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But perhaps computer games are different -- so uniquely compelling that violence in games does breed violent behavior?

Some 25 years ago, I read through the Whole Earth Catalog. One section of the book was devoted to the war games published by Simulations Publications Inc. -- and I was then an avid war gamer (and later employed by that company) so I, naturally, read it carefully. The Whole Earth Catalog was written during the Vietnam War, a period when schools shied away from any discussion of warfare or military history as too hot a topic to consider. But, as the publication said, war has been part of human nature since time immemorial. War is worthy of study, if only so that we can avoid it by understanding it more fully. And, perhaps, war games are our best hope of avoiding future wars. Perhaps the things we find attractive about war, perhaps the impulses that lead us to war, can be satisfied through simulation.

Violence, and the attraction of violence, is a fundamental part of human nature. It is particularly appealing to young adolescent males, for it is a clean break with the rules-bound environment in which they have lived, a rejection of parental order. In every society, violence is most common among young men.

It is foolish to try to change human nature; it is immutable, or mutable only through the slow process of evolution. What can be changed is society. Society can develop institutions and mechanisms to channel antisocial impulses to pro-social purposes. That's one reason for armies, of course; they institutionalize violence in a mechanism designed to protect rather than damage society.

And games of violence? They allow players to be violent, to act out their violent impulses, to hunt and shoot and kill -- in a way that harms no one.

Listen to the boastfulness of Quake players on TEN. They'll kill your pussy ass. They'll blow you up so good your spleen will land in Chicago and your liver in Des Moines. They're profane and obnoxious, and violently so.

They're blowing up pixels. They're killing bitmaps. They're shooting at software subroutines.

They're not a threat to public order, for chrissakes. What they're doing makes them less likely to be a threat to public order. They're getting their jones -- they're satisfying their antisocial impulses in a completely harmless way.

Violent computer games don't spur violence; violent computer games channel antisocial impulses in societally acceptable ways.

Games are good.

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For those of us who've been involved in gaming for a long time, the whole hysteria over Littleton brings forth a strong sense of deja vu.

We've been through this before. Fifteen years ago, Dungeons & Dragons was the culprit. Every time some kid killed himself and a copy of D&D was found amid the stuff in his room, the papers would run a story about how those vile fantasy role-playing games made him do it. The fundamentalists latched onto it, too; Dungeons & Dragons involved magic and spells, and to fundamentalists of a certain stripe, that means it must be inherently demonic and evil.

Poor Sandy Petersen is the man I sympathized with most. He designed Call of Cthulhu, a role-playing game based on the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft. He's a devout Mormon. His game was repeatedly attacked, and he along with it, as one of the most demonic and evil of the lot: After all, it deals explicitly with demons from other dimensions. He found himself on panels at gaming conventions, trying to explain to gamers that all Christians were not vile, censoring, irrational scum -- and I have no doubt he found himself trying to explain to his co-religionists why all gamers weren't evil Satanic monsters.

If I feel a sense of deja vu, how much worse it must be for him. Sandy co-designed Doom II and Quake.

It's not just Dungeons & Dragons. We went through this when the Internet first came to prominence, and was blamed for sex crimes and pederasty. We went through it in the '50s, when comic books were attacked as perverting our youth, leading to the death of EC Comics and the establishment of the Comics Code Authority. We went through it in the '30s, when LaGuardia took his hatchet to pinball machines across New York.

Hell, we went through it with rock 'n' roll.

Young people are the ones most open to novelty. Consequently, they lead the way in the adoption of any new entertainment medium. Parent/teenager relationships being what they are, parents invariably view the new medium as threatening. The nature of our journalism-industrial complex being what it is, some pundits seize on the fear as a means of achieving an audience. The most threatening aspects of the medium are puffed up into a major threat to civilization. Kids find their medium under attack, and respond, naturally, by embracing the aspects under attack most wholeheartedly.

Sometimes, as with Dungeons & Dragons, the attack ultimately dissipates under the weight of its own ludicrous contradictions. Sometimes, as with EC Comics, congressional hearings and an abject surrender by the industry result.

But these attacks, all of them, have nothing to do with reality. They're about fear. They're about the fear of the new -- the fear of parents who see their children doing something they don't understand and worry about the consequences.

The attack is an argument from ignorance. It has no rational basis. It is made by people who don't understand what they attack, and find its indicia frightening. And to the degree that they have any credibility at all, it's because ugly and repulsive violence does exist within computer gaming. And if the industry has the brains God gave a biscuit, it will respond -- not by imposing censorship or another inane rating scheme, but by avoiding the kind of repulsive, exploitative violence that any idiot ought to see is not going to work anyway.

If you are concerned about violence in gaming, I have one piece of advice: Go buy a copy of Quake II. Install it on your machine. Download a walkthrough, so you won't fear humiliation when you play. And give it a try.

I think you'll find that it's not so frightening. You may even have a good time.

You might even find yourself -- like me -- shopping for a home networking kit and running cable, so you can play games with your kids.
salon.com | June 21, 1999

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