Letters to the Editor
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Eric and Dylan's greatest hits
You remember that they were both Jewish, yes? And that one of the Trench Coat Mafia's fathers was an FBI agent... oh, but right, right. We need to ban video games. They're evil. Obviously. We don't need to think, we need to act, particularly when the camera is upon us, mais oui..?
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What's wrong with teaching kids to fight back at bullies?
The anti-"Bully" people love to use the tragedy at Columbine as evidence of the dangers of bullying and fighting back. They are 100 percent wrong.
What if Eric and Dylan *had* fought back, instead of sulking in internal rage that grew every day, when they were being taunted and picked on? What if they would have picked a fight with a big dumb football player, gotten their nose bloody, but earned respect in the process, or at the very least, gotten them off their back?
In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with teaching kids that they should fight back when they can. What is true in prison is also true in 7th grade: The bullies pick on the weakest. Even if the victim is 92 lbs., he or she is much less likely to be picked on if the bullies know they will fight back.
Who knows what might have been at Columbine. But it's quite possible that if Eric and Dylan had been more vocal and even physical in their anger in non-lethal ways towards those who bullied them, earlier and often, the massacre would not have happened.
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Tools of the Demagogue
Let's clear something up straight up. Playing violent video games decreases actual violent acts. The role playing involved clears out violent thoughts and intentions in a harmless place - the imagination.
The drubbing of video games reeks of adult and parental failure to take responsibility. It is not the game that makes him violent. It is the lack of parenting and the never ending background noise pointing to a violent solution for all the worst problems that puts a gun in your child's hand. We kill to punish. We go to war to solve our foreign relations problems - killing the best of this generation and the entire generation somewhere else. The Inquisition for video games is not unlike societal disapproval of bogymen of the past. Every easy target will be used by every demagogue as if steps were made of people injured in the politician's rise to power.
Do not buy the slogan. Buy the game. Buy the book. Think for yourself.
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To stop Columbine, we must ban them!
History and common sense teach that two things defeat bullies; speaking up and sticking together. The John Wayne idea that some rugged individual with enough firepower could do the job is bullshit, but one that serves the powerful well.
Banning video games is a spastic misdirection, and not only deflects attention from the roots of alienation that nurtures the violence, it is a hell of a lot less politically risky than daring to speak about something that has more reasonableness of working: Banning Guns.
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What can I say...
Farhad Manjoo leaps from the NOT stealing the election theme to video game psychology. Must be an age thing. Rock on bro!
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Wait till the game comes out -- judge it in the context of what's in it
Isn't this talk premature? On what basis can you even discuss banning a game that nobody has played? (Or did you get an advance copy?) I watched one of the game trailers and it was hard to tell what the actual game play was about. Does the game encourage you to pick on innocent people who are minding their own business? Or does it encourage you to defend yourself? Does the game's violence have consequences? Or can you do the worst possible thing and walk away unscathed?
I played the "Grand Theft Auto" games and they are certainly violent, but the violence has a context. If you randomly hurt or kill people, the cops come after you. In many situations it is near impossible to get away from the cops -- and you die. The lesson to learn from the game isn't that you can go around killing people in the real world, the lesson is that if you give in to your worst impulses, you will pay a price. The game allows you to find that out through trial-and-error, in a safe, video-game way. I wouldn't recommend that game for kids, but teenagers who play it aren't going to be psychologically damaged. (Actually I wouldn't recommend a lot of things to kids and teengaers whose parents haven't provided them with a solid moral compass.)
One thing that must also be said about these games -- particularly the ones made by Rockstar -- is that they contain an element of the satirical. It's not the most sophisticated satire out there, not even by Mad Magazine standards, but it is clearly meant to be an exaggerated, ridiculous version of reality, and you can be sure even the dimmest children will recognize this. The game clearly breaks with reality in several key ways, most notably the lack of any helpful adults -- a difference that kids will recognize as an excuse for the extreme behavior in the game, but not in real life.
I can't pre-emptively defend the whole game, of course, but nor should anybody pre-emptively condemn it. But if you do condemn it, you ought to at least be consistent and condemn the many other games on the market. There are hundreds of first-person shooters, where you go around blasting people in the head, or slicing them with knives. There are hundres more games that consist of nothing more than fighting, fighting, fighting, devoid of any contextual story information that would encourage a kid to think about why he's fighting in the first place. At least "Bully" provides a story world for whatever mayhem it contains. Sure, it's far from literature, but it's textual.
As for politicians trying to get involved in banning or condemning the games, they should be careful. The industry has already taken steps to rate its games, and a good deal of the responsibility for what kids play and do lies with their parents. We already know from experience that there are some parents so clueless they'll take 5-year-old children to horror movies. With parents that thoughtless, undoubtedly the bad influence of a video game is the least of these kids' problems.