—1982: The National Institute of Mental Health issued an extensive report stating that there is clear consensus on the strong link between TV violence and aggressive behavior.
—1984: The U.S. attorney general’s Task Force on Family Violence stated that the evidence is overwhelming that TV violence contributes to real violence.
—1984: The American Academy of Pediatrics’ Task Force on Children and Television cautioned physicians and parents that TV violence promotes aggression.
—1985: The American Psychological Association’s Commission on Youth and Violence cited research showing a clear link between TV violence and real violence.
—1989: The National PTA again called for the TV industry to reduce the amount of violence in programs.
—1990: Congress passed the Television Violence Act, giving the three major networks an antitrust exemption so they could formulate a joint policy to reduce violence on TV.
—1992: The Journal of the American Medical Association published research concluding that “the introduction of television in the US in the 1950’s caused a subsequent [15 years later] doubling of the homicide rate,” and “if, hypothetically, TV technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer murders each year in the US, 70,000 fewer rapes and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults.”
—1992: An American Psychological Association report concluded that forty years of research on the link between TV violence and real-life violence had been ignored. They went on to state that the “scientific debate is over” and called for federal policy to protect society.
—1995: The American Academy of Pediatrics (a group that, by the way, is strongly in favor of significantly increasing gun control laws) stated that, “[a]lthough media violence is not the only cause of violence in American society, it is the single most easily remediable contributing factor.”
—1998: UNESCO reviewed studies of media violence from twenty-five countries and documented an international concern that a “global aggressive culture” is being formed by violent television and movies, particularly violent American TV shows and movies being exported around the world.
The entertainment industry, along with people who prefer to blame guns for everything, like Stephen King and Maureen Dowd, wants to ignore this incredible body of scientific research. Through their lobbyists, they’ve spent vast sums of money on disinformation campaigns, and vicious, mocking rebuttals and attacks on every one of these scientific statements and the researchers behind them.
I know what it feels like to be attacked and smeared for standing up for what you believe in. But, for better or worse, giving my opinion is my chosen profession. That’s not the case for these researchers and scientists. Most of them are not prepared for the onslaught to their reputations and careers that occurs when they put out studies that reveal the truth about entertainment violence. In many cases they eventually succumb to the pressure and move on to other, less controversial projects.
Stimulus/Response
The video game generation gave us Sandy Hook in elementary school, Jonesboro in middle school, Columbine in high school, and Virginia Tech in college. And, considering how rudimentary these video games are compared with what’s to come, it will only get worse.
Those who’ve grown up being exposed to violence since the day they were born will eventually perpetrate massacres at our hospitals, our day-care centers, our Little League games, our churches, our school sporting events, and our school buses. There is no sacred place.
How do I know this? Because there’s no other choice; this is the way we are raising them.
A study conducted by members of the Task Force on Television and Society appointed by the American Psychological Association revealed that the typical American youth had witnessed an average of 200,000 acts of violence on television by age eighteen. That’s 200,000 acts of violence just on television. That doesn’t include movies, video games, or the Internet. And that study was conducted in 1992, twenty years ago—does anyone really believe that entertainment has gotten less violent?
The other issue is how much time our kids spend watching this stuff. According to a study to be published in Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, “It is estimated that children in the general population consume on average roughly 3 hours of electronic media, such as video games every day . . . . The estimate of daily electronic media consumption among youth in the psychiatric population is 6 hours per day.”
As parents, we often try to make ourselves feel better by saying that children know the difference between real-world violence and what they see on TV. We try to convince ourselves that our child is too mature or too intelligent to be affected by it. But no matter how we try to justify it, it simply isn’t true. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, “At young ages (before age 8), children cannot uniformly discriminate between ‘real life’ and ‘fantasy/entertainment.’ They quickly learn that violence is an acceptable solution to resolving even complex problems, particularly if the aggressor is the hero.”
Entertainment violence clearly teaches children the wrong life lessons, but it goes well beyond that: it actually affects the way their brains function. In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, participants played either a violent or nonviolent video game and were then shown violent and nonviolent photos while their brain activity was measured. Next, each participant played against an opponent in a game to measure their reaction time. They were told that whoever was slower in this game would receive an uncomfortable blast of white noise in their headphones. Each player was able to select the volume and length of the noise their opponent would receive. (In reality the “opponent” was only a computer, but participants did not know that.) The idea, of course, was to determine if those who’d played the violent games would be more aggressive with how much sound they blasted at their opponent.
The results were pretty remarkable:
These data provide the first experimental evidence linking violence desensitization with increased aggression, and show that a neural marker of this process can at least partially account for the causal link between violent game exposure and aggression.
[F]or individuals whose prior exposure to video game violence was low, playing a violent video game caused a reduction in the brain’s response to depictions of real-life violence, and this reduction, in turn, predicted an increase in aggression.
The good news is that we may be able to flush out the hormones that rush to children’s brains while they are watching violent entertainment. Experts say that, while we need a lot more research, current data indicates that we can “detox” a child in a couple of days just by turning off the TV and video games.
But not all consequences can be so easily remedied; some have much more long-lasting effects. A study conducted by researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine monitored the brain function of young men before and after playing violent video games. “For the first time,” Dr. Yang Wang, an assistant research professor in the IU Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, wrote, “we have found that a sample of randomly assigned young adults showed less activation in certain frontal brain regions following a week of playing violent video games at home.”
The regions of the brain that were found to be affected, Dr. Wang continued, “are important for controlling emotion and aggressive behavior.” Unlike some hormones that can be flushed out of the brain in a day or two, “These findings indicate that violent video game play has a long-term effect on brain functioning. These effects may translate into behavioral changes over longer periods of game play.”
The Truth about (No) Consequences
I understand if all of these studies bore you; they kind of bore me, too. But since the doubters always demand evidence, it’s hard to win this argument without having those kinds of facts on your side. But, looking past all of the research, common sense alone tells us that the kind of violence our children are witnessing is often far more brutal than what most of
us grew up with. Pong was the kind of game we remember from the 1970s. In the 1980s the most violent of the bestselling games was probably Duck Hunt—a game with crude graphics and a dog that laughed at you when you missed.
But today? Shooting games are no longer about hunting ducks; they’re about hunting humans.
Consider Colonel Grossman’s description of how the popular game Duke Nukem is played:
[T]he shooter, who is controlled by the player and looks somewhat like the Terminator, moves through pornography shops, where he finds posters of scantily clad women he can use for target practice. In advanced levels, bonus points are awarded for the murder of female prostitutes, women who are usually naked. Duke often encounters defenseless, bound women, some of whom are even conveniently tied to columns and plead, “Kill me, kill me.”
Manhunt, which has been a target of groups who’ve tried to get some games banned (and actually was banned in Australia), is especially gruesome. Josh Wanamaker, who writes for a website about video games, describes it like this:
Players sneak around maze-like levels and were tasked with killing dudes in various gruesome ways, getting points for violence, essentially. Suffocating dudes with plastic bags, stabbing dudes in the face with knives, knocking dudes in the head with bats, sticking axes into dudes, etc. It’s all really standard fare, actually . . . .
Grossman says that Manhunt 2 is even worse.
“Cave that man’s head in with the baseball bat,” the voice tells you. So you swing it really hard and “Boom!” your victim’s head explodes.
“Ah that was good!” says the voice. “I didn’t know you had it in you!”
“Take the knife and cut that woman’s throat,” the voice commands.
You hold the motion-capture device in your hand, and you sneak up behind your victim. When you move your hand, the knife and hand on the screen moves. You actually reach across and cut your victim’s throat from ear to ear, and you watch her spin down, gurgling as blood gushes from her throat.
Introducing Your Child’s Babysitter
Sometimes it takes reading descriptions of the games our kids are actually playing in order for parents to really connect with the magnitude of the problem. Here are a few of the worst, courtesy of Dave Grossman and Josh Wanamaker of Gameranx.com:
Grand Theft Auto: Grossman: “You play a criminal. You cannot be a ‘good guy,’ it is all about criminal behavior. These games are computer generated so you can play them for hundreds of hours without repeating yourself. And for hundreds of hours you steal enough stuff, you sell enough drugs, you kill enough cops, and you are going to make a lot of money.
“What do you do with all the money? One of the things you can do is to buy sex from a prostitute. Afterward, you can murder the woman you just had sex with, and get your money back. Screaming obscenities, in state-of-the-art graphic detail, you beat to death the woman you just had sex with, and you get your money back.”
Postal 2: Wanamaker: “The game is nothing but a sandbox of senseless slaughter, hate, and pissing on people’s heads. I’m not even kidding about that last part. Do you like the idea of running into a convenience store and screaming ‘Rag Heads’ whilst shooting up a bunch of Arabs? How about sticking a shotgun up a cat’s anus to use the animal as a silencer?”
Grossman: “You kill every living creature in your town. You blow a girl’s kneecap off with a sniper rifle. You blow a cop’s leg off with sniper rifle. And then, as your victims writhe in agony you pour gasoline on them.
“It’s ‘you’ doing this. You see your hands, you see the gas can, and you see your victims as you pour gasoline on them. Then, as your victims beg for mercy, you drop a match on them. ‘Whoof!’ they burst into flames. Their clothing and face char and burn in state-of-the-art detail as they scream in agony. But here is the big ‘payoff’ in the game. You urinate on your victims.”
Soldier of Fortune: Wanamaker: “Shoot a dude in the stomach with a shotgun, out spill his intestines. Shoot a dude in the head, and depending on what part of the head you hit, a different part of the back of his skull would be blown out. Every part of a character model could be destroyed in hideous fashion, and while back then [2000] everyone was all ‘WOW!’ Today people would be more like ‘meh.’ Just . . . just don’t let your kids play it, okay?”
Just so we are all clear on what depths of depravity these games are able to go to, none of the ones described here earned the highest rating a game can have of “Adults Only.” Some of the worst games are available online and don’t even need to be submitted to the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB). For example, V-Tech Rampage and Super Columbine Massacre RPG are both online games that allow the player to be the killers in horrific real-life events and neither has an ESRB rating.
It’s abundantly clear that entertainment violence fills kids’ heads with the wrong kinds of images. But it does much more than that: it fills them with the wrong kinds of messages.
Think about the kinds of violence that are out there in popular culture. There is the gratuitous violence-for-violence’s-sake, which is where I think many of the video games fit in. But there’s also the superhero-beating-up-the-bad-guy-to-save-a-woman kind of violence—which is clearly preferable. And what about the consequences of violence? Does the perpetrator receive proper punishment or did it go unpunished, or was it even glorified?
Very often in video games you play a criminal and the crimes you commit are rewarded by gaining points and moving higher through the levels of the game. For the kids who play these games the criminals become the heroes and the cops become a force to be avoided or stopped in any way possible.
As parents we often unknowingly reinforce this sentiment. According to a study published in the journal Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, “The consumption of violent media is far from innocuous, and when violent media consumption in the form of video games is viewed by adults as a ‘reward’ for youth to spend their free time, it can be problematic.” Because we often allow our kids to play video games as a reward for good behavior, we are in effect telling them that we approve of the games and that the behavior they engage in while playing them is worthy of reward.
In addition to teaching children that violent and criminal behavior is what they should be striving toward, video games also have another big problem: they don’t allow the players to “feel” anything. When the reality is virtual, players never experience any real consequences. There’s no pain, no wounds or blood or agonizing trips to the ER.
Nonvirtual games, even those that could be considered violent, like paintball, teach that actions have consequences. Getting hit by a paintball hurts. A lot. Players quickly learn to treat the weapon with respect because they know what the pain feels like. The same principle is why law enforcement training usually entails the trainees’ getting pepper sprayed and Tasered. We want these people to know what their weapons actually feel like when you’re on the other end of them.
This is not the case with video games. The only consequence for dying in a game is having to press a button and start over again.
Trained to Kill
Soldiers who prepare for combat by using video game simulations often have very different reactions when they are first exposed to real-world violence. Evan Wright, the author of Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War, talked about his experience observing Marines in Iraq in 2003: “What I saw was a lot of [soldiers] discovered levels of innocence that they probably didn’t think they had. When they actually shot people, especially innocent people, and were confronted with this, I saw guys break down. The violence in games hadn’t prepared them for this.”
The simulated violence in video games has two big problems: it desensitizes people, making it easier for them to commit acts of violence in the real world, and at the same time leaves these people unprepared for the consequences of that violence. According to Grossman, this claim about desensitization is something that the gaming industry has refuted o
ver and over again, yet it’s also something they eagerly advertise when it comes to the military.
How did video games and the military ever come to link up? Well, in World War II only 15–20 percent of individual riflemen fired their weapons in close combat. The problem was that these infantry had been trained by firing at standard bull’s-eye targets. While this trained them to shoot accurately, it did a terrible job of preparing them to kill actual persons.
Our military has overcome this problem by using something called “operant conditioning.” Now, instead of shooting at a bull’s-eye, soldiers shoot at a man-shaped target that pops up. If they hit it, the target drops down, and once they hit a certain number of targets they’re rewarded. This system was intentionally designed to apply B. F. Skinner’s “operant conditioning” model, which many of us remember from the “rat lab” in Psych 101: stimulus, response; stimulus, response; until the behavior becomes automatic. Like a child in a fire drill at school, we have turned killing into a “conditioned response”—and it has worked. The firing rate went from 15 percent in World War II, to 55 percent in Korea, to upwards of 95 percent since Vietnam.
Today, this process has evolved into modern, highly realistic “combat simulators” that are now pretty much widespread throughout the military. Research from the Center for the Study of Violence, located at Iowa State University, suggested that “the U.S. Defense Department has spent $1 billion on games technology that gets soldiers combat ready.” Sergeant Donel Hagelin, an Army “simulator facilitator,” said that “combat simulators [are] . . . the fastest way to train troops and the easiest way to save money.”
While the games used to train our soldiers are not the same ones you can go buy at your local store, they’re not as far off as you might think. Rainbow Six is an off-the-shelf video game about a counterterrorism unit that has to plan out very specific missions in response to terrorist threats. It is such a successful and realistic game that, according to the book Media Violence and Children, “the U.S. Army has licensed the game engine to train their special operations soldiers. Furthermore, the U.S. Army has created their own violent video game as a recruitment tool.”