Everything You Know About Video Game Violence Is Wrong A stunning Surgeon General's report puts new doubt into the media violence connection. Where do we go from here?
Written by: Bruce Rolston
Published: February 27, 2001
"Cognitive dissonance" is a mental state produced by having two contradictory pieces of knowledge in one's brain at the same time. If you as a gamer are feeling a little dissonance these days, you're not alone: February was a confusing and contradictory month on the whole harmfulness-of-game-violence issue.
On the one hand, game industry executives were revealed to be working behind the Oz curtain to curtail the access of teenagers to violent computer and console entertainments. On the other, the American Office of the Surgeon General released a major report telling people that violent media aren't really that big a problem, after all. A game industry watchdog group told us that sales clerks were ignoring the game rating system; but still praised the industry for having the best entertainment rating system around. Those who follow these issues closely were left wondering: Overall, did we gain or did we lose? Perhaps the answer is neither… but we did take a few steps forward.
Forward, that is, out of the shadow of Columbine. This month's Surgeon General's report was only the latest indirect consequence of one of the most ghastly episodes of school violence in American history: the April 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.
In the media frenzy that immediately followed the mass murder-suicides of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, almost any negative influence that could have impacted on the killers' state of mind would be seized upon by a press and public trying to understand what happened. To some, the pair were after jocks, or Christians, or maybe blacks. They were frustrated homosexuals, Neo-Nazis commemorating Hitler, or perhaps Goths honoring Marilyn Manson; they were victims of prescription drugs, or maybe the children of bad parents ... and, of course, victims of a violent culture, including the computer games they played.
At first, this didn't seem so far-fetched. Both Klebold and Harris were known to be fans of the first-person shooters Doom and Quake. Harris was an amateur Doom level-maker, as well. Similar attempts to make a connection with the four previous school shootings in the previous year-and-a-half had had less evidence to work with. (A lawsuit by the victims' families against computer-game makers following a 1997 school shooting in West Paducah, Kentucky was thrown out of court this past April.)
But a series of articles for Salon.com by investigative reporter Dave Cullen, who has covered the case exhaustively for nearly two years, showed that the preconceptions about games playing a role in the Columbine violence were overstated, at best.
Cullen points to the trial of gun dealer Mark Manes, who received a six-year sentence for selling the two killers a firearm. During that trial, prosecutors made the case that it was the pair's training sessions with real firearms, not the computer equivalents, that stoked their lust for violence.
"The game Doom was specifically cited as the means for Harris and Klebold to develop both their shooting skills and their passion for blood," Cullen wrote. "But ... prosecutors portrayed the practice sessions with Manes and [co-accused Phil] Duran as the breeding ground for their enthusiasm, allowing them to transform their fantasies into reality. It was the only known time they trained with weapons, according to prosecutors, and their success in those sessions fed their thrill."
(It was just one of the untruths or overstatements about the Columbine tragedy Cullen would uncover. The records the killers left behind showed the two to be confused teenagers, with none of the other motives ascribed to them. The killers weren't after any specific group, police would find (they appeared to hate just about everybody); nor were they gay, or Manson fans. They never wore trenchcoats except to hide their guns that one day, and they likely didn't know a girl was a born-again Christian before killing her.)
What they really wanted, police investigators concluded, was to become infamous, and they were simply willing to kill themselves and a lot of other people to do it.
"[Lead police investigator Kate] Battan actually believes fame was the single biggest reason Harris and Klebold ultimately went through with the plan," Cullen wrote shortly after the killings. "'That's my personal opinion,' she [Battan] said. 'And all the rest of the justifications are just smoke.' Other key investigators backed that assessment."
One of the killers, Harris, proudly claimed the massacre-to-come as a personal achievement, refusing to share any of the credit with either games or any of the other supposed negative influences on him. "It's my fault!" he wrote just before the killings. "Not my parents, not my brothers, not my friends, not my favorite bands, not computer games, not the media, it's mine."
But by the time reporters had begun to dismantle the myths that had sprung up around Columbine, their political force had already been felt. In Washington, anti-violence crusader Senator Joe Lieberman was saying only two weeks after the shootings that the Littleton killings were more evidence of what he called the mass media's "culture of carnage."
"Even some of the most reluctant of skeptics are beginning to focus on the culture of carnage surrounding our children, particularly the hyperviolent movies, music, and video games that have apparently mesmerized these child killers," he told the Senate's commerce committee, chaired by Republican Senator John McCain.
"None of us wants to resort to regulation, but if the entertainment industry continues to move in this direction, and continues to market death and degradation to our children, and continues to pay no heed to the real bloodshed staining our communities, then the government will act."
At the time, Lieberman's statements almost seemed moderate. That summer of 1999 saw a flurry of activity in Congress, with the House of Representatives considering no less than 44 amendments on cultural issues. Judiciary committee chairman Henry Hyde was pushing for a ban on all "obscenely violent" content. Another bill called for the Federal Trade Commission to assume responsibility for the rating of all media. (Both bills were defeated in the House.) That August, the Senate judiciary committee issued a brutal report homing in on Hollywood and the computer game industry as dark forces behind the killers of American youth. If there was any doubt about the significance of their role, it wasn't apparent. "To argue against it," said one psychiatric association spokesperson at the time, "is like arguing against gravity."
President Clinton also weighed in with his views shortly after the Littleton shootings. In an online forum with high school students that week, he questioned whether games could be a factor. "There's been a lot of talk about
whether the Internet plus having very young people play very violent video games where they learn to shoot people and stuff, that those two things have added an extra element to an otherwise already pretty violent culture. And I think we're going to have to take another look at it."
It would be Clinton who would commission two separate fact-finding efforts in the weeks that followed the Colorado shootings, under pressure from Congressional leaders who wanted to be seen to be doing something. Surgeon General David Satcher was instructed to undertake a broad look at the causes of youth violence, while the Federal Trade Commission was told to look at the industries some saw as the culprits: movies, music, and computer games.
The FTC would come back first. Its thorough and mostly sensible report, calling for greater efforts at industry self-regulation over marketing practices and rejecting government involvement, was released last September. This last month, it was Satcher's turn; Hollywood was already bracing for the impact: If Satcher's report had been strongly negative, it might have been a hammerblow to the mass entertainment industries' steadfast defence of their own freedom to create what they wanted. Claiming they had seen a leaked draft of the report, the Los Angeles Times stoked expectations by saying the report would establish that games and other entertainment have an "important causal role" in crime today.
"Repeated exposure to violent entertainment during early childhood causes more aggressive behavior throughout the child's life," the Times paraphrased the still-to-be-issued report as saying. The report would also say the statistical evidence on the connection of real violence to media violence was as strong as lung cancer's connection to smoking, the newspaper added.
But the real Satcher report (released in late January, but only made widely available this month) defied all those predictions. While saying that media violence was not innocuous, it summarized all the existing scientific research to date as supporting the belief that the actual effect of exposure to movie violence on long-term criminal behavior was minor, and confined to the relatively young. As far as games went, there was no good research yet, at all.
"Theoretically, the influence of these interactive media might well be greater than that of television and films, which present a passive form of exposure, but there are no studies to date of the effects of exposure to these types of media violence and violent behavior."
Basing their conclusions solely on the scientific literature, Satcher's team said they simply could not find statistically significant evidence of any more than a weak indirect tie between the movies children watched and their behavior. "Some studies suggest that long-term effects exist, and there are strong theoretical reasons that this is the case. But many questions remain." Parents and educators should by trying to help children become more critical consumers of games and TV, the report says.
If legislators really want to help, they should provide proper funding for the research needed to conclusively establish the media's role first, it concludes.
|