You know, I've kind of grown deaf to the news articles that get published every other week trying to scare grandma about how the next Grand Theft Auto game is going to turn everyone under the age of 16 into a generation of killers; a lot of news is just entertainment itself and it's all part of doing what it has to do to draw an audience in the slow news periods between starlet pregnancies. The games industry is pretty well entrenched by now that that sort of nonsense isn't going to make a dent in games today, and the latest generation of parents now has grown up playing videogames, they're not going to be as terrified as the previous generations are of entertainment technology.
It's a different story, though, when the alarmist arglebargle finds its way into the games press itself.
We have this essay in the Escapist from a gentleman named Robert Marks, a student at the Royal Military College of Canada, and who from his tone and style of writing we can infer probably has a ponytail, at least one trenchcoat, and a collection of replica Japanese swords. Some of the peculiar ideas he puts forward as truisms are very familiar from this class of individual: for instance, if the debate of an issue becomes 'polarized' then any further discussion is useless. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that he is also the sort of dude that would say that if you are 'emotionally involved' in an issue than for some reason your opinion on the subject is without merit. And that only autistic people, Vulcans, and Objectivists can weigh in on the subject and have their voices heard.
Anyway. The whole language of his opening paragraphs is constructed in such a way as to diminish the value and credibility of the minds that have previously (and vigorously) threshed out the question of the connection between violent behavior in kids and violent videogames, dismissing the years of conversation and study as 'heated rhetoric,' this haze of anger and confusion that he is here to save us all from, with these entirely new ideas and discoveries presented in this sacred text he's discovered: Dave Grossman's On Combat, which for Marks is the One True Voice of clarity that will finally deliver us from years of all this useless, confusingly nuanced discussion and scientific rigor.
I mean, who the fuck needs rigor anyway? Lietenant Col. Grossman is in the military, dude knows a few things about what it takes to kill people, right? Marks' prize source is a self-described expert in the comically-named field of Killology, a pseudo-psychological discipline that he himself coined. With this in mind, it is probably easy for most of us to keep from mistaking his book for science.
Most of us except Mr. Marks, anyway.
The essay is stocked with bubbly, gee-whiz sophistry, ideas that might look like Science! at first blush, but don't stand up to scrutiny: For instance, Marks repeatedly makes reference to the 'fight-or-flight' instinct as being part of the 'mammalian brain,' or 'middle brain,' which suggests that he may have a passing familiarity of the Triune brain model, like maybe he heard about it on discovery channel or something, but had he done his homework he probably would have called it the Reptilian brain, and understood the distinctions between the lower, or reptilian brain, and the higher brain functions that are unique to mammals, rather than repeatedly calling the lower brain functions as being part of the "mammal brain." It is with this kind of sloppiness that Marks pads out his work, brachiating from one softheaded, impossible conclusion to the next.
Marks takes us on a meandering exposition of how videogames are supposed to be psychologically conditioning us to become killing machines - by repetitive actions of seeing violent activity on a tv screen, and playing out that action via a controller, I'm somehow more likely to be willing to throw a blue turtle shell at the driver ahead of me in real life. I haven't seen anybody do this yet, so, you know, I just don't know. But if he's to be believed, videogames are an appropriate substitute for time spent in a shooting range or the rigorous training given to military recruits and police officers.
He's very careful to stress that 'context is everything' and there are a few small pebbles of interesting substance in his article, but then he follows it up with this extraordinary line:
While we haven't been conditioned to be murderers, however, the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings prove that some of us are capable of committing heinous acts of violence under ostensibly mundane conditions.
After some very sensible talk about how important 'context' is for determining what makes it possible for somebody to kill somebody else, whoosh! Here we are, in a stunning lateral leap of logic, arriving at this proof that -- well, something, we can't be totally sure what -- made these school shootings possible, having given us no context at all for this conclusion. Maybe it was videogames? Who knows. I'm tempted to assume that's the connection he's trying to make here, but maybe he decided not to show his work for this proof so that he could maintain some kind of plausible deniability should he be pressed to defend it.
And this conclusion prompts a number of questions I'd like to ask Mr. Marks: does he play violent videogames himself? Has he shot anybody? Does he know anybody who has? Has he conducted any control-group sort of studies to test his ideas? Conducted any polls? Or does he rest his faith in the truth of the 'serious problem' that he's trying to call our attention to solely in this one book? Do LTC Grossman's ideas stand up to peer review? Is Robert Marks familiar with the concept of peer review?
In a way, I almost envy Marks' approach to the subject. Unburdened with inconvenient things like facts or prior research, he is then free to tackle, huge, huge questions with unwavering moral certitude - like being able to blame videogames makers for arming "90 percent" of people who play violent videogames with "the capability to use deadly force." I don't know if I'm prepared to call that kind of assessment ballsy, though there's a number of other things I'm prepared to call it. Fortunately, he's got every unsubstantiated claim covered with an equally unsubstantiated get-out clause: You're welcome to disagree if you like, but violent videogames are a problem, "no matter how vehemently we deny" that they're a problem. Touche, I guess?
What is most frustrating about this article is not that it is poorly researched or that its thesis is poorly supported, but that it is these things and it comes from the Escapist. Grossman's book might make some waves with that segment of our population that is still trying to make a buck off of keeping older people afraid of younger people, and there's not much to be done about that. We're used to seeing sloppy fact-checking and breathless sensationalism about the dangers of videogames from the mainstream press, and we've more or less gotten used to it and are okay with it because like Dr. Bartle says, the fight to legitimize videogames and overcome censorship is one we've already won. But we just shouldn't have to put up with this caliber of dumb from one of our own outlets, especially one as entrenched and respected a voice of Serious Games Writing as this. Let's hold ourselves to a higher standard.
