Fun Inc. (8 page)

Produces of online games, meanwhile, are making very considerable efforts to ensure that their products offer strictly controlled environments as far as children and other vulnerable users are concerned. Take, for example, the British company Mind Candy, who produce one of the world’s leading online social games for children,
Moshi Monsters
(the game itself involves looking after, and showing off, a virtual pet monster). Its CEO, Michael Smith, is clear in his insistence that ensuring abusive adults and cyber-bullies can’t take advantage of their game is their highest priority as a company. ‘Like most of the industry, we take extreme care over this. Everything that is said between players in the game is viewed in public channels: there is no ability to communicate with anyone privately. We have a team of moderators who look over everything that is said and written in the game; children don’t give out their real names, or any personal identifying information.’ And what about financial exploitation? ‘The game is designed to be played for free, although you can get premium content for about £3 per month. And it’s designed to be played with parental input, so children can only play after their parents have separately approved this.’ It is, he explains, impossible to pay more than £3 per month to play, and there is no use of what Smith calls the ‘ethically more fragile model’ of advertising.

Moshi Monsters
won a National Parenting Publications Award for its work, but its standards are typical of online games aimed specifically at children, a global market that runs well past the hundred million mark in terms of users. Their business model, after all, relies on both the goodwill of parents and strict adherence to ratings guidelines. As Smith puts it, ‘It is frustrating, because people outside of the industry don’t understand it. The internet is far more important to younger children than television: it’s a no-brainer for the new generation. There are now hundreds of millions of children around the world playing safely online; they’re safer there than they are on their way to school or in a playground. We can’t and shouldn’t give unfiltered access to children: they do need limits, they do need supervision. Every responsible designer needs to be aware of this, and everyone that I’ve come across is.’

It’s a refrain that comes up again and again within the industry: responsible design is about ensuring strict adherence to ratings guidelines, and about knowing your audience. But it’s also all about your audience knowing you. As Michael Rawlinson, general manager of the world’s longest-established trade association representing video games publishers (the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association), put it to me: ‘There does seem to be a point with video games that parents are seen as having no responsibility, and everything is up to the industry. That is ridiculous. We need to encourage parents, and everyone else, to learn more about gaming and play their part. And I think that is happening, as we see the notion of gaming as part of the family lifestyle becoming normalised.’ Some sectors of the games industry are extremely well designed for use by children; others cater for an ever-widening diversity of adult tastes. It’s just as misleading to think of all modern games as essentially children’s toys as it would be to think of all films as suitable for children.

Despite the almost universal prevalence of age ratings, the relationship between violence in games and violence in life is one debate that’s unlikely to die down any time soon. And this is in part because it’s something that is only too easy to imagine in terms that go well beyond what we’re now used to in other media forms. Consider a game like those in the bestselling
Medal of Honor
series: first-person experiences in which absorbing, interactive environments, realised with ultra-realistic graphics and sounds, evoke warfare in such detail that it can virtually be smelt. The weapons on the screen look and sound exactly like the real things, and are seen as if through the eyes of the soldier a player controls, ducking and diving their way through the campaigns of the Second World War, slaughtering enemies as they go. It’s easy enough to understand why this kind of interactive pursuit is seen as a level beyond video-nasties in the corruption-of-youth stakes, and it generates a number of intransigent questions that mustn’t be brushed aside even by the most ardent defenders of gaming. What exactly is the relationship between game violence and real-world violence? And is the likelihood that a certain number of inappropriately young people will play certain games so awful that these games should not be allowed to exist?

As far as the first of these questions is concerned, scientific studies can often seem confusing to the point of contradiction, which should come as no surprise to students of any of the media/violence controversies of the past half-century. In 2007, however, one unusually authoritative paper appeared in the peer-reviewed US journal
Psychiatric Quarterly
(entitled ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: A Meta-analytic Review of Positive and Negative Effects of Violent Video Games’) that provided hitherto unprecedented clarity on the issue. Its author, Dr Christopher John Ferguson, an assistant professor of psychology at Texas A&M International University, set out to compare every article published in a peer-reviewed journal between 1995 and April 2007 that in some way investigated the effect of playing violent video games on some measure of aggressive behaviour. A total of seventeen published studies matched these criteria – and Ferguson’s conclusions were unexpectedly unequivocal. ‘Once corrected for publication bias,’ he reported, ‘studies of video game violence provided no support for the hypothesis that violent video game-playing is associated with higher aggression.’ Moreover, he added, the question ‘do violent games cause violence?’ is itself flawed in that ‘it assumes that such games have only negative effects and ignores the possibility of positive effects’ such as the possibility that violent games allow ‘catharsis’ of a kind in their players.

This, for many people, is sufficiently radical stuff to provoke considerable scepticism. And, indeed, 2008 saw a rather different case being made by a peer-reviewed longitudinal study of violence in games published in the US journal
Pediatrics
. A joint venture between American and Japanese academics, this paper (‘Longitudinal Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggression in Japan and the United States’) argued that, across three samples of Japanese and American secondary school pupils examined at two points in time over a period of three to six months, ‘habitual violent video game play early in the school year predicted later aggression, even after controlling for gender and previous aggressiveness in each sample’. The authors thus recommended ‘reducing the exposure of youth to this risk factor’. What are we to make of contradictions like this?

One nation that already seems to have taken the most radical anti-games school of advice to heart is Germany, where in June 2009 leaders of all sixteen German states voted to ban entirely all games ‘where the main part is to realistically play the killing of people or other cruel or inhuman acts of violence against humans or manlike characters’. Germany has always been strict in its regulation of games, and the ban is a direct consequence of the shootings that occurred in a German school in March 2009, when a seventeen-year-old ex-pupil, Tim Kretschmer, killed nine pupils and three teachers before turning the gun on himself. Kretschmer, it was widely reported, spent a large amount of time playing first-person-shooter video games, and there were suggestions that these had somehow ‘trained’ him to perpetrate the massacre.

The case is, like all such occurrences, a rare and extremely disturbing one. Yet attempts to trace a causal relationship between violent games and real-life killings tend, at best, to be misleading, and at worst simply to be inaccurate scapegoating. Adam Lewitt, writing in
The Sunday Times
, was typical in his description of ‘remarkable parallels’ between the bestselling game
Far Cry 2
and the killings. ‘In the game it is essential to hijack cars to move around,’ he explained (which it isn’t); ‘characters in the game … wear black camouflage uniforms – the clothing Kretschmer wore’ (almost none of them do); ‘Most sinister of all,
Far Cry
2’s killer uses a Beretta 92 handgun, the weapon fired 112 times by Kretschmer’ (no Beretta handgun appears in the game); the game ‘also rewards players who shoot their victims in the head, the style of killing chosen by Kretschmer’ (it doesn’t). Perhaps more relevant was the large supply of guns the boy’s father kept at home, the fact that his father had been taking him shooting since the age of eight, and his recent depression. But such reasons are less incendiary fuel for speculation.

Although it grabs occasional headlines, the case in favour of video games directly causing violence is one that it’s increasingly difficult to take seriously. With over 90 per cent of Western adolescents now playing video games to some degree, it’s hard to see how a near-universal pattern of behaviour can, in any meaningful sense, predict a rare occurrence of violent, let alone murderous, behaviour. Moreover, when it comes to the most comprehensive study of high-school shootings ever undertaken (a 2002 study by the US Secret Service and Department of Education, investigating thirty-seven such incidents between 1974 and 2000), it transpires that only
59
per cent of the perpetrators took even ‘some interest’ in violent media of any kind; and that, among these media, video games were the least significant, with only 12 per cent of subjects expressing an attraction towards them. Even taking into account only the incidents that occurred after 1989, by which year ‘violent’ games could safely be said to have become widespread, a mere 15 per cent of perpetrators were noted to have shown any interest in violent games.

Of course, more sensible critics of violent games will reply that, while it’s largely meaningless to look for a direct causal relationship between violent games and incidents of violent crime, it is reasonable to suppose that an interactive medium that allows people to shoot at other (virtual) people within highly realistic settings may help to create a culture of desensitisation towards violence. It’s a theory that’s not readily susceptible to either proof or disproof, but it has a ring of common sense to it – something that it shares with the most commonly heard arguments against graphic depictions of violence in any medium. Socially and morally, it is argued, such depictions (and, in the case of games, enactments) have a coarsening effect on their audience – as well as a potentially far more dangerous degree of influence on vulnerable individuals. Is this true?

This feeling of decline may strike an emotional chord with many, but it is hard to bear out statistically. The consumption of video games – including, naturally, violent ones – has increased by several thousand per cent since the start of the 1990s. Yet violent crime in the US, the EU, Canada and Australia has decreased dramatically over this same period. Among the generation who have grown up playing video games in America, rates of violent crime are the lowest in recorded history. Tens of millions of video games are now sold and played each year, compared to none whatsoever fifty years ago, and yet ‘gaming’ societies have yet to fall into any kind of an abyss – at least as far as violence is concerned.

Is there, nevertheless, an aesthetic and moral case to be made for the banning of violent and explicit media? In one sense, versions of the same case have been made for the last century or more – against novels, comic books, rock music, and indeed against almost anything that seeks to represent aspects of life and society that some people view as shameful, undesirable, antisocial or corrupting. The case for age restrictions, and for restrictions on some extremities of content, is one that all sides are willing to concede and debate. So far as censorship in general is concerned, however, one of the most eloquent and definitive ripostes to the notion that society has a duty to censor violent media was given by Judge Richard A Posner in his 2001 ruling on an Indianapolis city ordinance that had sought to restrict children’s access to violent arcade games. ‘To shield children right up to the age of eighteen from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming,’ declared Posner. ‘It would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it. Maybe video games are different. They are, after all, interactive. But this point is superficial, in fact erroneous. All literature (here broadly defined to include movies, television and the other photographic media, and popular as well as highbrow literature) is interactive; the better it is, the more interactive. Literature when it is successful draws the reader into the story, makes him identify with the characters, invites him to judge them and quarrel with them, to experience their joys and sufferings as the reader’s own … It is conceivable that pushing a button or manipulating a toggle stick engenders an even deeper surge of aggressive joy, but of that there is no evidence at all.’

To deny the link between games and violence in society is not, however, to say that gaming is a medium without its hazards. For, despite its headline-grabbing potential, it’s not the research on violence that gets to one of the most troubling aspects of video games. For this, we must look to a far more statistically robust phenomenon – and one not only disapproving social watchdogs but also gamers themselves acknowledge as one of their pastime’s greatest hazards: addiction.

The word ‘addiction’ itself is a loaded one. For many people, it conjures images of physical, mental and moral decline; of gaunt figures hungering for their next fix, less than fully in control of their own lives and minds. It’s an image that doesn’t much resemble most people’s experience of video gaming. Yet almost anyone who has played games at all seriously will acknowledge that their compelling nature – and the problematic relationship some users have with this – raises a number of questions that cannot easily be dismissed.

There have already been several attempts to define ‘video games addiction’ as a psychological condition, including an effort to have it admitted to the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the definitive global guide to mental health. This effort was abandoned due to a lack of evidence, but considerable research continues in the field, with the comparison to other behavioural addictions and compulsive behaviours – from gambling to shopping – shedding some light on the more extreme end of the spectrum. Contrary to the claims of some critics, however, playing video games is categorically not analogous to taking drugs or drinking to excess. While a game may be said to act like a drug in the compelling pleasure it gives, the behavioural mechanics of gaining pleasure from games are the very opposite of the passive process of ingesting a substance and waiting for it to act. It is action, coupled with challenges, incentives and constant feedback, that makes gaming what it is.