The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (74 page)
Authors: Steven Kent
From the start, an issue that came to the forefront of the hearings was concern about realistic-looking characters in games.
Street Fighter II
and even
Eternal Champions
, an especially violent fighting game for Genesis, were seldom if ever mentioned in the hearings. Neither were
Doom
or
Wolfenstein 3D.
The emphasis throughout the hearings was placed on games with digitized human images, that is,
Mortal Kombat, Night Trap
, and, toward the end of the hearings,
Lethal Enforcer.
Even the launch of an arcade game from Strata titled
Time Killers
, in which players hacked off each other’s limbs with swords, saws, and axes, went unnoticed.
The next panel member, Dr. Eugene Provenzo, Jr., was well known to video makers, having published a book called
Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo
, which took a critical look at the impact that video games had on children. “Video games are overwhelmingly violent, sexist, and racist,” he testified.
4
Now, if the video game industry is going to provide the foundation for the development of interactive television, then concerned citizens, parents, educators, and legislators have cause for considerable concern and alarm. During the past decade, the video game industry has developed games whose social content has been overwhelmingly violent, sexist, and racist—issues that I have addressed extensively in my research.
For example, in
Video Kids
, I explored the 47 most popular video games in America. What I found out was that violence was the main theme. Of the 47 most popular games—this is based on
Nintendo Power
polls, industry polls—40
had violence as their main theme. Of these 47 games, 13 included scenarios in which women were kidnapped and had to be rescued; i.e., the idea of women as victims. This represents a total of 30 percent of the games, a number which is even more revealing when we take into account that 11 of the 47 games were based on sports themes such as car racing and basketball.
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*—Eugene Provenzo, professor of social and cultural foundations of education, University of Miami
The most telling testimony came from Robert Chase of the National Education Association. Chase warned about the instinct to censor materials and cautioned against it, while at the same time decrying the level of violence in some games. Throughout his speech, Chase stood firmly behind the idea of a rating system that would provide parents with “appropriate tools for making reasonable judgments.” Then he made a statement that would later be echoed by much harsher and angrier critics.
Electronic games, because they are active rather than passive, can do more than desensitize impressionable children to violence. They actually encourage violence as the resolution of first resort by rewarding participants for killing one’s opponents in the most grisly ways imaginable.
6—Robert Chase, vice president, National Education Association
The last member of the panel was Marilyn Droz, whose testimony sounded more like an emotional plea than anything else. In the course of her testimony, Droz stated that “Girls are very offended by the lack of games for them to play” and that “playing video games has become a macho boy thing.”
The video industry has done the same thing that the movie industry has done. They have confused children’s desire for action with violence. My 23 years of working with children directly has proven to me that children want action,
they want excitement. They do not need to see the insides of people splattered against the wall to understand. You know, they need action, but they do not need to find murder as a form of entertainment.
7—Marilyn Droz, vice president, National Coalition on Television Violence
Once Droz finished her testimony, Senator Kohl asked the members of the expert panel what they would say to the industry panel if they had the chance. Page said that he would ask about marketing techniques and encourage game makers to focus on action rather than violence. Provenzo said that “by manufacturing games such as
Night Trap
,” the game companies were “endorsing violence.”
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He went on to say that there was an obligation to make good games and to stop confusing violence for entertainment. As a closing remark, Provenzo called for guidelines for parents—the rating system that Senator Lieberman had advocated from the start.
Given his chance to speak, Robert Chase said that he would leave them with a message of responsibility. Finally, Droz called for a ratings panel that included people from outside the industry. “I feel to allow them to police themselves when they have already demonstrated that they are out of control,” she said, “is like leaving a classroom in charge of the troublemaker.”
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Senator Lieberman asked Eugene Provenzo for examples of the video game racism he cited in his testimony and in his book.
In interviews with children, what I found was that they talked about the ninjas as being bad. Then you asked them about who ninjas were, and they were sort of like the Japs and the Chinese. It turns out that they perceive Asians, any Asians, as being extremely violent, as being dangerous, as being evil. It is operating at a very basic level and at times simplistic.
It carries over into other areas as well. There are depictions, I believe, although it is hard to prove, but my perception of homophobia operating in terms of how certain types of women are portrayed.
10—Eugene Provenzo
Throughout the question-and-answer period, the one game mentioned most was
Night Trap.
Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota started to comment that
the committee had the testimony of Tom Zito, “who is not with us,” when Zito interrupted him from the gallery, yelling, “I’m here, sir. I called, but there was no time to give a statement.”
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Reading the transcripts of the 1993 hearings, it is hard to believe that anybody had ever actually played
Night Trap.
Few people bothered to acknowledge that the goal of
Night Trap
was not to kill women but to save them from vampires. Players did not even kill the vampires—they simply trapped them in Rube Goldberg–like booby traps. Nearly everyone who referred to
Night Trap
mentioned a scene in which a girl in a rather modest teddy is caught by the vampires and killed. The scene was meant to show players that they had lost and allowed too many vampires into the house. When this was pointed out to Marilyn Droz, she responded:
Oh, it makes me feel a lot better that if you are a loser, you are dead? No, it doesn’t. We are dealing with self-esteem here. There are many magazines out there on the market like the several I brought in here today. These magazines are filled with game tips on how to play the game. In no time at all, children become winners and kill, and their kill ratio goes up. It tells them the secret codes and exactly what to do to become successful in murder.
My statement to people who feel that there is some value to these games is that if the Pentagon was to ever have suggested years ago that we put video games that teach children how to aim guns and train them at the age of eight to be soldiers, and ever invented a game to put in homes of young boys to train them to be in the military, I can’t begin to tell you … you know what kind uproar there would be in this country if our government was to start training early killers.
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After interviewing the panel of experts, the senators turned their attention to a panel of industry representatives that included Howard Lincoln, executive vice president of Nintendo of America; Bill White, Jr., vice president of Sega of America; Ilene Rosenthal of the Software Publishers Association; Dawn Wiener, president of the Video Software Dealers Association; and Craig Johnson of the Amusement and Music Operators Association. The battle that was about to transpire was, if nothing else, bizarre.
Howard Lincoln led off by stating that Nintendo was “just as concerned about the issue of violence, whether in the movies, television, or video games, as anyone in the room.”
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Having made the decision to edit the violence out of the Super NES version of
Mortal Kombat
, Lincoln entered the proceedings with an air of innocence. Senator Lieberman even offered Lincoln an air of courtesy that was not extended to the people from Sega.
Lincoln went on to extol his company’s virtuous endeavors. He said that thanks to the security chip, companies had to get Nintendo’s permission to create games for the NES and Super NES. “Nintendo has video game guidelines which control game content, and we have applied these to every one of the more than 1,200 games released into the market by Nintendo and its licensees.”
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In the past year, some very violent and offensive games have reached the market and, of course, I am speaking about
Mortal Kombat
and
Night Trap.
Let me say for the record, I want to state that
Night Trap
will never appear on a Nintendo System. Obviously, it would not pass our guidelines. This game, which, as you have indicated, promotes violence against women, simply has no place in our society.
15—Howard Lincoln
When Lincoln mentioned that Nintendo had been criticized by children and parents alike for “sanitizing”
Mortal Kombat
, Senator Lieberman interrupted him to ask about it. “We have received letters, we have received literally thousands of phone calls,”
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Lincoln responded.
If Lincoln was the welcomed guest, Bill White of Sega was the man on the hot seat. Both of the games that had prompted the hearings were made for Genesis, and without ever mentioning Sega, Lincoln had pointed a scathing finger at the company during his testimony. White tried to improve his company’s image by restating the vital information that Lincoln and the senators seemed to have ignored. He started by stating three points: Sega’s customer base was older and broader than the previous experts had suggested; Sega already had a rating system; and Sega was trying to encourage the rest of the industry to adopt a rating system.
In recent days, the glare of the media spotlight on this issue has resulted in the circulation of a number of distorted and inaccurate claims. The most
damaging of these distortions, in my view, is the notion that Sega and the rest of the digital interactive industry are only in the business of selling games to children. This is not the case.Yes, many of Sega’s interactive video titles are intended for and purchased by young children. Many other Sega titles, however, are intended for and purchased by adults for their personal entertainment and education. The average Sega CD user is almost 22 years old, and only 5 percent are under age 13. The average Sega Genesis user is almost 19 years old, and fewer than 30 percent are under age 13.
17—William “Bill” White, former vice president of marketing/communications, Sega of America
White went on to explain Sega’s “three-pronged approach” to informing parents. According to White, Sega not only placed ratings on all Genesis games but also included a toll-free hotline for consumers to get ratings, and informational brochures about the ratings were made available.
Listening to White, Howard Lincoln was apparently seething. Years later, Lincoln said, “I heard him saying these things that I knew he didn’t believe, and I’m not sure what came over me.” He sat quietly through Rosenthal’s, Wiener’s, and Johnson’s testimonies, preparing a response to Bill White. Lincoln’s anger may have been aroused by the way White tried to speak for the entire industry, and it may have been in response to the way he characterized Sega as being on the forefront of protecting children from adult material.
*
It may also have sprung from their past relationship. White had been Nintendo of America’s director of advertising and PR and had joined Sega a few months after an ugly split from Nintendo. Whatever his reasons, Lincoln waited until the question-and-answer period after Johnson’s testimony to speak.
Lieberman directed his first comment to White, stating that the clip he had seen of a woman being attacked in
Night Trap
was “gratuitous and offensive and ought not to be available to people in our society.”
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White responded by reiterating his message about the market maturing and the importance of
ratings. Senator Lieberman continued to pick at White, pinning him down on whether or not
Night Trap
was a product for adults, then pointing out that if it was indeed being marketed only to adults, Sega should be obliged to enforce the ratings. He then proceeded to show the commercial for
Mortal Kombat
and commented that the boy in the commercial appeared to be under thirteen years of age—too young to buy the game, according to Sega’s ratings.
Senator Lieberman then turned to Lincoln and threw him a softball question. After faintly praising Nintendo for its limited self-regulation, he asked if Nintendo would be willing to display ratings on advertisements and in brochures as well as on games. Lincoln said he would, then changed the subject.
Let me make just a couple of other points. I can’t sit here and allow you to be told that somehow the video game business has been transformed today from children to adults. It hasn’t been, and Mr. White, who is a former Nintendo employee, knows the demographics as well as I do.
Furthermore, I can’t let you sit here and buy this nonsense that this Sega
Night Trap
game was somehow only meant for adults.The fact of the matter is this is a copy of the packaging. There was no rating on this game at all when the game was introduced. Small children bought this at Toys “R” Us, and he knows that as well as I do. When they started getting heat about this game, then they adopted the rating system and put ratings on it.
19—Howard Lincoln