“West of Memphis” trailer

This is the trailer from West of Memphis, the upcoming documentary about the West Memphis Three, directed by Amy Berg and produced by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Damien Echols (one of the Three), and Lorri Davis (Echols’ wife). It comes out on Christmas Day, 2012.

How not to get hysterical about a pentagram

Pentagrams and walls seem to go hand in hand — like bored teens and vandalism. Photo by Flickr user The Trousered Ape.

As the weather turns warmer, kids in suburban and rural areas go outside. They’re bored. They’re looking for something to do. They’re angry, or at least irritated. Maybe they have a magic marker in their back pocket. They’re walking through town, maybe past a church, and an idea strikes them.

Churches in Santa Rosa, California, and Prairie Grove, Arkansas, have suffered recent vandalism — one more seriously than the other. In Santa Rosa, The Church of the Incarnation was tagged with a few pentagrams and other designs. In Prairie Grove, the Illinois Chapel Baptist Church has been vandalized repeatedly over the years, culminating with arson late last month.

Two different cases, in two different parts of the country, reported in two very different ways. Let’s look, shall we?

From Arkansas Matters:

A church is set ablaze in Prairie Grove and officials find satanic symbols spray-painted on the building.

From the Santa Rosa Press Democrat:

The Church of the Incarnation on Mendocino Avenue in Santa Rosa was tagged with possible Satanic graffiti on Wednesday afternoon, and police said they may have a suspect.

Hmm. One seems more cautious than another. Let’s look again.

Prairie Grove:

“Devil worshiping signs, you know, and stuff, this is nothing but the Devil … People that does this stuff, they are lost … They haven’t the slightest what hell is really about.”

But everyone we spoke with said, there is one thing still standing strong, and that is their faith.

“The Devil can’t beat us down, not as long as we hold faith in Him … I know the good Lord is with us,” said Burnett.

Santa Rosa:

[Santa Rosa Police Sgt. Mike] Lazzarini said the suspect also tagged St Luke Evangelical Lutheran Church, as well as other buildings and signs.

“It’s not church specific,” he said.

A pentagram is a five-pointed star connected with lines considered by some to have magical connotations, and to have satanic meaning when inverted with two points up.

Lawrence said while the pentagrams are potentially upsetting to members of the church, “it’s not enough to make us feel threatened.”

You could chalk up the sensationalism of the Arkansas article to the fact that the crime is more serious, but there have been plenty of times when graffiti like Santa Rosa’s has been reported in a tone more like Prairie Grove’s. In fact, more alarmist reporting tends to be the norm. The Press Democrat reporters offer something refreshing: a report of the crime that doesn’t hysterically imply that the Devil controlled the vandal’s hand — or did the dirty deed himself.

The fact remains, most such vandalism is made by bored, aimless people — kids especially — and not Satanists with an anti-Church agenda. Reporters should write their articles this way, unless they know for certain who the suspect is, and what his/her motives are.

And yet, it’s still plenty interesting to read. Factual reporting that doesn’t descend into fear-mongering. When’s the last time you saw that in a story like this?

Video games: Saving lives, soothing depression, tickling brains and quieting the nag (since 1972)

Gamers behind the Mario Kart wheel. Photo by Flickr user RonaldWong.

In the arcade, being gay simply didn’t matter; it wasn’t a place of sex or relationships, so it didn’t matter that I was wanting to be romantically involved with guys as opposed to girls. All that mattered there were good matches and getting better.

So I did.

And that saved me from my desire to die. While I was improving myself in the arcade, either with Guilty Gear or at home with Smash (and my local train station had a gc with smash set up in front of it to attract customers to the game shop there). My time out of school was mostly dedicated to improving myself.

This may sound sad, spending so much time fixated on games. But at the time I was so depressed it was hard to hang around people. So what did this fixation do for me? It occupied my mind. During those days I started considering how to improve my ky or Bridget in GG, how to improve my use of Link’s Boomerang usage and so on. It stopped me thinking about death all the time. It saved me from going insane.

– Rowan Carmichael, How Games Saved My Life

Ashly Burch (blogger at Hey, Ash, Whatcha Playin’?) created How Games Saved My Life last month as a way to gather stories from gamers that show video games’ positive side. Already, she’s collected dozens of stories and she’s poised to attract many more, now that she’s gained attention from sites like Kotaku and Ars Technica.

I heard many similar stories while conducting interviews for Backward Messages. Perhaps not every gamer has such a story, but I suspect many, if not most, do. These aren’t stories that many kids share with their parents — these stories remain especially hidden when the parent/child relationship is most fractured, and this is when kids most need games as an outlet. Fellow gamers and parents can come to a site like this, browse around, and hear something similar to what their own child might be too shy or scared to talk about.

These stories are powerful. Beyond that, they reveal an incredible amount of self-awareness — a self-awareness many adults do not give kids credit for possessing. Those who would try to keep video games, including violent games, out of the hands of minors on the grounds that they are too violent make the assumption that kids who love these games are a blank slate, not considering what they’re playing. On the contrary, kids seek these games out like medicine. They know what they need, and know they are healed by it. And we need to listen to them.

Burch’s site comes at a time when the news wires have been jumping with reports about video games. For example, TodaysTHV.com, a news station in Arkansas, recently reported, “Study links teen depression risk to hours spent with online media.” Look at that, and then look at Rowan’s story. Then check out this quote from one of the study’s authors, Erick Messias:

“We need to do a better job of understanding how the Internet and video games, whether violent or not, affect young people. For many, the Internet and video games are the only form of social interaction they have; they are their primary source of communication,” says Messias. “We fully don’t understand the consequences of this kind of stimulation, but we hope this work will lead to improving the screening process in adolescents.”

Correlation is not causation. Teens turn to video games as a source of solace from problems, including depression. The video games aren’t the problem — they’re part of a coping strategy, even a recovery process. That’s what needs studying.

Over at Forbes, blogger David M. Ewalt posits, “Do Video Games Make You Smarter? Maybe Not.” In it, he analyzes a new study that questions prior research showing that video games improve mental acuity and performance. One problem with such studies, he says, is, “gamers perform better on cognitive tests because they’ve heard that gamers perform better on cognitive tests.” Well, true. This is a complicated issue, to be sure — and games have many benefits beyond what’s shown in scientific tests.

Amusingly, the Deseret News recently reported that “Negative, nagging parents cause kids to play video games more, not less.” No ironies there; of course kids who feel henpecked, particularly over their favorite pastimes, are going to turn to those pastimes as an escape. Actual dialogue about specific video games and their appeal to a child is always going to be more effective.

Readers, did a video game save your life, or the life of someone you know? Share stories in the comments.

West Memphis Three could happen again

Half their lives ago, Damien Echols, Jessie Miskelly and Jason Baldwin were sent to prison for a crime they didn’t commit. They were released today.

In 1993, three teenagers from West Memphis, Arkansas — Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Miskelly, were convicted of murdering three young boys. Almost from the beginning, many have maintained that the teens were innocent of the crimes. Today, after spending half their young lives behind bars, they are free.

These boys — Echols and Baldwin particularly — prove what can happen in a society that mistrusts teen boys, particularly teen boys who wear black clothing, listen to heavy metal music, and practice Wicca. In some parts of the South, “Wicca” is indistinguishable from “Satanism,” and “Satanism” is indistinguishable from “child sacrifice.” Wear black and practice Wicca and you might as well go straight to the gas chamber.

It is, in many ways, a relief that they’re free men. They can go home to their families and try to put nearly two decades of wrongful confinement behind them. However, because of the plea deal which freed them, they won’t be allowed to pursue a wrongful conviction case against the State of Arkansas — a case which otherwise deserves to go forward. And because these men were robbed of their early adulthoods, it may take some time before they can settle into the world — a world very different from the one they left in 1993.

The mistrust that put these boys in jail has not gone away. There are still people out there that would have us fear teenagers, since we don’t understand what makes a handful of them violent enough to kill. There are those who want us to fear teens who play too many violent video games. There are those who want us to fear teens who listen to too much heavy metal. And there are certainly those who want us to fear teens who explore pagan faiths. There’s no reason to believe that this couldn’t happen again. There’s no reason to believe that it hasn’t happened to other teens currently in prison. The West Memphis Three are free, but this fight isn’t over.

Why blame guns or gangs when you can blame video games?

Agnes Sina-Inakoju, 16, was accidentally gunned down in a UK pizza shop last April. Her killers were targeting rival gang members.

Let’s say a group of young men — ages 17 to 22 — are involved in street gangs. And let’s say they have a small arsenal of automatic weapons. Now, let’s say they take one of those firearms, get on bicycles, and spray bullets into a local pizza shop, hoping to kill rivals. Instead, one of those bullets hits a 16-year-old schoolgirl in the throat, and she dies two days later.

Would you blame the killing on video games? Well, you might, if the killers turned out to be avid video-game fans. (Even though there’s no evidence that video games make players kill). However, there’s no indication that the gunmen, Leon Dunkley, 22, and Mohammed Smoured, 21, were gamers.

Nevermind that pesky detail. Actress Stefanie Powers and Anne Diamond have clearly got it all sorted out. The duo — obviously experts on video games and culture — appeared on UK television last week to offer their well-informed opinions just as Dunkley and Smoured were being sentenced to 32 years in prison for Agnes Sina-Inakoju’s murder.

“I hate to think that as Americans we’ve exported along with rap music and the horrible video… I say the horrible video culture. It’s the horrible violent video games [wiggles thumbs] which, I’m terribly sorry, they’ve been used far too long as baby-sitting devices, so that children are raised with these flashing, hot symbols of violence. And irresponsible violence; there’s no responsibility to the violence,” Powers said. What?

Diamond’s comments made even less sense: “Well in fact, having just that sort of armoury under his bed – just like you’d have a couple of Nintendos and a PlayStation under your bed.”

I highly doubt that Dunkley and Smoured thought of this cache of weapons as being anything like “a couple of Nintendos and a PlayStation.” In fact, the only person who seems to think that they are comparable is Diamond. At least, I hope the folks watching and listening to her didn’t actually think she was onto something.

This is at least as ridiculous as Carol Lieberman’s comments on Bulletstorm. I realize that getting ill-informed celebrities to talk on television — and offer outrageous theories on topics they know nothing about — is a tactic that draws readers, conversation, clicks, retweets, and so on. Unfortunately, such tactics only bring attention to dangerously misinformed ideas and makes vulnerable people (parents especially) afraid that the people talking are right.

If we, as a culture, ever want to get to the bottom of youth-involved shootings — and perhaps prevent them from happening — then this kind of malarkey really has to stop. Fortunately, UK gaming site ComputersandVideoGames.com is launching W.R.O.N.G., “a concerted campaign to stop (or at least loudly mock) the Witless and Ridiculous Opinions Of Non-Gamers.” Not that “experts” like Powers and Diamond actually pay attention to the gaming press — if they did, they might know more about the non-link between gaming and violence.

Readers: what’s the most ridiculous claim you’ve heard regarding youth violence and media influence? Share your stories in comments.

Oh, and while I’m at it, remember Thursday’s piece about a Belegarth player being charged with molesting kids whose parents he’d befriended in the game? According to one commenter in Arkansas, his Belegarth group has been banned from fighting in local parks as a result of the case. Way to punish the wrong people, city of Auburn, Arkansas.