The fantasies of violence

An interesting point raised in the Goldstein reading is the idea of fantasy violence and actual violence. Typically the media’s perspective on violence and video games tends to draw a direct connection between the two and yet issues with how this “research” they are basing this correlation on seems to me to be flawed.

Kevin talked about the notion that telling a child to play a video game while a researcher sits there analysing them is not fair, and inaccurate because these are obviously not the natural conditions in which anyone (let alone kids) play video games. This made me think about another point where, in New Zealand typically where video games are censored based on the MPAA system – most “violent” video games (I am thinking here of first/third-person shooters) have at least an R16 or R18 rating. Because this is the case, when conducting research on kids who play violent video games surely they are unable to allow a 12-year old to play an R16 game and therefore how are they conducting this research and how “violent” are the video games that the researchers are testing kids on if technically kids cannot legally even play these games?

I began to take a trip down memory lane and assess whether or not video games I played as a kid had any kind of violent effect on me. I remember being about five or six years old and playing Sega’s Golden Axe in multi-player mode with my elder brother. The game involved our guys working their way through the medieval levels and fighting the bad guys who were trying to get in our way. Throughout the game, I’m fairly certain that your character never gets any kind of weapon upgrade, there are no guns – you are armed simply with a fancy sword. With this sword you would typically perform beheading acts in order to kill the bad guys; blood would spill from their wounds as well as your own. In saying all of this, the violence in the game to my six-year old self was not what stood out to me. Instead, from the experience I took away copious amounts of hand-eye coordination skills, as well as strategy and team building efforts (as corny as it sounds) because the focus of the game for me [my world-of-concern if you like] was to make it to the end of the level, survive and proceed onto to the next one. In this sense, I think that kids playing “violent” video games become immersed into the game in a way where they ‘become’ their character but the specific aesthetic details of the game become peripheral.

Another “more violent” game I recall playing as a kid was Wolfenstein 3D. This game was visually more graphic and gory than Golden Axe. The aspects of immersion (such as the display of just the hands on the bottom of the screen) convince you to embody your character even further. However, amidst all the killing of Nazis, this game’s violence (again) did not stand out to me as something I remember from the game. Let alone the political aspect (I was too young to even understand or know anything about who the Nazis were and why I was killing them) the gore and violence in the game fell secondary to me being so focused on getting through to the next level alive, and figuring out which doors to go through and remembering where I had already been. In this way, I think that when researchers who are trying to link violent video games onto influencing children, the link is somewhat frayed in the way that a child’s mind doesn’t really operate in the same way as an adult who is observing them play.

I recognise that nowadays games have become a lot more graphic and detailed as far as the effects of violence which they depict. The agency and freedom of actions you are enabled to commit (think GTA franchise) have allowed for much more violent acts to be committed in comparison to the beheading of medieval skeleton warriors and knights. However, I’m sure that kids who do get a hold of these games do so because their parents make an educated decision based on the maturity of their own child, their ability to handle it as well as the element of control on conditions and environment a parent is able to have. Like many people, I still struggle to understand why more research continues to be done on the links between video games and violence, or violence and any other media form for that matter. What I do know is that, my own personal experience says that those fantasy ‘violent-for-back-in-the-day-games” didn’t really seem to have any kind of actual negative effects on my behaviour.