This post was originally written on August 19, 2005 for my, now defunct, Grownup Gamer blog.

So, now that GTA:San Andreas is rated AO, the big problem is that many stores, most notably Wal-Mart, have a policy of not carrying AO rated games, or NC-17 movies. However, I can’t help noticing that they do carry “unrated” versions of movies.

See, what happens is this: a studio makes a movie, and they decide that they want it to have an R rating so that it will actually be shown in theatres. Then the ratings board says that in order to get that rating, certain objectionable scenes have to be taken out. So they take some scenes out of the movie until the ratings board is happy. Then, they release a version on video that has the scenes put back in. This version would, presumably, garner a rating of X or NC-17, so they just don’t show it to the ratings board. After all, the movie rating system is totally voluntary. They just print “UNRATED!” in large letters on the box (and they only do that to increase sales).

To those who are following the GTA:SA controversy, this might seem familiar. Presumably, Rockstar was going to include the sexual material, but blocked it out of the game to keep from getting an AO rating. It seems to me that instead of “fixing” all the new copies of GTA:SA and taking an AO rating, they should be able to do what the movie studios do: unlock the sexual content, slap a big “UNRATED!” label on it and sell it at Wal-Mart.

Of course, this wouldn’t work because Wal-Mart’s policies aren’t based on a desire to promote good moral values, or be fair to content creators. They are a business and their repuation is based on creating an environment where parents feel they can bring their children. So as long as GTA:SA is generating controversy, they risk losing their target demographic by having the game on the shelf. This is the way it should be. After all, corporations shouldn’t be dictating morality (that’s the government’s job, right?).

But it does raise a question of incentive. The ESRB rating system is also voluntary. But if it doesn’t stop parents from buying the violent/sexual games for their kids, and it doesn’t protect publishers from being accused of “peddling” violent/sexual games to minors, then why bother applying for it? The government can’t force publishers to adhere to the rating system, but they sure seem to be able to give grief to publishers who are trying to adhere to it. At what point will they just start driving publishers away from the rating system, effectively shooting themselves in the foot?

This post was originally written on May 26, 2005 for my, now defunct, Grownup Gamer blog.

I recently finished Double-Fine’s magnum opus Psychonauts, and I hardly have words to express how in awe I am of it. Certainly, I can talk about the witty dialog, or the excellent voice acting, or the boldly original art direction. All of these things make it entertaining, but in much the same way that a movie is entertaining. We can get these things from other media. But Psychonauts is not like other art. Psychonauts is game art.

Some explaination: in Psychonauts you are a psychic who spends a lot of time in other people’s minds. Inside each mind is a world that represents that person’s state of mind, and it is in these worlds that the game’s real brilliance lies. The story and characters aren’t just added onto the game to string it together, they are woven inextricably into allegorical worlds that you can explore and interact with. Navigating each level is a matter of coming to understand the personality of the person whose mind you’re inhabiting and figuring out the unique logic that governs that particular mind. Truths are revealed not just through cutscenes and exposition, but through the very experience of playing the game.

But equally important is the fact that these truths are so elegantly communicated. The rich metaphors contained within the mental worlds really gave me the feeling of wandering around in someone’s head and knowing that person from the inside. It is the combination of these things that makes Psychonauts a huge step towards establishing videogames as a unique artform, independant of existing media. I mean, when GTA3 came out, people talked about how it was art. It was a really great game, but as far as art goes, it was really just an imitation of another artform, namely film. Psychonauts is something different.

Oh, and its also wicked fun.

This post was originally written on March 12, 2006 for my, now defunct, Grownup Gamer blog.

Someday, we’ll have virtual worlds that you can interact with intuitively - just do what you would do if you were really in that situation - instead of juggling statistics and leveling strategies. That’s what I did when I first started playing Everquest. I just wandered around and talked to people until they gave me something to do and then I did it. It wasn’t a very efficient way to play the game, but it was a fun way to experience the world and it mostly just required common sense.

Then there are games like RF:Online. Apparently, a normal part of the character development process in this game involves allowing enemies to attack you, so that you have a chance to block the attack (which happens automatically), and thus raise your shield and defence skills. You do this either by attacking with weak weapons to draw the battle out, or by not attacking at all. I had to do the latter since, by the time I figured this out, my offensive skills were far greater than my defensive skills.

So I went out and let weak monsters smack me around. This is not something I would have thought to do if I hadn’t read about it on a forum. Its also not fun. At all. Even the monsters get bored. Seriously, they fall asleep after a while and you have to smack’em up a bit so that they’ll keep attacking you. After a while, I could have used somebody to smack me when I started falling asleep.

Of course, obscure rules don’t make a game bad. A lot of the satisfaction from games often comes from mastering the arcane rule systems upon which they are built. For that reason, complicated stats-laden games aren’t going away any time soon, and that’s fine. It would just be nice if mastering these games could come more naturally from living in the world, rather than from forums and manuals. RF Online just felt too intentionally esoteric if you ask me - a game made complicated for the sole purpose of making its players feel like they are experts at something. It felt manipulative, somehow.

Bottom line, if you’re looking for a world that you can just explore and experience, steer clear of RF Online. If you try to explore without leveling up, horrible monsters will appear out of nowhere and kill you instantly.

(note: my experience with the game was limited to the Beta test, but I doubt that it changed much before release. I really need to stop procrastinating with these posts…)

This post was originally written on February 27, 2007 for my, now defunct, Grownup Gamer blog.

This is an email that I sent to “Gabe” of Penny Arcade recently regarding his remarks (scroll down) about a story involving violence against homeless people. I’m posting it here because it applies equally well to all the people who posted about Gabe’s remarks in their blogs, and to a lot of other people in the videogame blogosphere. It also partly explains why I haven’t posted here in a long time. I edited it somewhat for clarity since I sent it, but the ideas are the same.

I am an avid consumer of violent videogames and think that GTA:SA is one of the most brilliant games ever made. I am also a fan of Penny Arcade, and have some laser-etched lithographs of your excellent work on my wall so that everybody knows it. Several months ago, I stopped reading all videogame “journalism” sites… except for Penny Arcade. However, your rants about CNN’s coverage of the increasing problem of violence against homeless people is a perfect example of why I gave up on the gaming media. I think your comments are baseless, paranoid and totally unfair, not just to the author but to the media in gerneral. If it was just you and just this story then I wouldn’t bother writing this letter. The problem is that things like this are happening all the time for no good reason. It upsets people needlessly, fuels paranoia and wastes time and emotional energy that could be spent on real problems that face the industry. It is, in other words, not befitting a man of as much character as I believe you to have.

(That last bit was a compliment)

1. Nobody is Blaming Videogames

You say that the teenagers mentioned in the article “blamed” the crime on videogames. What are you basing this on? There is only evidence of one teenager, Andrew Irhckte, even mentioning videogames. He only said that the experience reminded him of a videogame. Assuming that he does play violent games, I think it would be rather strange if committing an actual act of violence didn’t remind him of those games. Isn’t it possible that he was just telling the truth and somebody wrote it down? One of the other teens, Nathan Moore, described the experience as being “like a dream”. Does that mean that he was blaming dreams for the murder? Later in the article, they talk about the beating of Norris Gaynor by Billy Ammons, who described beating Gaynor with a baseball bat as “like teeing off”. Does this mean that CNN has a similar grudge against golf?

You and this step-mother person also seem to think that Irhckte made the statement as some kind of strategy and that it “will probably work”. Will work when? The guy’s been in jail for three years and this is apparently the first time anybody’s heard about it. He pleaded no contest to the charges, so he didn’t use videogames as a defense either.

2. The Article Isn’t About Videogames

You also seem to think that the idea that videogames caused these teenagers to commit this horrendous act is somehow central to the article. Well, let’s look at the story. Let’s start with the title, whose purpose it is to state the topic of the story. No mention of videogames there. They’ve also given us a bullet-list summary at the top of the article. Videogames weren’t important enough to make that list. How about the body? It’s a basic, BASIC rule of journalism that an article starts with the most important information and ends with the least important information. Videogames come after 2 mentions of alcohol and one of drugs (both of which appear in the lead sentence). The mention of videogames is paragraph 16 of the 19 paragraphs that talk about the 3 teenagers (I actually had trouble finding it just now). And lets not forget that it is not even mentioned in an accusatory way.

Of course, that’s not the entire article, which brings me to a side point: not only is this article not about videogames, it is also not about these three teenagers. The killing of Rex Baum isn’t even news because it’s not new. It happened 3 years ago. No, this article is about the recent increase in violence against homeless people. The Baum case is simply an example of the kind of violence that homeless people are the victims of (admittedly, I’m not sure why they chose such an old case to illustrate a recent problem). They mention lots of other cases later in the article with not a single mention of videogames. So the mention of videogames is not only a small part of the article - it is a small part of a small part of the article.

I also find it odd, if this is a story about the effects of videogame violence, that they chose to feature a 7 minute video interview with Nathan Moore, who did not make the comment about videogames. Also, in those 7 minutes the interviewer never asks Moore anything about videogames. She does ask a lot of question about what he was thinking and why he did what he did, which seems like the kind of thing that you say nobody in the media will ever try to find out ever.

3. Many Other Causes Are Explored

Once they move into the problem in general, we get a list of things that they actually explicitly state as causes:

- Bumfight videos (7 paragraphs!)
- Peer pressure
- Mob mentality
- Testosterone (or something like that - “The attackers are almost always boys”)
- Unsuspecting parents
- Boredom

This is in addition to mentioning drugs and alcohol earlier in the article. The last item could even be seen as praise for videogames since, whatever else they do, they definitely relieve boredom. At any rate, the article seems to contradict your apparent belief (and the belief of many gamers) that nobody in the media will ever explore any other possible explanation, ever. Clearly, this very article has done just that. I find it hard to believe that they featured people in the article who actually said “These things are actually caused by [insert item from above list]”, but that their real, secret intent was to demonize videogames by mentioning the fact that somebody mentioned in the police report that one of the boys mentioned videogames.

4. Nobody Else Cares

Okay, but what about the rest of the media? Supposedly they have “jumped all over” the videogame angle, right? So I spent some time on Google news looking up similar stories and found these:

http://phoenix.swarthmore.edu/2007-02-22/opinions/16926

http://www.sptimes.com/2007/02/20/Tampabay/Homeless_violence_up_.shtml

http://origin.insidebayarea.com/argus/localnews/ci_5279455

http://www.thedenverdailynews.com/?page=details&id=6683&t=Archivehttp://www.thedenverdailynews.com/?page=details&id=6683&t=Archive

http://www.playfuls.com/news_10_15249-Killing-Homeless-Man-Was-a-Game.html

http://www.dailyindia.com/show/116741.php/Killing-homeless-man-was-a-game

http://www.georgetownvoice.com/2007-02-22/sports/blood-sport

http://www.thebreeze.org/2007/02-22/op2.html

These are all the stories I could find about the rise in teen-on-homeless violence featured on non-gaming sites. Of these 8 stories only 2 of them, (The Breeze and the Phoenix News) make any mention of videogames whatsoever. In both cases, they use the exact same quotation from the CNN report, nothing more. In fact, Joshua Cohen of the Phoenix News goes on in the next paragraph to explain why the videogame connection is irrelevant (at least I think that’s what he’s saying – his language is a bit esoteric).

In fact, 2 of the stories don’t even mention the Baum killing. Not surprising since, as I said earlier, that’s really not the story here. Compare this to several stories that have already popped up on videogame blogs that talk exclusively about the supposed “videogame connection” in this story and I think it becomes clear who’s really “jumped all over” this “angle”.

5. The Mainstream Media, in General, Doesn’t Care.

So maybe the media frenzy just hasn’t happened yet. But its inevitable, right? Everybody knows that the mainstream media jumps at every opportunity to bash violent videogames, right? So I spent what was left of my day on Google news doing searches like “violent videogames” “’video game’ violence” and whatever other permutation of videogamey words and violenty words I could think of. I could only find ten mainstream media stories that had something to do with both videogames and violence:

http://www.munciefreepress.com/news/story/2007/2/19/235524/496

http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=local&id=5060223

http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070220/NEWS02/702200408/-1/ENT06

http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/207693/4/

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,660197441,00.html

http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-02-20-voa53.cfm

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/305yuvkp.asp?pg=1

http://www.wral.com/entertainment/blogpost/1198325/

http://media.www.dailyorange.com/media/storage/paper522/news/2007/02/07/Feature/Replaying.Tragedy-2701623.shtml

http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A202847

Three of these stories are about how various new laws restricting the sale of violent videogames to minors are having problems because they are unconstitutional. These range from simple matter-of-fact statements to an extended screed against (repeat: against) such laws. One of them talks about serious games like “Peacemaker” and how games don’t have to be violent. The Daily News of Central Utah has a delightful story about Jack Thompson’s antics that makes him look like a complete ass. Seriously. They make him look like the crackpot that he actually is.

Another actually talks about how games can help laproscopic surgeons greatly improve their accuracy on the job, since they basically do surgery by remote. What does this have to do with violence, you ask? At the end of the story, the writer cautions parents not to let their children play violent videogames in the hopes that they will become better surgeons. You might think that it wouldn’t make any sense for a parent to come to this conclusion. But one thing most gamers seem to agree on is that most parents are stupid. And I hope we can at least agree that it is good advice to not let your children play violent videogames.

When I found a couple of articles talking about Super Columbine Massacre RPG, I thought for sure I had hit paydirt. No such luck. They mostly consist of interviews with people who think the game is brilliant.

The article from the Weekly Standard is mostly about Civilisation, and only talks about violence in games in order to point out how Sid Meier and his games are so non-violent. It does contain the following statement: “Some have blamed videogames for juvenile delinquency and violence.” This is one of the most inflammatory things that I’ve read on any of these sites. Of course, that’s not saying much - the statement is inarguably true. At any rate, they go on to basically dismiss the argument as irrelevant.

At one point I actually thought that I had an honest-to-goodness flaming anti-videogame rant on the Indy Star website (http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070221/OPINION01/702210377/-1/ZONES04), but it turned out to be a letter to the editor written by the Parents Television Council. Obviously, you can’t hold letters against a publication because its not their opinion. Besides, the PTC is a media watchdog group and, therefore, not part of “the media”, so I didn’t include it in the list.

The closest I came to an article that could be considered anti-videogame was the one on the Muncie Free Press website. Mind you, it wasn’t really an article. It was mostly a cut-n-paste of a press release from the Indiana Senate Democratic Caucus, and that fact is plainly stated. So it’s not necessarily that opinion of the Muncie Free Press. However, the press release does say bad things about videogames and the Muncie Free Press doesn’t say anything to contradict them (or agree with them), so by your standards I think it would be an anti-videogame story. So I will give you a point for it.

At this point I realized that current articles might not be the best thing to go on right now, since there weren’t any high profile cases of gamers committing violent acts recently. Being out of the loop, I had not heard of Sulejman Talovic or his Trolley shooting. Tellingly, my search for violent videogame news didn’t dig up anything about him either! Damnit, its getting really late. Okay, quick scan of 13 articles involving Sulejman Talovic, doing a quick text search of each for the word “video”. Hardly any mention videogames! One emphatically states the opinion that videogames were NOT the cause. Another clarifies that NO videogames or computers were found by police and that police were going on record as saying that there was NO reason to believe that videogames were the cause (there goes another supposed enemy of gamers – the police). Wait! This just in! A friend of Talovic is making spurious claims that he played violent videogames on Talovic’s nonexistent hardware! Only one site seems to be carrying the information, and they are very careful to point out that this contradicts everything the police have found out. Somehow, this still worries some videogame blogs simply because people are talking about videogames at all in this case. So, I tell you what, I’ll give that one to you just to be on the safe side. About 4 stories about this guy that mention videogames, and one puts them in a way that could be considered unflattering.

So that brings the score to 2 stories about the dangers of videogames out of a total of 14 stories, with several positive stories to balance them out. Are you surprised? Don’t be. This is exactly the situation I found several months ago when I gave up on videogame “journalism”. Yeah, about that…

Why I Left

Over a year ago, I started frequenting gamepolitics.com. I was especially interested in the ongoing debate on videogame violence. I could not come to terms with the fact that so many people were so misinformed about the nature of videogames and that so many opportunistic people were playing on the fears that came from that ignorance. I became nearly obsessed with learning more about the battle for my favorite pastime, and fearful of what the outcome might be. Delving past blog posts, past the news articles that they were based on, I hunted down actual court decisions, legal precedent and psychological journal articles (I have a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from a local University). I contributed to many discussions at gamepolitics on the topic, as well as many posts on my own blog, Grown Up Gamer (http://blogs.gameblogs.org/grownupgamer/ ) .

I watched as the gaming industry won case after case defending the rights of developers and retailers. I watched them succeed at a battle that no other medium in recent history has won. Comic books, movies, television… all of these succumbed to censorship in one form or another, but not us! I saw the enemies of videogames fail again and again. And the mainstream media watched with me and realized that videogames weren’t all that bad, and that a large portion of their readers played them and that Jack Thompson was a complete asshat. I watched the mainstream media become what I have (hopefully) shown you in this email.

In fact, by the time I abandoned the videogame blog-o-sphere, I felt quite safe in the knowledge that everything was going to be just fine. But I increasingly realized that I was the only one who seemed to notice that things were getting better. Even as videogame bloggers report on the repeated victories of the videogame industry, they still insist on seeing themselves as underdogs, persecuted at every turn. As evidence of this persecution became more scarce, the gaming community just became more irrationally senstitive, to the point we’re at today: turning the mere mention of videogames into a grand conspiracy to blame videogames exclusively for all the worlds ills.

Gamers need to realize that they are the ones, more than anyone else, who are obsessed with videogames. I understand because I share this obsession. When you are obsessed with something, then everything about that thing seems bigger than it really is. So it is easy to understand how gamers can take the tiniest mentions of videogames in the media and make it out to be some great conspiracy. But enough is enough. Gamers need to realize that this is a result of their own obsession with games, not the media’s obsession with games. I hope that this mountain of evidence that I have spent all day amassing is enough to make that truth impossible to ignore.

The story that started all this is a story about a segment of the population that gets eggs thrown at them by strangers if they’re lucky and has to worry about teenagers killing them for no good reason. But gamers look at this and all they can see is some tiny perceived slight at themselves. Somebody mentioned their favorite pastime, and all they can think of is how persecuted they are. Do you see? Somehow, the persecution that gamers feel eclipses the plight of homeless people in America!

That is sick.

That is what drove me away from videogame blogs. Not the tragic farce of politicians and lawyers trying to capitalize on the fears of a misinformed public. That is frustrating, don’t get me wrong, but its just the kind of thing you come to expect from politicians and lawyers. You shouldn’t just accept it, but you have to expect it. No, what I just couldn’t take anymore was watching reasonably intelligent, well spoken, clever writers get reduced to the kind of egomaniacal, paranoid, delusional reactionism that’s ordinarily reserved for fundamentalist religious groups. The more the world started to accept them, the more they became an insular sub-culture of group-thinkers, relying only on each other for news, telling each other the same story about how the world is out to get them. That’s the only explanation I can think of think of for how their perspective became so hopelessly divorced from reality.

Why have I gone to such lengths to demonstrate this to you? Because I can’t stand it anymore. I tried to stay away from it. You were my buffer zone between me and the gaming world that I have grown so weary of. But you failed me. And now I can’t ignore it anymore

I’m also telling you this because you can help change this. People in the gaming community are holding on to so much useless pain and hurt and feelings of persecution aimed at people who don’t mean them any harm and are, in many cases, on their side. It may sound overly dramatic, but you are very much in a position to help heal this pain. I tell this to you because I believe that, more than anyone else in the blogosphere, you would want to do this. I believe that you are fundamentally good people who can rise above whatever need is being filled by fueling this needless hatred.

A New Hope

Throughout this process I have been dismayed with the lack of progress that gaming sites have made. It seemed like nothing had changed since I stopped reading these sites. Then I noticed the comments on the Joystiq article referencing your comments. For the first time I’ve ever seen, a large number of commenters were actually correcting the errors made in the story instead of just mindlessly agreeing with it. People were actually reading the CNN article and disagreeing with Joystiq’s take on it. I don’t ever recall so many commenters being so ahead of the curve. Clearly a change is coming, although its kind of sad that blog readers seem to be figuring this out faster than blog writers. You have the opportunity to live up to your rebellious reputation by espousing the truly radical opinion: that the media is not our enemy.

This post was originally written on October 12, 2005 for my, now defunct, Grownup Gamer blog.

This post was originally written on August 8, 2005 for my, now defunct, Grownup Gamer blog.

Of all the things that really piss me off about the Hot Coffee debate, I think the worst is all this talk about how Rockstar somehow betrayed gamers and the video game industry by including “hidden” sexual content on the GTA:SA game disc.

For the record, I think they should have done a better job of removing the content from the disc. I think they could have and wish they would have. I also think that the resulting debate is a valid one and that this is a legitimately valid issue. I’m not trying to let Rockstar off the hook here.

But before you go accusing Rockstar of failing in their duty to the game industry, or whatever, consider the fact that GTA:SA comes with a End User License Agreement that forbids modification of the code. Now, you can think what you want about EULA’s. I don’t like them very much personally. But last time I checked, it was a legally binding contract. One that has been violated by the creator of Hot Coffee, and all the people who have installed it. It seems to me that the violation of an explicit contract is at least as bad as violating some vague implied code of honor that people seem to think Rockstar should be bound to. So if you want to talk about trust issues, I’m here to tell you that it works both ways. Gamers are saying “Well, Rockstar should have known that somebody would hack the game”. Well, when you consider what the EULA says, that’s pretty much the same as saying “Gamer’s can’t be trusted”. Maybe Rockstar wanted the game to be hacked. But if that’s true, then it means that their plan hinged on players violating the EULA that they agreed to.

I’m not even saying that people shouldn’t hack games. I use NoCD cracks all the time because I think that having to put my CD in to play a game is bullshit. I’m just saying don’t go online and talk about how Rockstar let you down. Even if you didn’t use the crack, that still doesn’t mean you should blame Rockstar for other people violating their EULA.

Consider this: Imagine that you own a public establishment… let’s say a wrestling ring, since that’s pretty violent. You mostly cater too adults, and you warn people that what goes on in the ring is not suitable for people under 17, but you don’t refuse admission to anyone. Kids usually can’t afford a ticket, but sometimes their parents take them.

You were originally considering making it an adults only establishment, and you still have a room full of sexually explicit posters and whatnot. Hell, you’ve even got a couple of strippers in there. Why not, its all hypothetical. But since there’s kids running around, you put a lock on the door and a sign saying to keep out.

So maybe somebody develops a simple tool that can pick this particular type of lock that you’ve secured this room with, and he starts distrubuting these tools to anyone who wants one, and telling them about your room’o’porn.

Then when word gets out, you are accused, not of owning pornography or of putting it somewhere where children can get to it. No, you are accused of peddling pornography to children. And if that weren’t bad enough, when the government threatens to outlaw professional wrestling, the fans accuse you of detroying their favorite pastime.

How the hell is that fair?

On the other hand, if this whole debacle brings down the violent video game industry, I don’t think PatrickW and the other Hot Coffee drinkers are really to blame either. In the end, Rockstar is, at worst, guilty of a minor infraction: selling content to 17-year olds that is only suitable for 18-year olds. If that infraction ends up being the crowbar that breaks apart the industry, it is because of crackpot alarmists like Jack Thompson and opportunistic politicians like Hilary Clinton. As gamer’s we should remember that and stop fighting against an industry that is just expressing itself in a legitimate way.

This post was originally written on June 29, 2005 for my, now defunct, Grownup Gamer blog.

“Here is something you can’t understand / How I can just kill a man” - Cypress Hill, from the GTA:SA Soundtrack

In my last post I tried to establish how Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas portrays gang violence as a lose-lose-lose situation for gang members, cops, and by-standers respectively. If you haven’t read it, please do, or at least read the preface before the list, as it has some important points.

Today I’ll be continuing my list of positive social lessons that can be learned from playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Lesson 5: Gang Warfare is a serious problem in urban America.

I recently defended GTA:San Andreas in a forum discussion on Gamepolitics, and an anonymous poster flamed me, saying that, being a Canadian, it must be easy for me to ignore the effects of gang violence in America. By the way, I am Canadian and in case you didn’t know, gang violence is practically non-existent in my country (which is interesting, considering we have the same videogames on the shelf as they have in the U.S., and they are just as available to minors). So ordinarily, it would be easy for me to ignore this problem. But, as it happens, I play GTA:San Andreas. I see scenes of brutal gang violence resulting in the death of innocent people every day.

Let me take a moment to make something clear. I don’t play GTA to learn lessons or appreciate the social commentary or experience the plight of inner city youths. Those things are bonuses. The primary reason I play GTA because I think it is fun and interesting. The game presents a dynamic world with many interesting and exciting challenges. Truth be told, I don’t care for violence in and of itself, but when it is used as a vehicle for interesting gameplay then I’m onboard (I think the reason why so many videogames focus on violence is simply because the medium is still in its infancy, thus still primitive and therefore best suited to simulating primitive human interactions, like shooting at each other. It will outgrow this phase as time goes on) And yes, it’s also exciting to play the part of an outlaw. This is not new idea. Western culture has long romanticized outlaws, be they pirates, or desparados, or mobsters, and many people, even children, have dreamt about what it would be like to live the life of one of these outlaws. This is the realm that videogames occupy, in my opinion: daydreams projected on a screen.

I say these things so that I can make an important distinction: as much as I truly enjoy playing the game, I don’t want to live in a place like the one depicted in GTA:San Andreas. I don’t think it would even be a nice place to visit. Why would I? Why would I want to live in a place where I’m afraid to leave my car in case a gunfight breaks out, and afraid to be in a car for fear that it’ll get jacked? Its a very stressful environment, which can be exciting if there’s no real danger, but having to live in a real world like that would be a hellish experience. Rather than making crime more acceptable to me, I am inclined to do whatever it takes to prevent this from happening.

Luckily, I live in Canada, so all I have to do is encourage my government to keep doing what they’ve been doing. I can only imagine how frustrating it would be for people who live in America, and have yet to find a solution to widespread gang violence in urban ghettos. Which brings me to the final lesson:

Lesson 6:Gang Violence is a Complex Problem

As I said earlier, I’ve already established how this game portrays gang life as a lose-lose-lose situation. This leaves one obvious, lingering question: Why would anyone choose to join a gang? This is one area where I feel the previous games in the Grand Theft Auto series fell short. The motivation of the main character to be a criminal was usually sketchy or overly simplistic, and we didn’t know much about how he got there. It really did trivalize the criminal life in a way that I felt left the impression that crime was something criminals did for fun, or just because they were evil or something.

But as much as the other games fell short, GTA:San Andreas has excelled in presenting a well-defined main character with complex motives. When we meet C.J., he has made the seemingly obvious choice of leaving the ghetto and moving to Liberty City, but he has returned after getting word that his mother has been killed in a gang shootout. On his return, he discovers that the neighborhood he grew up in, is in danger of being overrun by the Ballas, a crack-dealing rival gang. C.J. clearly feels guilty for not being around to protect his mother and his neighborhood, guilt that is only exacerbated when he discovers rumors that he “ran away” to Liberty city. Here we see the first dilemma that faces anyone looking to escape the ghetto: You can’t leave without leaving people behind.

C.J.’s friends are, likewise, interestingly characters. Having life outside the ghetto, he clearly sees them as immature and developmentally stunted. He is hesistant when they approach him to help them take back the neighborhood, but ultimately, he feels the need to help his friends, most likely out of the guilt he feels about his mother’s death. After a while, he slides back into his old lifestyle as a gangsta. These are the people he grew up with. Looking in from the outside, its easy to say that fellow gang-members should be abandoned because they’re not worth saving, or whatever. But meeting these people, we see that they are not evil, and that C.J.’s ties to them are much like the bonds we feel with our own friends. Leaving them is clearly not a trivial choice.

As I’ve said, the city of Los Santos, where C.J. grew up, is a very dangerous place, where a person can be gunned down at any time. At first, the player is very vulnerable as he travels through Los Santos, and surviving a simple drive can be a challenge. But as C.J. begins to regain some of the respect that he lost by “running away”, he starts to attract gang members who will follow him and fight against anyone who attacks C.J. (or, for that matter, anyone who might attack C.J.). The difference in terms of sense of security is palpable and profound. Suddenly, the player has a fighting chance. We are reminded that, for many, joining a gang is simply a matter of finding strength in numbers when faced with a dangerous situation. Its how humans have survived for thousands of years, why would we expect inner-city youths to behave any differently?

Again, as a Canadian who doesn’t have to deal with these things, the idea of forming a gang is a very bad idea, and playing this game does nothing to make it any more appealing. On the other hand, if I lived in a ghetto full of murderous thugs, forming a gang might seem like the lesser of two evils, but I wouldn’t need a game to tell me that. So, we are beginning to answer that final, nagging question: Why would anyone choose life in a gang? The answer is that no normal person would, but some feel they don’t have a choice. Aside from a small portion of psychopaths, murder isn’t a hobby that people take up because they played a videogame that made it look cool. Its something you do because you feel you have to in order to protect the things that you value most, whether its friends or family or money or your own hide. I’m not naive enough to think that all gang members are as noble as C.J. and his friends, but GTA:SA shows how gang violence is not just a matter of bad-seed, degenerate kids, and that maybe any one of us would cave in under the pressure of such a stressful life.

Conclusion

In this exploration, I haven’t even touched on some of the smaller lessons that the game includes, such as the value of excerise the dangers of eating fast food, and the importance of balancing “work” with relationships (no, seriously), but I hope I’ve made my point.

I find it ironic that parents worry that violent videogames will turn their children into sociopaths. A sociopath is a person who lacks empathy for other human beings, who can’t put himself in someone else’s shoes, so to speak. Videogames, on the other hand, have the ability to show us the world through someone else’s eyes in a way that no other medium can, not just as passive observers, but as participants. People criticize the GTA games for not having alternatives to crime (even driving an ambulance requires you to steal one first), but that’s the point. In addition to the thrills and excitement, you’re supposed to feel the hopelessness, the claustrophobic stress that comes from having all of your choices lead inevitability to violence and death. But there is also hope that comes when we turn the console off and realize that, although the game world is limited, the real world is much larger. In the real world, there are solutions to these problems, if the people inside and the people outside can just understand each other better. GTA:SA shows how a a videogame is uniquely suited to accomplishing that task.

People talk a lot about whether or not the Grand Theft Auto series is art, and it seems that even people in the gaming community tend to dismiss the games as bold, but pointless, excercises in free speech. I think this misses the point, which is that whether or not GTA has artistic merit, it does have merit as political speech, if we only listen to it. Instead, many who need to hear its message most chose to villainize it, which basically amounts to shooting the messenger, and I think that’s shame.

And as I said in the last post, I’m not advocating the children play these games, and parents should use discretion when deciding whether a teenager should be allowed to play it. But if you do allow your kid to play it, I really do invite you to use these lessons as a guideline for talking to him/her about the issues in the game. Young people can have trouble seeing the messages in these games for what they are (especially with the lack of emphasis on critical thinking skills in schools today), but with some parental help, I think playing these games can be a much more positive experience developmentally. We talk a lot about how parents should be responsible for what their children see, but they can also affect how their children see. Videogames are interactive, so lets not forget that parenting can be interactive too.

This post was originally written on June 26, 2005 for my, now defunct, Grownup Gamer blog.

Detractors of violent videogames often argue that the games “glorify” violent criminal acts simply because the game awards “points” or money for completing missions. While I do think that there is a relationship between videogame violence and real-life aggression, I think that the idea of “glorification” is more complicated and more relative than the pundits would have us believe. These same pundits tell us that the characters in these games commit repeated acts of senseless violence against innocent people. If a person thinks that this is “glorious” simply because the character is given money, doesn’t that say something about the person’s attitude towards violence (not to mention money) prior to playing the game?

I do believe that videogames teach people things, but I don’t think the press gives both sides of the story. For that reason, I offer a list of things that I think Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has to teach people. I leave it to the reader to decide whether it applies to other games.

One more thing to note before I begin: I don’t generally think that children should be playing violent videogames, but I realize that they do, and I do believe that these lessons apply to children playing the game as well, although they may need help from an adult to learn them. If your child plays these games, consider using the following list as a guideline to talk to them about the things that they see and experience in the game.

Lesson 1. Speed Limits Exist For a Reason.

Its very easy for young people, even young adults, to feel more in control behind the wheel than they really are. When it looks like nobody is around, they floor it, telling themselves that they can handle the speed. Often, they don’t realize the truth until someone is paralyzed or dead. But GTA has taught me that it only takes a fraction of a second for someone to come out of nowhere or do something unexpected and often there is no possible way to react in time. You may argue that nobody gets hurt in these accidents, but it doesn’t take a genius to know how they would really turn out. Rather, the fact that I can crash again and again allows me to learn the lesson again and again and to realize that it is not a rare occurence, but something that is will inevitably happen if I ignore the posted speed limits.

Lesson 2. If I commited a crime or a randomly violent act, I would most likely get shot or arrested.

This one is much like the first one, and many of the same arguments apply. For almost every successful mission that I complete in GTA, there are at least a few unsuccessful attempts where I end up dead or in jail. That is not good odds. It doesn’t matter that I earn money for finally accomplishing the mission. There is no amount of money you can offer me that is going to make it worth going up against those odds. The net effect is to dissuade me from actual violence and crime.

Lesson 3. Gang violence is not a victimless crime.

Gang members often justify violent behavior by claiming that their violence is only directed at other gang members, not randomly at innocent by-standers. But the fact is that by-standers get caught in the crossfire. GTA reflects this. You are not rewarded significantly for killing bystanders. At best, they might drop a small amount of cash which, in gameplay terms, is not worth the negative attention you’ll get from the police. The game never asks you to kill bystanders in order to complete a mission. However, it is often very difficult, if not impossible to complete missions without accidentally killing bystanders in the confusion. Many critics will sound a hearty “A-Ha” at this, but I say that it is a feature, not a bug. It shows the true nature and consequence of gang violence.

Lesson 4. Police do an important and dangerous job.

Part of the famous “Comic Code” was that law enforcement should always be portrayed as good, good should always triumph over evil, and the portraying the death of cops should be “discouraged”. Now, politicians are trying to pass similar laws in regards to videogames. Most of the criticism so far has focussed (rightly so) on how this takes away our constitutional right to criticize law enforcement officials. This is an important right, and one that is excercised in the GTA series. However, I would like to suggest that such censorship will also have the paradoxical effect of lessening our respect for those same officers. One of the reasons that we have so much respect for the police is that they put their lives on the line for us. Any given one of them faces a good chance that they will be killed in the line of duty. Of course, its easy to forget that if all we see is a censored version of events where police don’t get killed. True, when I play San Andreas, the police are my enemy, but I know that in the real world, I am not the gang member. I am the innocent by-stander, and we’ve already established how dangerous that can be. If a cop decreases the chances of me ending up like one of the by-standers in GTA, then I can’t help but value them more.

I’m just getting warmed up, but I’ll let you mull these over before I come back in a day or two with some more. I’m sure many critics will dismiss these claims, but I am totally serious and feel that these lessons can easily balance out the negative impact that these games may have.

This post was originally written on April 13, 2006 for my, now defunct, Grownup Gamer blog.

Okay, that might not be true, but its no more of an exaggeration than their recent headline, Study: “Violent Games Turn You Into Alcoholic Pot Fiends”. Note that the quotation marks appear in the actual headline, despite the fact the Reuters article it refers to says nothing of the sort. The actual findings, as stated in the first paragraph of the Reuters article:

After playing a violent video game, young men are more likely to think it’s OK to smoke marijuana and drink alcohol, raising the possibility that exposure to violent media could negatively affect health-related behavior.

What a happy day for the anti-videogame pundits, when they no longer have to write sensational headlines about this kind of research. Supposedly pro-videogame sites are perfectly willing to do the work for them. Are we really so blinded by righteous indignation that we can’t see the difference between Kotaku’s claims and the ones put forward by the Reuters article? Well, if the comments section is any indication, it really doesn’t matter because nobody reads the Reuter’s article anyway.

And why should they? They all know the drill. Every time one of these studies comes out, the would-be Davids line up against the alleged Goliath, their sling-pouches filld with the stones of “correlation is not causation” and some talk about bias or sample sizes and maybe a copy of “How to Lie With Statistics”. But their failure to give their “opponent” any credit whatsoever makes it less like David and Goliath and more like The Five Minute Hate. But if everybody can calm down for five seconds, I’d like to address some of misconceptions that I see cropping up about this study, which apply equally well to a lot of other studies that have been conducted lately, and the way the media portrays them.

Misconception #1. Correlation is not causation! What if people who drink and do drugs are more likely to select violent videogames?

That might be true, but not in the case of this study. If you actually read the Reuters article, the subjects were selected randomly and randomly placed in one group or the other, where they were actually made to play violent or not-violent games accordingly. You cannot select to be randomly selected.

“Correlation is not causation” is a very important idea, and an excellent place to start debunking faulty research. But if every correlational study was worthless, then we would have to throw out the entire body of psychological research (except the annecdotal evidence, which is worse). I can teach a parrot to say “correlation is not causation” all the time, but that wouldn’t make him a good critic.

Misconception #2. A sample size of 100 is too small to tell anything.

This just isn’t true. Check any introductory textbook on the subject. I don’t know why people feel they are qualified to make this judgement. For a study like this, which has random selection and assignment of subjects, a control group, and is conducted in a controlled environment, 40 people would be enough to conduct a valid experiment. When researchers calculate the “significance” of a correlation, they don’t just look at the number and say “gee, that looks big”. They use a well established set of equations that takes sample size into account in such a way that you actually have to have a larger effect to get a significant result if the sample size is small. So if you see a study that claims to have a statistically significant result with a small (but no smaller than 40) sample size, it actually means that effect must be fairly large. In technical terms, when researchers talk about a “significant result”, they really mean that the chance of the result being a coincidence is less than 5% (sometimes the limit is even less than that). It doesn’t have anything to do with what most people mean by “significant”.

3. Misconception #3. O NOES! They are trying to ban violent videogames!

Actually, real scientists (not politicians with science-related degrees) usually don’t advocate censorship. Even the APA’s much touted report to congress did not include legislation in its many recommendations. Psychologists tend to favor education and awareness as good solutions, and these researchers are no exception. From the Reuters article:

Brady urges parents to be aware of what sorts of video games their children are playing. And kids themselves, she adds, should understand that violent games can change the way they think.

Notice, they do not say that games will brainwash children or damage their frontal lobes. They say they will change the way they think. As in “I just saw The Passion of The Christ and it changed the way I think about the crucifiction” or “I just read Out of Harms Way and it changed the way I think about batshit crazy lawyers”. There is no subtext here. Unlike politicians, scientists tend to say exactly what they mean, nothing more and nothing less, and they assume that people reading their conclusions will take them at face value.

But Kotaku has readers that they need to whip into a frenzy, so their article starts with vague accusations of bias and political agendas. Unfortunately, they attribute no source for this information. The Reuters article gives no indication of any political agenda. Are we to assume that, simply because they asked a relevant question, they must be affilatied with the side that corresponds with whatever results they get? If their experiment turned up a negative correlation, would we assume that they were getting paid by the videogame industry? Once again, it is Kotaku that is making broad assumptions based on the outcome of this research, but the researchers are getting blamed.

Likewise, politicians often use research like this to justify far-reaching violations of people’s constitutional rights. That does not mean that the conductors of that research somehow retroactively support those laws. Most people believe that M-rated games are not good for children, and that’s really all that most of these researchers are saying. In these cases, it is the politicians who are making broad assumptive leaps based on the relatively modest conclusions that the researchers are making. But the researchers always get blamed by association.

Misconception #4. They need to include different ages/genders/media in order for the study to be valid

No they don’t. Just as they are not advocating broad-reaching censorship laws, they are also not trying to reach a grand conclusion about Life, The Universe And Everything. The fact is, most studies set out to answer a very small, narrowly defined question. For instance, lets take another look at the conclusion from the Reuter’s article (emphasis added):

After playing a violent video game, young men are more likely to think it’s OK to smoke marijuana and drink alcohol

They don’t need to expand the scope of this experiment because their not making any statements about anything outside what is being studied. Most notably, they are not making any claims that videogames have more effect on these attitudes than books or movies. They don’t say that the effect will last for any length of time. Nor are they stating that violent videogames will definitely make poeple more likely to actually do drugs. They do say that the change in attitudes might lead to an increased tendency to actually do drugs. That really isn’t much of a stretch. People who think something is okay might be more likely to do it. That’s hard to argue with.

So people might similarly say that this means the study proves nothing. Not true. It proves very little. It takes a step towards answering a narrowly tailored question. It is but a thread in the rich quilt of scientific knowledge. A thread will not keep you warm, but without any threads, you have no quilt. The fact is that very few, if any, individual studies have ever single-handedly changed the face of psychology. Even the most influential studies are only considered valid because their effects have been replicated numerous times by independant researchers who have performed the same or similar experiments in their own labs. That’s how science works. Likewise, if a colleague wants to know how videogames compare to movies or books in this or that regard, he is free to conduct a similar experiment with movies or books and compare the results. They do not sit in their offices and make self-satisfied posts about how the original researchers didn’t answer the question for them.

Sure, it would be great if we could conduct one experiment that answers every possible question about the relationship between videogames and drug use from every possible angle. But really, be reasonable. We’re talking about a couple of Professors and maybe a handful a grad student slaves. Processing 100 people, making sure they actually play games for a little while and answer some questions is already a big undertaking.

How do I know all this? I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology. But that’s not the point. No matter how many degrees you have under your belt, or what stones you have in your little sling-pouch, it doesn’t give you the ability to tell what’s wrong with a study without actually reading it, or at least getting as close to the source as you can (hint: you can get closer than Kotaku. That’s what the link is for).

You might think that I’m being naive and that you know what’s really going on according to your personal conspiracy theory. I would then say that you are the one making broad and prejudiced assumptions, not the researchers. I’m just looking dispassionately at the information given to me by the Reuter’s article. That’s what Kotaku should be doing. Instead, this is what’s happening:

Reuters: Scientists are saying A, B and C.

Kotaku: Scientists are saying D!

Kotaku Readers: D? Their study doesn’t prove D! It only proves A, B and C! Those scientists are full of shit!

Grown Up Gamer: *sigh*