Pessimistic Politics: Violence in Video Games: An Issue as New as the Bubonic Plague

Okay, if you’ve lived in America and watch, read, or get the news from your co-workers (who, by the way, wouldn’t mind if you told your boss “news” that was wildly inaccurate so you look like a hump), you’ve probably caught some mention of the hot topic of violence in video games and how it affects our children today. If not, go over to Joe Lieberman’s house, knock on the door, and ask him what he thinks. He won’t answer, but we know what his two cents are anyway (hint: he hates video games).

Before I go on, I’ll state now that I have a unique perspective in all of this. Sure, you’ve probably heard some of these points more often than you would like, but stay with me here and we’ll get to the new stuff eventually. If you don’t, I’m going to create my own dancing hamsters section complete with the annoying song and lure you into it, and no one wants that, especially you.

The issues of video game violence stretches back longer than you think, but before going into that, I’ll put in my hypothesis about why video games are considered “children’s entertainment” and haven’t been able to get the artistic reorganization that movies and books have enjoyed. I’m not going to dwell deeply into the specifics, so if you want exact facts, go to www.classicgaming.com or check the Net for plenty of good resources on video game history.

Video games started out as a scientific experiment in the mid-fifties that eventually evolved from analog routines to digital success with the first mainstream commercial release of Pong in 1972. From there, video games transformed from simple raster and vector graphic displays to more complicated raster (you know, pixels and the like) graphics that didn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out what they were supposed to be.

As games started to get more numerous, with better graphics and more complex play mechanisms, the designers really started to throw in the kitchen sink, which meant some intense violence and gore. I’ll take a second to state that in the mid-seventies, there was a racing game, Death Race, if I remember correctly, that involved running over little human/gremlin things, and was one of the first titles to get banned. It probably wasn’t all that significant, but I thought I’d point it out.

The games of the eighties were a little more intense than the pixel-tastic Death Race, with titles like Smash TV and its sequel Total Carnage ushering in a new era of games featuring intense violence. It wasn’t until Mortal Kombat rolled around in the nineties, however, that things really took a turn. That and a full-motion video game called Night Trap caused a big stir in the political community, which pointed out that these games (Mortal Kombat more so, since people actually played that one) would cause children to act violently. The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) and a rating system spawned out of the mess in 1994 (even though Sega had been using one of its own before), both of which are still around today.

After that, it was pretty clear that some video games were for adults and some were for kids, right? Not so fast. Politicians and parental groups were still whining about how children had ready-access to these games, even though the rating system was in place. As developers wanted to push the envelope for content, the voices of the naysayers grew louder. Since the days of Mortal Kombat, our games include more intense violence, sexuality in the mainstream, and more mature themes, such as being asked to assume the role of the bad guy and do very bad things. You know, the stuff other media industries have been doing for years.

But, of course, the whiners don’t see it like that. They see children’s toys being used to coax the youth of America into a life of evil. That’s one of the problems that video games have to overcome. Despite all of the rich stories, rendered cinematics, and high production values, video games are still considered toys and not works of art. This is probably in part of their newness and the fact that, due to hardware limitations, there arguably hasn’t been much chance to express “art” before Final Fantasy VII came in and showed everyone what RPGs were going to be like from now on. The industry is still growing, despite the fact that it could overshadow the movie industry in revenue earned any day now.

Despite this, video games are still looked at as disposable entertainment and should be treated as such. How else could you explain the whiners going on about the Grand Theft Auto series, with its violent, sexual, and crime-ridden themes (and allegations of racism, thanks to the infamous “kill the Haitians” line in the fourth game), when we have countless movies that glamorize crime and the Mafia? We count the Godfather as an America classic, and we have Undercover Brother driving wedges between cultural differences that many are trying to heal. How can we chastise Leisure Suit Larry and its stated goal of a lovable loser trying to have sex when Sex in the City is so wildly popular and on television where the poor, victimized children can watch it and might learn about (oh, horrors!) the “grown-up world”? How can we blame DOOM for school shootings with the likes of Rambo and Scarface so engrained in our culture?

Yeah, yeah, video games are interactive, influencing children to do these bad things, but so can movies and television shows. There are those who argue that passive or interactive entrainment doesn’t actually affect children, and while that might seem to be the side I’m going to take, I have to declare that they are partially incorrect, because I know that when I was a kid, ninjas were the thing, and I sure as hell tried to act like one. I was influenced, but I also knew a valuable lesson: that was fantasy, and I was in reality. I never went to the playground with a lead pipe and re-created some of my favorite Battletoads fights, even though there were times that I wished I did. Don’t think you parents are off the hook, I’ll see you in my office later in the article.

Now that most of the whiners are now forced to concede to logic, I’ll state it clearly in case a few of you missed the point: if we censor video games or ban certain content from them, then we have to do it for all media in the world. Think about that the next time you want to watch a good action movie and all the characters have to either solve their problems by talking it out, or (in the case of a racy rated R movie) jump on their opponent’s head, causing them to disappear into a cloud of smoke forever.

With that, it’s to bring up a delightfully intelligent organization known as the National Institute on Media and the Family (NIMF), who, for the past nine years, have reported on the video game industry and how it is evil. Big surprise here, their 2004 report shows that the video game industry is still evil and won’t stop corrupting children. The NIMF can’t seem to get it through their skulls that adults actually do play video games and prefer a little grit with them, believing instead that the video game industry is making evil games just to spite them.

In the article about the report in February 2005 Game Informer, there is mention of a small organization with similar goals that made their own 2004 list. And in true gonzo zealot fashion, they preferred insanity over fact when it came to their report, citing evil games that either weren’t out yet, were released years ago, or didn’t really exist. Oh, it was a church organization, too.

Now all that is left for me to berate are the conservative whiners who want to ban everything in the world. I really wanted to leave religion out of this, but considering this country is founded on the principles of Christianity, it’s kind of hard to leave it alone. Most of you religious yahoos who condemn content you deem unsuitable really need to check your rulebook. The Bible is chalk full of offensive stuff, like conspiracies, violence, corruption, sexuality, and just plain evil. You don’t like the waves of bloodshed found in modern media? Then why the hell would you tell children about the hundreds of Egyptian soldiers who were torn apart by the Red Sea? Or how about King David’s lustful eye? Of course I know that there are lessons in all this and it’s because God said so, but give me a break. How are you supposed to tell your kids the violent media is bad and make them read the Bible? Sheesh.

But back to my main point. A lot of people seem to think that video game developers are using violent and sexual themes to exploit children and make them play their games. True, an edgy work of art has a lot more appeal than a benign, fluffy one, but I argue that these developers are creating a form of entertainment the way they see fit for an audience they want to target, which, believe it or not, is not always innocent and vulnerable children, despite the market potential. I know no amount of pleading on the developers’ behalf is going to get through America's conceded notions, so I’ll tell you first hand that we game creators create what we want because it is an art form and that’s what we want the canvas to look like.

That’s right, “we,” because I was responsible for a few full conversions for DOOM II on the PC a few years back. For those who you the modification community who are tittering because you don’t consider modding pre-existing games as qualifying yourself as being part of the development pool, I’ll pompously state that maybe your one or two Unreal Tournament maps don’t count you in, but I created three full conversions that played like DOOM, but had completely different themes.

Two of them were based on my life, or rather an exaggerated version of it. In fact, I think these two humble DOOM WADs had more of a chance to cause an uproar than most of what’s out there today (maybe even nudging GTA off the top slot) because of some of context. The violence wasn’t bad; how could it be with only a few dozen rows and columns of pixels to work with? It was the setting that could be troubling.

The first game was called Chris Zasada’s World WAD. The plot revolves around me taking on the malevolent forces of my evil aunt Esther, who sends them against me to prevent her destruction. Those minions are all based on people I know in real life, including friends, my Tech Prep class (who were all a tribe of primitive people known as the Tech Prepians, both in the game and real life), and one of worst teachers I ever had up until that point. The game involved me mowing down all these folks. Some of the levels took place in my high school (well, they were supposed to in the first game, but since I didn’t know how to use the mapping tools, I stole other people's maps; I apologize about that, by the way). The Tech Prepians even muttered perverse phrases (just like they did in real life), which added to the entire piece.

The sequel, the cleverly-titled Chris Zasada’s World WAD 2, featured many of the same enemies, but with all-new maps. This one was even more risqué, since I designed several of the maps to closely resemble parts of my high school, and they were convincing. The games starts out with the Tech Prepians invading the school dance, leaving many dead and a massive gun battle to be waged that eventually takes things to the roof. Later, it is revealed that all the girls at the dance were taken to have their life energy extracted for Esther’s revival, with the aid of evil tentacles (and you hentai aficionados know what that means, but honestly, it didn’t show anything, it was just the implication that was naughty). Yep, I was bad.

At first, I didn’t think the old WADs were that offensive, but after reflecting on the second one, I have to grant that they are kind of twisted. Even if you don’t think they’re all that bad (you sick, sick freak), consider that I was creating these during the era of the Columbine school shooting, an era where DOOM was considered a major factor in that tragedy. If the right people knew that I was so heavily involved with DOOM (hours upon hours for the development time over a period of a couple years overall), they would have locked me up the in the ward in no time. No, wait, it was public school, so they would have stuck me in the building where they put all the troubled kids and hope that I would lower the headcount.

Anyway, according to these whining concerned groups, I should have by all means used these games as a planning guide for my major offensive against the school. Shockingly, I never got past planning stages and even enjoyed my “planning” sessions with DOOM. Some circles might even call this “planning” “playing,” but we know those circles are nuts.

The funny part of all this is that I used Chris Zasada’s World WAD 2 and parts of my incomplete Bob’s Odyssey project for my big high school Senior year project, so I was actually sanctioned by the school to do these games for a grade. When I presented the project to the committee, I remembered when I was up presenting and thought that I should mention the issue of video game violence, which turned out to be the smart move. The only offense anyone took was the project to a story that I wrote based on the first game that I included in the project packet that mentioned a real-life Tech Prepian invention called, I am not making this up, the Dildo Mobile. The committee member questioned how appropriate that was for this project, and I explained that that actually happened, as if that would make it all better.

The two World WADs were an absolute blast to work on. I enjoyed working on them almost every time I got a chance to, and when they were finally complete, I could only stand back and stare in awe at my work. They weren’t perfect, but to me they were, and I couldn’t have been prouder. There wasn’t even the slightest intention of influencing children to gun down their classmates or a suggestion for the adolescent set to rape women. It was all about achieving a humorous, twisted, and, overall, enjoyable experience that was unlike any other. The kicker is that I had no profit at stake, no riches awaiting me if I made a game so shocking that everyone had to buy it. CZWW was a free game available to those who could download it, and except for a small ego boast, I had nothing to gain if it did become a hit. It was just fun to do.

Given the opportunity, however, I would bring the CZWW universe into the modern commercial gaming world with all the bells and whistles. I would expect a lot of the whiners to claim that I’m trying to corrupt the youth of America, and all I would do is shrug my shoulders and say, to effect, “I wanted to make a unique experience that people can sit back and enjoy. It may be racy, but people like it, I like it, and if you don't, fine, but don’t make my work out to be your adversary.”

But it will probably never happen, so if I’m going to leave my mark on this argument, I better offer my solutions. My end-all solution, of course, is that the religious fanatics shut up, go to church, and enjoy their lives as they see fit while leaving the rest of us alone, but since that will only make them shout louder, I had better come up with a better solution, so let’s take what we have and work with it.

Since we already have those keen ESBR ratings that are far more accurate than movie and television ratings, let’s actually put this to good use. Parents: on the covers of video games, there are little letters in the corner that say “E,” “T,” “M,” and, in rare cases, “EC” and “AO.” Here’s how it works: “E” is for “Everyone,” meaning basically kids and adults of all ages that have the motor skills to play a video game, and the game may contain some mild violence that is unrealistic. “T” is for “Teen,” meaning that the player should actually be a teenager to play, and these games can feature some realistic violence, harsh language, and suggestive themes. “M” is for “Mature,” meant for players seventeen (that’s 17, not 7) and up, and these games feature realistic violence and gore, strong language, and the occasional mature sexual theme and nudity. On the extreme end, there is “EC” or “Early Child,” safe games for pre-schoolers, and “AO” or adults only, meaning games ONLY FOR ADULTS.

So here’s the deal: if you buy your kids games that are “too mature” for them and you find something objectionable, fill your bathtub with water, stick your head in, and take a deep breath. Wait, don’t do that. Also, don’t write to the game companies or the senators or the church about how the game is evil and corrupting your children and it should be kept from everyone in the world, Just lay in bed at night thinking about how you are a bad parent who should have your children taken away from you.

Or you can be responsible and pay attention to the ratings. Better yet, have a talk with your kids and make sure they know what’s real and what’s fantasy. It may sound idiotic, but at least you’ve covered your bases. Make some rules for them about gaming, monitor what they’re playing, and think long and hard if about whether or not they’re ready to play games that are deemed too mature for their age group. Ratings aren’t set in stone and some kids are more mature than others, so it’s your call, because you’re the parent.

Do not take the defeated attitude that you can’t control what your kids play, especially in the house, because you may as well let them smoke crack and have wild orgies for all the parental sway you’re going to have with other matters. Remember: your house, your rules, and if the kids are too immature to handle responsibility, they don’t get it. Simple. Now get to it.

Kids, listen to your parents, they were kids once too. They’re just stupider now because they had you. Once parents have children, the experience a brain spike that deletes all memories of when they were irresponsible. They also had to be idiots when they raised you, because all you gave in return for their love and affection was spit-up and soiled diapers. It’s your fault, so listen to them, grow up, and you might be able to play racier games if they feel you can handle it. And if you have parents that are complete loons, well, there’s always the sweet vengeance of the retirement home in the horizon.

Retailers, take a look at the ratings above and enforce them. Remember: they card at movie theaters; so should you. Card the kids to make sure they don’t buy something that they’re not supposed to, and make sure the parents know what to look out for, because you can’t do a thing about it if they buy the game for their kids. If they complain to you about it, you’re in the right for denying the kids an item that they shouldn’t have, and if the parents want to give their kids that item, they either trust them or are idiots. Once the parents are involved, it’s out of your hands, but you did your best.

To the game developers: keep it up. You’re jobs are tough, and I say that just from my experience with amateur work. You have a right to express what you can while still making a fun and profitable product. Sure, some of the content in video games is a part of humanity we don’t want to admit is there, but we enjoy it and leave it in the game. You guys aren’t the problem, don’t act like you are. You have the First Amendment by your side.

Speaking of First Amendment, you whiners out there would probably be lynched by now if it wasn’t in place, because video games are big business for the companies and the government in the form of taxes. Despite the profit inlvolved, game developers are artists and craftsmen (or, to be politically correct, craftspersons) who create entertainment as they see fit. They don’t get paid a lot and they work way too hard, but they love it, and that’s why they keep doing it (kind of like how I’m entertaining you people for free). Parents have more power than you care to admit, and kids have more common sense than you give them credit for. Let the developers do the developing, the parents do the parenting, the kids do the playing, and you whiners stop whining and make the world a better place in a more productive way. And if you want all artistic expression, including the expressions of violence and sex, to be done away with and the population turned into sinless drones, burn your Bibles first and then we’ll go to the bargaining table. Well, the others will. I’m going to be busy that day.

Do I think that I just made the world a better place? No, not really, because it’ll take the efforts of people to change their ways, and that’s more effort than they’re willing to expend. So to those who are willing to change for the better, I take my hat off to you. To the whiners, you better hope that you’re wrong about DOOM.