase their anxieties.”
Psychiatrist Nancy Marks has also seen patients who seem to play video games instead of living.“For many people it’s a way of avoiding the real existential issues, the angst, of life,” she said. “They may try to deal with their pain and anxiety through the surrogate selves of these games, but there’s really no way to work through significant issues in a game, not unless someone is sitting there talking to you about what you’re doing in the game and what that might mean about your real life. These games can be constructive as long as the players know they’re playing and come back to real life. But some people forget that this is just play.”
Too often we just dismiss gamers, let them retreat into isolation, or chase them away by worrying too much about their gaming. Doctors Ponton and Marks both have stressed the power of communication. Ponton has advocated trying to play the games occasionally with the kids, which she does with both her daughters and her patients. “I don’t usually last long at the games,” she confessed. “But beating mom or Dr. Ponton makes them feel good in its own way and can ease some of the barriers between us.” If a parent can’t stand to play the game, just being available can help young people resurface. If a teenager disappears into his room for too many hours at the expense of the rest of life, consider moving the game console into the family room.“Sometimes,” Ponton said, “it can be helpful to young people just to have a parent nearby, reading or balancing the checkbook.”
When parents aren’t available, teachers, friends, or any interested party can help habitual gamers integrate their fantasies with real life just by communicating with them about the games. Simply talking about the games calmly and respecting young people’s passion for them, whether that means discussing them in schools or putting them in public places, will help open the door for gamers to connect more meaningfully with society at large. I contrast Jimmy, the boy from Pennsylvania who felt so ostracized by his teachers’ reactions to his games, with Richard, the Quaker youth worker playing Quake 3 at a public conference. Fear and hostility can make any entertainment problematic; communication and empathy can help make any entertainment constructive.
We are frightened by the images we see in the games, and so we become frightened of the people who love them, which makes us shove those people further from us and induces them to play the games more often and in greater isolation. Because the hobby looks bizarre to us, we seek evidence of its effects in bizarre events. “It’s true that crime rates in general have gone down,” said New York State Senator Michael Balboni in the course of his campaign for video-game regulation. “But according to a detective on the New York City Police Force I was speaking to, certain types of crimes are up. Beheadings are up. Burnings are up. These are the types of violence portrayed in these games. Is this a coincidence?” The question is a misdirection. Horrific, sadistic crimes have been with us for centuries, many of them perpetrated by adolescents. The 1924 Leopold and Loeb case, in which two wealthy young men murdered a younger boy mostly just to prove they could get away with it, sparked debates about the new generation of soulless youth and the pernicious influence of movies, jazz, and liberal education. But from the distance of time, it’s clear that the cruelty of those two boys did not reflect any trend or pattern. There is no evidence to support the fear that video games have increased the amount or changed the nature of crime anywhere.
We are troubled by the idea of repetition. We fear that if kids do something over and over again in play they’re more likely to replicate it in life. But the evidence suggests that repeated play is usually a good tool to diminish the power of their thoughts and feelings, not to strengthen them. We’re also troubled by the thought of kids playing actively with disturbing images. But the example of video games suggests that kids’ ability to write their own “scripts” and build their own “maps” gives them more control over those images. This is why I feel that the Joint Statement may have had it exactly backward when it suggested that video games “may be even more harmful” than other media. There do seem to be cases of movies and songs exacerbating young people’s aggression or providing them scripts for acting out, but not games. Because games are so obviously artificial, so completely the player’s tool, they are the medium least capable of inspiring any powerful emotion beyond the thrills of the playing itself. If they condition children to do anything, it’s only to play more–which may be their one real pitfall.
Even if video games have inspired some acts of real violence, trying to prevent such incidents by restricting access to the games is an absurd and potentially dangerous idea. As the examples of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs have shown us, trying to restrict access usually means that the young people most fascinated with them will still get them, but they’ll have to be covert in their use. They won’t be able to work them into an open social life, won’t discuss them with their parents, and will be even more likely to disappear into their rooms with them. They’ll see themselves as outlaws just by playing the game. Already branding themselves “bad kids” because they play a forbidden game, they’ll have been pushed one step closer to allowing themselves to do something really bad. What’s true of the older forms of entertainment violence is true of this unsettling new one. All of us–parents, teachers, policymakers, children–will benefit not from more control but from more understanding.
When one of my articles was published, a reader responded: “My husband and I were at the Cliff House in San Francisco and I saw an Asian teenager playing that video game in which the player is supposed to destroy a peaceful Southeast Asian village. I wanted to jerk the controls out of his hands and ask him if he had any idea what he was doing! Didn’t he know what messages this was sending him about his own history, about his own culture, about the cost of violence in the world?”
I answered that I understood; I came of age politically abhorring the Vietnam War, and I find glorification and trivialization of it appalling. But I pointed out that there’s an arrogance, too, in thinking that a middle-aged white person’s noblest response is to jerk the controls out of the boy’s hands. That kid knows more about being a teenager and an Asian-American in contemporary America than we ever will. The only message jerking the controls from him will send is that adults don’t care what he likes or why. Instead, we should ask the kid why he wants to play that game. I don’t know what he would say, but we should ask. And I believe something good will come from the asking alone.