The quasi-role-playing-game Fugitive earned some negative attention this week after a Phoenix-area teen, Andrew Arellanes, died while playing about a week ago.

While this is awful and tragic — as a parent, I don’t know how I could survive the loss of a child — I’d hate to see this turn into a blame game, with Fugitive bearing the brunt. Unfortunately, the TV news report in the link above is full of finger-pointing turns of phrase, describing Fugitive as “a dangerous game,” a “deadly game,” and a game with “a new element — a twist that caused Arellanes to fall to his death.”

Let’s be clear here: saying Fugitive caused this boy’s awful death is like saying a person who dies of a heart attack while strolling through a garden was killed by the garden.

Kids in other places are apparently playing Fugitive unsafely, but the game doesn’t require reckless behavior. There are many ways to play it wisely and safely. That’s up to the players.

We’ve been down this road before with role-playing games, but it’s clear that, for the most part, play-acting is really good for us. So go; play Fugitive. Be safe. Have fun.

This week, metal fans were shocked to learn that As I Lay Dying frontman Tim Lambesis was arrested for allegedly trying to hire someone to kill his wife, Meggan. The couple was in the process of getting a divorce — and apparently, Meggan raised questions in the divorce papers about Tim’s recent behavior, which she worried was putting their three adopted children in danger.

According to police, Tim was arrested last week after soliciting a man to kill Meggan — and that man turned out to be an undercover detective.

At this point, very little has been revealed, and that’s normal, considering that this is an active criminal prosecution. If the case goes to trial, much more will be revealed at that time. But the shroud of protection that surrounds the prosecution of criminal cases leaves much to the imagination — and people love to speculate when they don’t know the details.

But it’s important to remember a few things: Tim is innocent until proven guilty. Just because the police and attorneys (especially attorneys!) say something doesn’t make it true. And metal had nothing to do with this.

The FBI doesn’t keep statistics on how many people hire (or attempt to hire) hitmen each year. It’s not none, but it’s probably not many. The people who do the hiring come from all walks of life. Heavy metal happens to be one of them — but when was the last time you remember a metal musician hiring someone to commit murder?

(It would be easy to joke that “real metal musicians do the deed themselves,” but that’s exceedingly rare, too. And, again, unrelated to metal.)

Crimes of all stripes have everything to do with the person who commits them, and the circumstances they’re in, but loving or even performing a kind of music isn’t a “circumstance,” per se. Divorce is a circumstance. Mood issues create circumstance. Losing custody of one’s kids is definitely a circumstance. But metal? Not so much.

There have been attempts to compare Tim Lambesis’ situation to that of Lamb of God singer Randy Blythe, who was accused of contributing to the death of a Czech fan who jumped onstage during a concert, and who was acquitted after a trial earlier this year. But that was a totally different scenario — an unfortunate accident that could have happened at any public concert where people stage-dive. Did metal have something to do with it? Kind of. In the same way that skateboarding, sky-diving, or boat racing is risky, so is stage diving. Enter at your own risk.

Fans and critics of metal must be patient, and wait to see what the evidence reveals — or doesn’t — about Tim Lambesis’ circumstances. Until then, let’s leave metal out of it.

Kat Chandler’s short film, “Black Metal,” is getting its big break at the Sundance Film Festival this month. In just a few minutes, the film explores a gruesome murder loosely tied to the music of a heavy-metal band. Only this time, it looks at the situation from the perspective of the musician whose work is linked to the killing. It’s a sensitive, emotional take on the topic, and doesn’t answer very many questions, leaving the viewer to reflect on whether this common scapegoat is really part of the problem.

Given my perspective on the topic, I have mixed feelings about Chandler’s film. On the one hand, I like the suggestion that this musician is baffled and upset by the blame, and the fact that the film mostly makes that blame appear misplaced. I also like the fact that it doesn’t overtly preach an answer; being too heavy-handed would be less effective. But I wonder whether this film is going to change the mind of someone who is already convinced that extreme music directly encourages its listeners to commit violence. I hope so, but part of me doubts it.

Corey Mitchell, a true-crime writer and metalhead who consulted on the film, said this on Invisible Oranges:

Just to be clear, I would not have taken the gig if Kat’s intention was to declare metal responsible for violent crimes.

What do you think the film says? And what do you think of the way in which it says it?

Dear President Obama,

This month, you said two things: First, that you asked Congress to allocate $10 million to the Centers for Disease Control to study the “the relationship between video games, media images and violence.” Second, that “We won’t be able to stop every violent act, but if there is even one thing that we can do to prevent any of these events, we have a deep obligation, all of us, to try.”

That’s why I’m writing to you today. I’m not an avid player of video games. I don’t work in the game industry. I’m a journalist, writer and mom who has spent the past several years reading and writing about the relationship between kids, violent video games, and real-life violence. So far, what I’ve learned is that there isn’t one.

Yes, there are hundreds of studies, particularly from researchers Craig Anderson, Brad Bushman, and Doug Gentile, suggesting there may be a link between playing violent video games and short-term aggressive behavior immediately after switching off the game. But they haven’t been able to show that video games _cause_ that behavior, or that post-game aggression translates into violent acts later on. Some people are amped up after playing a particularly intense game of football, too, but we haven’t spent millions of dollars researching whether it makes kids bring guns to school.

If you dig deep into each of these researchers’ studies, they say as much.

There are other studies that reveal the positive influences of these games. For example, two studies from Ohio State University researchers David Ewoldsen and John Velez showed that when kids play violent games cooperatively – as many do – they come out of the games feeling pretty good. Canadian researcher Jayne Gackenbach has shown that playing violent video games can help soldiers overcome nightmares induced by the traumas of war, an outcome that seems like it could apply to other gamers trying to make sense of our violent world overall.

In Somalia, video-game-play is on the rise, and many parents are glad, because it’s keeping their kids off the dangerous streets. That’s also true at home: University of Texas at Arlington researcher Michael Ward found that in towns with more video-game retailers, juveniles commit fewer violent crimes – because they’re too busy playing to get into trouble.

By far the best text on the benefits of violent games and aggressive play for kids is Gerard Jones’ book “Killing Monsters.” I interviewed Jones in 2011 for a Wired.com article on why violent video games are good for teens, written at the time the Supreme Court voted against a ban on the sale of these games to minors. He said:

“For the world of adolescents, [reality has] mostly gotten more stressful and bleaker,” he said, citing the dire economy, stressed-out parents, the increasing demands of public education and two lengthy wars in the Middle East. “This is not a cheerful time to be coming of age in America. The need for escape, the need for fantasies of potency, and the need for a community of peers is greater than it’s been in a long time.” He has said, in other moments, that we cannot expect teens to accept forms of entertainment that have been sanitized of the violence they know exists around them every day.

However, one of the most important sources of information on the relationship between violent video games and young players is the players themselves. As a nation we have spent far too much time studying the supposed affects of games on gamers, and almost no time asking gamers questions about why they enjoy them. If you ask, they will tell you that they love the escape, the chance to explore violent ideas safely and without hurting anybody, the opportunity to play the hero, and much more. I interviewed and surveyed dozens of young gamers for a book I wrote for parents – a book that, given our current cultural climate, I believe parents need more than ever, but unfortunately has found almost no support in the publishing world.

So far, Congress has been smart, vetoing just about every bill that proposes a study of violent video games and young players. To start spending money now on such studies would be a tremendous waste of money that could be put to more productive use, such as providing more mental-health support for violent teens and their struggling families. If Congress does wind up putting money into video-game studies, however, please make sure those studies look at the potential benefits of violent games, not just our preconceived notions of harm, which hundreds of studies have already failed to support.

Thank you.

In the month since the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary (which as far as we know, was not committed by someone with mental illness), I’ve been encouraged by how much of the conversation has been framed around mental health and the lack of services for those who need them. We saw that front-and-center with Liza Long’s powerful “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother” post. We’ve seen it elsewhere, too. I want to call attention another such story today, because it makes great points about what’s missing and what society needs to do — not only to curb mass shootings, but also to help the many, many nonviolent people who struggle with mental illness daily but can’t get the help they need because it doesn’t exist or isn’t available to them.

Chantel Garrett wrote this piece about her brother, Max, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. In her article, she doesn’t just talk about how difficult it is for Max to stay afloat. She also offers concrete steps for repairing the system so that Max and others like him might hope for functional, fulfilling lives.

Mostly, I want to let Garrett do the talking here, because she does it well:

2) Change the law to more easily help an adult loved one get involuntary care when they desperately need it – before anyone gets hurt.

We must begin to fill the gaps in the mental health care system that could have potentially helped to prevent recent massacres at the hands of people in need of psychiatric intervention. Studies show that early intervention greatly improves the prospect for recovery. In my own experience with my brother, a first dose of anti-psychotics during a psychotic episode palpably reduces paranoia and hallucinations.

A few years ago, Max went off his medication, barricading himself in his apartment and warning his family to stay away. In an extremely psychotic state, he plastered the Web with terrifying words and images, predominantly aimed at the people who love him most. While punishing to read, as the time and severity of his symptoms wore on, his posts became our only proof that he was still alive – our only hope that he could still get help.

For two months, my parents and I campaigned the local police to knock down his door and get him to a hospital. My dad became a fixture at the police station. We sent the police chief Max’s blog and threatening emails. We explained his diagnosis, his years of involuntary hospital commitments and dire need for care before he did more permanent damage to his brain. His neighbors also called the police to complain. The police went to his house multiple times but said they didn’t have cause to forcefully enter. Their response was always the same. “We understand that he’s very sick, but what has he done? Call us when he’s done something and we’ll pick him up.”

…

Males with schizophrenia most often become symptomatic in their late teens to early 20s. From a legal standpoint, parents hands are often tied trying to get help for their sick child who is of legal age, with the current standard of “danger to oneself or others” far too hazardous.

The “dangerous” bar is too high to get someone with acute psychotic symptoms care when they need it most – and when they are the largest threat to themselves and, potentially, their family and community. Why should it not instead be a standard of gravely disabled – unable to care for oneself or for others? Surely, if the police could have somehow glimpsed at him and his apartment, they would have immediately seen that he was unable to care for himself.

We need to change the law, and create a mental health workforce working alongside officers and families to provide more proactive, onsite assessment of people who are credibly unable to care for themselves – before it gets to the point of “dangerous.”

Do you know someone who’s mentally ill and prone to violence when they’re in their darkest periods? If so, what do you think would help them the most?

Last week we looked at a NJ.com poll where the bulk of the respondents said they didn’t think video games had much to do with real-life violence. This week, we saw just about the opposite results, this time in a poll from Common Sense Media. For those who don’t already know about this organization, CSM presents itself as basically the polar opposite of Backward Messages: a resource for parents, but one which tells them why all these forms of media are wrong, harmful, and so on — and enables parents to remove these “dangerous” influences from their lives. CSM is headed by Jim Steyer, whom I’ve interviewed here before.

In the wake of Sandy Hook, CSM polled parents to find out how they feel about the video game/violence connection. The result?

The majority of parents (75%) feel that shielding children from violence is difficult. That same percentage of parents blame “media violence, such as content in TV, movies and video games” for adding to “America’s culture of violence.”

I’m not entirely sure what “America’s culture of violence” means; I take it to mean the fact that human beings are, in real life, sometimes violent. Unfortunately, you can’t take away everyday violence by taking away games. It isn’t that simple. Humans were violent long before video games. What causes our violence is still not well understood, and there’s new science all the time; most recently, it looks like recent spikes in violence mirrored environmental lead levels. It’s probably not any one thing. It’s also probably not video games, which describe a society (and a subconscious interpretation of it, with survival-horror games) we already live in.

When you take away video games, you take away a valid and safe way for gamers to explore their own feelings about living in a violent society.

Without seeing the questions CSM asked in its poll, it’s tough to say for sure, but I’d wager a fair amount of money that these responses were highly influenced by the questions asked (to be fair, the same could be said of the NJ.com poll). This is one of the things you learn in statistics and social-sciences classes: when you’re running a survey or a poll, the questions you ask will make all the difference in the responses you get. It’s the classic “Have you stopped beating your wife?” scenario.

There’s also the matter that, although CSM apparently polled random parents, I wonder if they were parents who have been in contact with the organization’s website at one time or another. That would tend to skew the results as well. Or they may be legitimately random respondents; there are still many who blame games for society’s problems. But the fact that a poll from group opposing violent media yielded results that also oppose violent media seems like more than a coincidence to me.

At any rate, legislative and policy efforts to link video games with real-life violence — now or ever — are pretty much moot, particularly when they’re bracketed by the efforts of politicians or “community leaders” who want to make it look like they’re taking action against something society can’t abide. To explain more fully, I turn to Atlantic writer Ian Bogost, and his recent article “How the Video-Game Industry Already Lost Out in the Gun-Control Debate.”

He writes:

Once more, public opinion has been infected with the idea that video games have some predominant and necessary relationship to gun violence, rather than being a diverse and robust mass medium that is used for many different purposes, from leisure to exercise to business to education.

…

If the White House is really interested in games, they could start using them as sophisticated communication tools to help break out of politics as usual, instead of using games as convenient rhetorical levers when the need arises.

In other words, the debate about ending violence isn’t about video games at all. That’s just a convenient distraction. Don’t buy it.

Destroying media deemed “dangerous,” for one. Much like the German book-burnings, a town near Newtown is collecting and destroying violent video games on Saturday. But Germany has other lessons to offer: a decades-long ban on Doom games did nothing to prevent two major mass shootings in the country.

Read my full thoughts on Saturday’s events at the SF Weekly.