Violent games didn’t cause Sandy Hook shooting

Did Call of Duty make Adam Lanza kill? Not likely.

I don’t know if this seems fishy to anyone else, but over the weekend, politicians and the press began speculating that violent video games must have had something to do with the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting. For example, you had Connecticut’s own senator, Joe Lieberman, saying things like, “Very often these young men have an almost hypnotic involvement in some form of violence in our entertainment culture – particularly violent video games. And then they obtain guns and become not just troubled young men but mass murderers.”

That’s not the fishy part. Well, okay it is, but it gets fishier: a few days later, the UK’s oh-so-reputable Sun unearthed a plumber who swears that shooter Adam Lanza played Call of Duty for hours every day. I don’t even know where to start.

It’s hard to imagine how a plumber could have a good window into someone’s behavior over time, unless for some reason he lived in the Lanza home. So there’s that.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Lanza did play the game. Then there’s the fact that more than 55 million people play Call of Duty. Sure, Anders Breivik also played Call of Duty. I bet both Anders Breivik and Adam Lanza also ate toast, or wore pants, or saw The Sound of Music. In other words, this is a pastime so common that it can’t be linked to any particular sort of behavior. All sorts of people play Call of Duty. It has wide, massive appeal. One or two of them is potentially going to go off the deep end in ways we couldn’t have predicted. Their gaming habits aren’t relevant.

This week, the Internet has been awash with writeups arguing that video games did — or didn’t — lend a hand in the Sandy Hook shooting. I’m not going to go through them exhaustively, but you can check them out on the Backward Messages Pinterest boards. I do want to call two pieces of news and commentary to your attention.

In the first, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) has introduced a bill to study the impact of violent video games on children. What a complete waste of taxpayer money. We’ve had dozens, even hundreds of studies — and even those that suggest a correlation between violent video games and aggression a) cannot prove that games lead to actual violence, b) only rarely show any verifiable link at all, and c) can’t prove whether it’s players’ need for an aggressive outlet which draw them to the games, rather than the games leading to aggression. Visit this blog’s video-games category to see articles on many of these studies.

In the second, the Washington Post looked at video games and gun violence in 10 countries and found, basically, “that countries where video games are popular also tend to be some of the world’s safest (probably because these countries are stable and developed, not because they have video games). And we also have learned, once again, that America’s rate of firearm-related homicides is extremely high for the developed world.”

A decade ago, studies showed that mass shooters tended to be kids who played video games less than average. Now that pretty much everyone plays a video game now and then — much more so than 10 or 20 years ago — it’s probably safe to say that these killers do play. But again, gaming is now so common that it’s akin to watching television or blockbuster movies; you just can’t say that engaging in it will lead to any specific outcome. And you can’t use one violent act to justify taking games away from the millions and millions of people who enjoy them safely.

In fact, it’s likely that Lanza enjoyed them safely, too. It’s likely that his gaming had nothing to do with his crime. It’s also likely that something in his mind went awry, and the fact that his mom trained him to shoot guns — not the fact that he’d played a shooter video game — gave him the means to act on his brain’s break with reality.

Can’t we make up our minds about video games?

Video games are bad for kids. No, wait, they’re not. Who’s right? Photo by Flickr user sean dreilinger.

It’s 2012, and video games have been with us for almost 40 years. Kids of all ages have been playing them for that entire time. If video games were going to cause massive changes in the behavior or psychology of young gamers, we’d know about it by now.

And yet there are large chunks of society that cling tightly to the idea that video games — violent video games in particular — are bad for kids. Take, for example, a recent article on Wired.com that asks, “Do Violent Video Games Make Kids More Violent?” In it, GeekMom writer Andrea Schwalm writes about appearing on Al Jazeera’s The Stream on the topic of kids and gaming. The show focused, specifically, on Call of Duty: Black Ops II, of which she writes:

While my teenaged sons do play some M-rated games (currently, Halo 4 and Dishonored are in heavy weekend rotation), I wasn’t familiar with the Call of Duty franchise. After watching some YouTube clips of the game online, I wondered, “Is this how foreign countries think American children spend all of their free time?”

And yet, as the host of The Stream pointed out, the truth is, the game sold $500 million in its’ first 24 hours, was a trending topic on Twitter, and is played by children. If you look at the incarceration rates in America, it seems a legitimate question: does the ubiquity of video game violence beget real-life violence?

This is the kind of ridiculous logic that sends so many people down the wrong rabbit hole. The main problem here is, she doesn’t explain who is being incarcerated — if she took a look, she would realize it isn’t kids. America’s hefty incarceration rate, in large part, is due to the massive “War on Drugs” as well as the disproportionate number of minorities being jailed; it isn’t gamer teens winding up behind bars.

Fortunately, she turns to Doug Gentile. Now, I haven’t agreed with Gentile much on this site, but there are moments where I think he’s on the right track, moments where he puts his findings in broader context, and I’m glad to see at least one mom listening:

The only way that anyone does something seriously violent is if they have multiple risk factors and limited protective factors for violent behavior, and thankfully most of our children have a great many protective factors, can consume a lot of violent video games, and still never do anything violent.

Slightly more logical is a recent Kotaku piece from Phil Owen, which asks, “Do Video Games Make Depression Worse?” Owen also turns to Gentile who, after conducting a study on just that topic — and finding evidence that video games were indeed somehow making his test subjects’ depression worse — actually argued that it’s more complex than his results would suggest:

“I don’t really think [the depression] is following. I think it’s truly comorbid. … As you get more depressed you retreat more into games, which doesn’t help, because it doesn’t actually solve the problem. It doesn’t help your depression, so your depression gets worse, so you play more games, so your depression gets worse, etc. It becomes a negative spiral.”

Still, we can’t listen to the All-Doug-Gentile-All-The-Time Channel, can we? Thankfully, we also have the International Society for Research on Aggression releasing studies that show exposure to violent media increases the risk of aggressive behavior. (Oh, wait, Gentile is on the commission.)

This is one of those times when researchers look at the existing research and cobble it together to come up with some kind of meta-finding. The problem is, most of the research to date has been slanted in the negative direction — that is, it finds some relationship between violent video games and youth aggression, but that’s because it’s what society and researchers wanted to find, and because the research showing no such links — or showing violent games’ upsides — is just beginning to catch up.

IRSA chair Craig Anderson said, “Having such a clear statement by an unbiased, international scientific group should be very helpful to a number of child advocacy groups.” But any group that includes Anderson and Gentile — whose work overwhelmingly supports the violent-game/aggression theory — can’t be called “unbiased.” Sorry, guys.

So why is all this attention focused on video games? Has the sexuality and violence vanished from blockbuster movies, television shows, or young-adult fiction? Hardly. But for some reason, there’s little to no research — or public furor — focused on those old-hat forms of entertainment. Dan Houser, cofounder of Rockstar Games (home of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, among others), recently took note of video games’ pariah status in a recent Guardian interview highlighted on Kotaku:

“We never felt that we were being attacked for the content, we were being attacked for the medium, which felt a little unfair. If all of this stuff had been put into a book or a movie, people wouldn’t have blinked an eye.”

But it isn’t all doom and gloom. Plenty of people see the good in violent video games, or at least the harmlessness.

If violent video games — first-person shooters, say — are such lousy influences, then how are they capable of engendering sympathy? Jens Stober, a game designer and PhD student in Germany, is developing a video game in which players can assume the roles of Australian border guards or foreign refugees. Stober has written other border-centered games, such as “1378,” in which players can assume the roles of border guards or refugees fleeing East German communists. In that game, the guards can shoot fugitives, which earned Stober death threats.

But, as with many games, it’s all in the eye of the beholder:

[Stober] claims [the games] actually penalise players for shooting, and that the main aim is to educate people about political issues using game mechanics.

“You can have a gun, you can use it, but if you use it you will lose points and lose the game,” he says.

The players who are refugees must cooperate to evade the border guards while the guards try to arrest them. Along the way, the game dishes out educational factoids designed to provoke deeper thought about the issues.

Another recent article, by Brian Hampel for Kansas State University’s The Collegian, makes quite a different case for violent video games and society as a whole: he argues that our media is so violent because, well, we just like violence: “Popular culture isn’t a thermostat that dictates our tastes and trends; it’s a thermometer that shows us tastes and trends that already exist in the cultural zeitgeist,” he writes.

But his conclusions come quite close to things I’ve said at Backward Messages before, so I’d like to close with them:

It turns out that the real [culprits] behind youth violence are depression, delinquent peer association and negative relationships with adults. Who would have guessed?

…

You wouldn’t know it from watching news networks’ coverage of school shootings, but it’s true. Not only is violence not caused by the media, but it’s also in decline. I guess it’s easy to get the impression that we’re violent by watching the news, which could very well be the most violent medium of all.

In Ridgeway death, “goth” is scapegoated again

Sensationalist media have had a field day with Austin Reed Sigg, Jessica Ridgeway’s alleged 17-year-old killer.

Is Austin Reed Sigg a goth who was infatuated with death? Did he hang out in the “goth corner” with the “metal heads” at school? Was he a Nazi wizard (whatever that is)? Did he play World of Warcraft and Call of Duty?

Over the past week, plenty of news has come out about the demise of 10-year-old Colorado girl Jessica Ridgeway and the 17-year-old boy who led police to human remains, which were underneath his house. He has allegedly confessed to killing her, and a prosecuting attorney has said there is DNA evidence against him.

It’s almost funny how many different tropes the media have tried to pin on Sigg: goth culture, heavy metal, violent video games.

Did Sigg do it?

If so, what would his choice of clothing, school hang-out spot, video games, music, or even speculation about a cross found at a crime scene have to do with it?

Whether or not Sigg committed this horrible crime is for the court to decide, and let’s hope that he has a fair trial, with competent people working both sides of the case and a jury that is capable of setting aside its biases. And let’s also hope that, if Sigg did kill Ridgeway, that he gets more than locked in a hole for life, because a 17-year-old (or anyone) who commits such a crime needs help, not isolation and abuse.

I say that because while I was away, I was lucky enough to see a press screening of West of Memphis, Amy Berg’s new documentary about the West Memphis Three. It is such a stark, vivid reminder of what happened to Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Miskelley, who were jailed for 18 years on charges of killing three 8-year-old boys in Arkansas. Their case has some of the same hallmarks as Sigg’s: a gruesome crime against a child, a community hungry for justice, a teenage boy whose interests are less-than-socially-acceptable; a confession. Yes, there are differences, particularly the fact that Sigg turned himself in, had body parts under his house, and the DNA evidence (if the prosecuting attorney can be trusted); there was no such thing as DNA evidence when the WM3 were convicted, and there’s now ample DNA evidence that they were not involved.

Still, my point is that mistakes can be made this early in the game — mistakes that can send the wrong person to jail for a long time, while the killer may walk free.

My point is that a community starved for a scapegoat will sometimes land on whoever’s most convenient, particularly if he looks different or just never fit in. If something seemed “off” about him. There’s a big difference between someone who makes you uneasy and someone who’s guilty of murdering a child. One is a personal feeling. The other is for a judge and jury to decide.

My point is that calling this kid a goth doesn’t make him any more guilty than he may already be. Calling him a “Nazi wizard” doesn’t, either. All it does is imply that somehow the simple act of being a goth, or even a neo-Nazi, means you might as well be a murderer. And that’s an awful thing to say about a group of people, no matter how you feel about their beliefs.

Goths, understandably, are concerned. In that forum, “CallaWolf” said, “This, to me, almost felt like scapegoating. I wear all black on almost a daily basis (and as I’m writing this, I’m actually wearing a Slayer shirt), and while I do not know any fellow goths outside of this site, I still kinda consider myself a part of it in one way or another, but the very idea of doing these things is apalling to me.”

“Nephele” said, “This happens periodically: The news media confusing sociopaths with goths.”

And CanCanKant said:

Even if the perpetrator does consider themselves a goth, I don’t necessarily think that it was his “gothic” tendencies that caused him to commit heinous crimes. The overwhelming majority of people I’ve met that are goth are very cerebral, calm, introspective types. Hardly the kind to do anything harmful to another human being, especially on this scale.

It’s the tendency of the general public to equate dark, or especially black, clothing, band paraphenalia, tattoos and piercings with the word “goth” that causes this confusion. So many music and art related subcultures use these things, but not all of them would be considered goth. You notice how it’s used to shock. It’s quite sad.

Studies find violent games boost pain tolerance, and in-game cooperation nixes aggression

Do first-person shooters boost gamers’ pain tolerance? One study says yes.

In universities nationwide, researchers are still prodding the effects of video games on human players. Do games make us violent or agressive? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Do they have positive effects? How do they influence us? How long do those influences last after we set down the controller and walk away?

At Keele University, researchers Richard Stephens and Claire Allsop had 40 volunteers play first-person shooter video games, and then studied their pain thresholds afterward. The volunteers also played a non-violent game for comparison. After both games, the players stuck their hands in ice-cold water (ow). The volunteers were able to keep their hands in the cold water 65% longer after playing the FPS than after playing the nonviolent game.

Their explanation?

The increased pain tolerance and heart rate can be attributed to the body’s natural ‘fight or flight’ response to stress, which can activate descending pain inhibitory pathways in the brain reducing sensitivity to pain.

Hmm. Stephens and Allsop have also studied how swearing affects subject’s pain tolerance — and apparently tossing out a few cuss words also makes a plunge in icewater more tolerable.

Although some news reports are saying the FPS findings show video games have positive benefits, I’d like to add a few caveats: one, this is a very small study, and may or may not be a study of people who play FPS games regularly. Two, there’s nothing that says higher pain tolerance is better than lower pain tolerance. There are times you might want it (while in labor, for example — can you imagine birthing women playing Call of Duty during contractions?) and there are times you might want extra sensitivity.

That said, there’s nothing saying that triggering the fight-or-flight response in the safe confines of video-game make-believe is good or bad, either. It causes a certain physiological response, but that response is not lasting. What we could perhaps use is larger studies on how much of the time gamers spend in that fight-or-flight mode, and the long-term affects on their health.

Two studies at Ohio State University recently examined how cooperative modes in violent video games affected gamers. In one study, researchers David Ewoldsen and John Velez had 119 college students play Halo II with a partner. In some of the groups, the students competed with their partner, while in others, the pair cooperated. Afterwards, the players engaged in a real-life “tit for tat” scenario to see how they would react to competitive or cooperative behavior from their partner — and found that those who cooperated in the game were more likely to cooperate in reality, too.

In their second trial, Ewoldsen and Velez had 80 Ohio State students play video games with people wearing t-shirts from University of Michigan, Ohio’s rival university. The pairs played Unreal Tournament — some as rivals, and some as cooperative teams. Afterwards, real-life tests revealed that the cooperative players were more likely to be cooperative away from the games, while rival players were less cooperative.

Velez said:

“You’re still being very aggressive, you’re still killing people in the game – but when you cooperate, that overrides any of the negative effects of the extreme aggression.”

Again, these are small and limited studies of young people, and we don’t know whether they are regular gamers or folks who have never seen Halo II or Unreal Tournament before in their lives. Gender and ethnicity may also be factors.

Of course, seeing these studies side by side, I wonder if the cooperative players in the Ohio State research showed the same fight-or-flight response and increased pain tolerance seen in the Keele study.

Despite the limitations, it’s clear that video games’ affect on players is complex — as complex as any other activity humans enjoy. If we’re going to keep studying this, we need bigger, more longitudinal, more comprehensive studies that reject the biases of the past and seek neutral explanations and analyses of this popular pastime.

Video games: educational, or crime-sparking? Informed & uninformed voices in the debate

As teachers look for ways to bring video games into the classroom, a law-enforcement leader says they’re making teens get stabby.

Many people look at the hours that kids spend playing video games and worry about them wasting their time. Others, such as seventh-grade teacher Joel Bonasera, look at those hours and see an opportunity to harness kids’ passion and teach them something.

Apparently Bonasera was, at first, surprised to find that a girl in her class liked killing bad guys in Call of Duty as much as the boys do. That made him realize the pervasive lure of gaming in his kids’ lives. Although he recognized he couldn’t bring a first-person shooter into the classroom, he did discover another popular game around which he could create lesson plans: Minecraft.

As the name suggests, Minecraft offers players the opportunity to build things — houses, fortresses, gardens — using 3D cubes. You also dig for minerals. For many players, it’s creative, fun, and a little bit addictive. So, Bonasera sits his students down in front of the game…

And then he builds a lesson around the game.

“While you’re doing it, just write your thoughts down over here about what you’re doing. Okay, next week let’s plan out what you’re going to do and show the mathematical reason behind that. Okay, the week after that, let’s make a full blown blueprint.”

Other teachers are finding ways to tie video games into their lessons — connecting the hero’s journey in World of Warcraft to a reading of Tolkein’s book The Hobbit, for example.

Meanwhile, in Australia, at least one law-enforcement officer believes video games are to blame for an increase in teen knife violence.

New South Wales’ Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione said recently that he believes young people are being desensitized by playing video games for hours. He didn’t specify which video games — or whether knife fighting was involved in them.

He said he had reached the conclusion that there was “nothing more potentially damaging than the sort of violence they’re being exposed to, be it in movies, be it in console games they’re playing.”
…

“You get rewarded for killing people, raping women, stealing money from prostitutes, driving cars crashing and killing people.

“That’s not going to affect the vast majority but it’s only got to affect one or two and what have you got? You’ve got some potentially really disturbed young person out there who’s got access to weapons like knives or is good with the fist, can go out there and almost live that life now in the streets of modern Australia. That’s concerning.”

However, what concerns me is something he says toward the end of the article:

“We grab them off the streets, children 14-13, who are drunk that we come across in the city in the Cross and in Oxford St.

“We ring parents and say ‘little Johnny’s down here, you better come in and get him’. And parents don’t even care. They say ‘he got there and can get his way back’.”

So he really thinks that video-game violence is inspiring these kids more than the treatment they’re receiving from their parents? Now, I’m certain we’re both generalizing: Scipione probably doesn’t receive that response from every parent of a kid who’s drunk and fighting. Nor is every parent who responds that way necessarily nonchalant or uncaring. At some point when kids act out, parents often would rather see them face police consequences, and maybe that’s what these parents are doing. However, this comment suggests frayed relationships between kids and parents, and that’s something much more likely to spark juvenile crime than blowing off some steam in a video game. In fact, kids with access to video games would probably be less likely to stab someone.

It’s true that with video games, they’re not all good or all bad. There can be video games that make sense in the classroom, and other video games probably best suited for late nights with friends. You can’t say that just because they’re good enough for school, there’s no way a video game could inspire a bad idea. Many — probably most — video games teach people valuable skills. And, once in a while, someone plays one and winds up hurting someone in reality, whether that act was influenced by the game or not. Heck, there’s no saying Minecraft, cute as it is, couldn’t feed someone’s fury — if that someone was already in a furious place.

However, it’s worth pointing out the contrast in these perspectives, in part because Bonasera saw a way to harness kids’ love of video game and turn it into something powerful and educational. Scipione, on the other hand, saw a month-long blip in knife crime, didn’t know what could have caused it, and blamed it on gaming — without even knowing the perpetrators’ gaming habits. Whose perspective is more thoughtful and informed? Given that, which one seems more worth heeding?

Hardcore video-gaming: is it saving kids from violent street life, or ruining a generation?

In Somalia, boys face more danger out on the streets than they do in front of the game console. Is that true elsewhere? Photo by Flickr user tkru.

Somalia has been known for years as a place of extreme violence and lawlessness. Since civil war broke out in 1991, all people were at risk, but particularly young people, who faced either being recruited to fight or being caught in the crossfire.

Now that some cultural sanctions have lifted, Somali boys are playing video games — and many adults are glad. Well, kind of:

Some parents say the video games are helping to keep teens off the street, which in turn lowers the chances they might be recruited by al-Shabab. But many teens admit to skipping class to practice their gaming skills.

Although there are downsides to skipping school, of course, there’s one major upside: schools are where kids are most likely to be recruited into the al-Shabab militia, where they would be required to fight.

Mohamed Deq Abdullahi, a father of two teens, watched his boys play a soccer video game in a sweltering parlor on a recent sunny day. He sees the boys’ new hobby as a beneficial development.

“This is his daylong activity because I don’t want him get bored and go to war,” Abdullahi said. “The busier they stay the more tired they get and the more they ignore violence.”

The article doesn’t say so, but I suspect there’s another benefit to these kids’ gameplay: it allows them to process the violence of the past 20 years, all they’ve ever known, in a safe way, without real-life consequences. That’s much healthier for them than getting behind a real machine-gun and being told to fight their countrymen.

In that light, what can we make of a recent CNN article blaming video games (and porn) for “ruining a generation of young men?” It claims that too much gaming sets up players (only male players, for some reason) for addiction — specifically, “arousal addiction,” where gamers need more video games to reach the same “high.”

Oddly, the article cites Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik as a prime example of this phenomenon, even though he doesn’t exemplify the average gamer at all:

Norwegian mass murder suspect Anders Behring Breivik reported during his trial that he prepared his mind and body for his marksman-focused shooting of 77 people by playing “World of Warcraft” for a year and then “Call of Duty” for 16 hours a day.

… Except that it’s not clear whether Breivik was telling the truth. After all, in his manifesto he advised people who were training for similar terrorist attacks to claim they were keeping themselves busy with video games, when in fact they were planning things out. It’s also worth noting, in light of the Somalia piece, that if Breivik had been playing video games all day on July 22, 2011, 77 people might still be alive.

It’s true that playing hours upon hours of video games is likely to have some consequences. Kids who play this much miss out on other things. But it’s important to remember that they’re also getting many important things — positive things — out of that gameplay, and that the things they’re missing out on might be much, much worse. Somalia isn’t the only place where kids can get caught in the crossfire. In inner-city areas where gangs hold power, the risks for kids are quite similar. Research shows there’s less youth violence and crime in places where video games are easy to come by.

What “ruins” kids more: playing video games until their arms are sore, or jailtime and violence?

Call of Duty: War game or propaganda tool?

Are video games making society more militaristic? One academic thinks so.

Did video games help Anders Breivik train for his terrorist attack in Norway? Victoria University lecturer John Martino says such questions are missing the point.

“What has not been addressed in the debate generated by violent military games is the role these games play in the process of ‘militarisation,’” Martino states in a CNET.au article published today.

In sum, he’s suggesting that the popularity and increasing realism of military-based games, particularly the best-selling Call of Duty franchise, is contributing to the “militarization of society.” But his article is riddled with errors and mistaken assumptions that leave his argument in the dust.

First, who is John Martino? His two most recent credits involve — you guessed it — looks at gaming and the militarization of culture, including “No Place for Noobs: Computer games and the Militarization of Youth Culture,” presented at the 6th Global Conference: Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberspace, and Science Fiction in Oxford in July 2011, and “Gaming and the Militarization of Youth Culture: Some Initial remarks,” presented at the IADIS International Conference ICT, Society and Human Beings in Rome, also in July 2011.

Martino starts off with Wolfenstein and Doom, which are good places to start, if you’re going to talk about military shooters. He talks about how the military modified the game to help train soldiers. Anyone who thinks you can learn how to navigate a real-life war scene by playing through Doom‘s blocky mazes and fighting its pixelated enemies is arguably suffering from loss of contact with reality.

Anyhow, from there he gets into the fact that Call of Duty developers have worked with military consultants to make sure gameplay elements are realistic. This is the same as bringing in consultants for a film, such as Saving Private Ryan or The Thin Red Line. Nobody would call the latter an effort to turn these films into “recruitment tools” — they would, in fact, be described as working toward historical accuracy.

Not Martino.

Such partnerships share the goal of working to enhance the training effectiveness of simulation technology.

Military shooters add to the already potent cultural tools that political systems have at their disposal for propaganda purposes.

Then, he stacks up his evidence that society is becoming more militarized:

1. “The commemoration of war (think Anzac Day) has become integral to our view of Australian history, and the place of Australia in the world.”

2. “Recent data published by the Stockholm International Peace Institute indicates that Australia is one of the largest military-spending nations in the world.”

These are his examples? Has he forgotten that much of the Western world has been engaged in some way with the struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade? Has he forgotten that Australia is within striking distance of the unpredictable North Korea, and might have good reason to want to defend itself?

Martino leaves out obvious counter-examples, such as child soldiers in Africa or other countries where high-end video games aren’t readily available.

I find it much more plausible that the military is responsible for “militarizing” societies, and that kids who grow up in societies undergoing such change might seek military-style games as an outlet, and as a chance to safely explore their natural curiosity about what wartime is like.

Do you think he’s on to something? Are Call of Duty and other games making society more militarized? And, if so, is that a bad thing?

Why do so many gamers heed “Call of Duty?”

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 alone has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. What makes this series so popular?

Ten years ago, a group of men working with Al-Quaeda hijacked four American airplanes. They crashed two of them into the World Trade Center towers in New York, toppling them. A third crashed at the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed over Pennsylvania. Within weeks, American troops had invaded Afghanistan and declared war on the Taliban. By 2003, the military had moved into Iraq as well. A decade of messy, complicated war followed.

It may be no surprise, then, that the Call of Duty franchise has become one of the all-time best-selling video game series during this decade. Many Americans were justifiably angry, but couldn’t go to war themselves. Others wondered what our soldiers were going through, but the news reports just weren’t enough. The Call of Duty games feed just those kinds of emotions, providing lifelike and detailed versions of military operations in spots around the globe.

As the world looked back this month on September 11, 2001, The Denver Post’s John Wenzel spoke up for Call of Duty, saying the games helped players make sense of the terrorist attacks:

Instead of promising escapism, they provided an outlet for ordinary Americans to vent their rage and frustration by aiming virtual weapons at otherwise nebulous foreign enemies.

Video-game environments are entertaining and tidily self-contained — unlike real war, where the blood lingers long after players switch off the Xbox 360. But as funhouse mirrors of the past decade, “Call of Duty” and other war games have reflected a certain distorted collective therapy that, at times, makes for an eerily lifelike portrait of the aggression and anxiety that violence breeds.

The new Call of Duty game, Modern Warfare 3, is due out next month and is likely to be a top seller at Christmas. The #2 holiday pick is another military game, Gears of War 3. Clearly there’s a hunger for war games in this long era of military exercises in far-flung places.

With such brisk sales, it’s inevitable that some teens and younger kids will play Call of Duty. And there are some who say they shouldn’t. But kids were just as effected by the terrorist attacks and the vagueries of war as adults were — and they have a right to explore these ideas as well.

Call of Duty players: what attracted you to the game? Did playing it help you process the 9/11 attacks or the “War on Terror” in any way? Has it helped you understand your feelings about war and military action better?

Grown-up gamers disprove fears of RPGs’ danger

Despite public fears, kids who play Dungeons & Dragons don’t go crazy or kill people. Mostly, they grow up to be adults who hold down jobs, have families, and … play D&D. Photo by Flickr user super-structure.

As sales of console and PC games fall, gamers are turning increasingly to cheaper alternatives, including online games and role-playing games.

RPGs have never enjoyed the blockbuster success of video games, but they have maintained a steady following since their emergence in the 1970s with games such as Dungeons & Dragons. That game alone has sold some $1 billion in merchandise and has entertained more than 20 million people. Compare that to the Call of Duty video-game franchise, which has sold more than 55 million copies and raked in upwards of $3 billion.

And yet, there was as much panic in the heyday of RPGs as there is now. Campaigning by Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (B.A.D.D.) coupled with scary fictionalized films like Mazes and Monsters — based on a sensationalized account of a single gamer who committed suicide — frightened many parents into believing that RPGs were a gateway to occult practice, psychosis, suicide, or homicide. While it’s true that a handful of RPG fans explored the occult, suffered mental-health issues, took their lives or killed someone else, the vast majority didn’t.

So what happened to them?

Well, some are still playing. Now in their late 30s to mid-40s, the original D&D generation has grown up, settled into jobs and careers, gotten married, raised kids, and are still enjoying a campaign now and then. Today, as in the 1980s, one of the primary reasons people enjoy such games is that it gives them a chance to spend time with like-minded friends:

That socialization is key, gamers said.

After spending all day on a computer at work, gamers Brandy Hamblet and Travis Fricke said that sometimes the last thing they want to do is go home and stare at a screen for entertainment.

“It’s nice to be able to sit down with several friends at once,” Hamblet said. “I probably wouldn’t get to see some of these people very often outside of the game. I get social-ed out pretty quickly, but that doesn’t happen with D&D. I always want to keep playing.”

People are sticking with — or returning to — RPGs for a variety of reasons: they’re less expensive than video games, for starters. Self-publishing has put many more games on the market, giving gamers an astounding number of choices. And new guidebooks for the old standbys have made them more accessible; some are aimed, specifically, at people who are burned out on video games. It seems to be working.

Still, you can find corners of the Internet — particularly religious corners — where opponents warn against the dangers of RPGs. By now, a longitudinal study of role-playing gamers, had one been conducted, would have found little statistical evidence of long-term harm.

Looking at these gamers, all grown up, disproves the fears that sparked a moral panic in the 1980s. What can we learn from this that can be applied to current and future moral panics? And will we ever be able to end such panics once and for all? Where kids are concerned, I suspect the answer will be no.

Norway’s backlash against video games begins

Norwegian stores have pulled several video games, including Modern Warfare, from store shelves following Anders Breivik’s killing spree.

Remember how I said last week that video games didn’t lead Andres Breivik to kill dozens of his fellow Norwegians? Even Breivik himself already seemed to have terrorism firmly in mind by the time he described Modern Warfare 2 as “probably the best military simulator out there.”

Nevertheless, some Norwegian stores, including Coop Norden and Platekompaniet, have suspended sales of Modern Warfare and other violent video games, such as Homefront, the remainder of the Call of Duty series, Sniper: Ghost Warrior, and Counter-Strike: Source. Coop pulled World of Warcraft while Platekompaniet is still carrying it. In all, 51 games are off the shelves.

It’s unclear why the decision to stop selling some of the top-grossing video games was made. Are they concerned that Breivik’s manifesto — which encourages playing MW2 and WoW — will inspire copycats? Or are they worried about looking insensitive by continuing to sell such games while Norway is grieving?

Coop representatives explained:

In light of Friday’s horrific events, and of respect for those affected, we have chosen to remove simple items from our range … Coop believes that terrorism has been guided by motives other than computer game universes and Coop therefore sees no direct [connection] between them.

Not much of an explanation, eh?

Unfortunately, this decision has the side effect of separating people from a powerful way of processing fear, anxiety, and shock. And Norway is currently a country full of people attempting to process fear, anxiety, and shock. Sure, some of them will find other outlets — but to deny this one seems unreasonable, particularly if nobody truly believes games were to blame for Breivik’s actions.

It also winds up punishing video-game companies for an act of terrorism they had absolutely nothing to do with. Stores usually have the option whether to carry a certain product, so no laws are being broken, as far as I know. But I wonder what the ultimate effect, if any, of this sales decision will be.

What do you think? Should retailers stop selling such games when they’re associated with an act of terrorism? Why or why not?