Videogame Violence

My pre-teen son had bookmarked a popular site that features free videogames. Because I'm the mean dad who won't buy him a "platform" (e.g. PS3, Xbox, Wii, etc.), I tell him he's welcome to indulge in online strategy games or puzzles, provided they rely on thinking, not shooting.

Well, he outsmarted me. Among the morass of shoot-'em-up titles (Pillage the Village, Tactical Assassin 2, Age of War, Circle of Pain, Momentum Missle Mayhem), he did indeed ferret out Ignite People On Fire, whose title pretty much describes the action. A well-timed mouse click will result not in a hail of bullets, as my son quickly points out, but rather cause human targets to spontaneously combust, in shrieks of agony. Hence, not technically a shooting game. Score one for him.

No violence of any sort, I clarified, and so he found Drunk Klunk, a "strategy" game in which no one is attacked, hurt or killed: "Everyone's favorite asshole is back, just in time for New Years! In this exciting, high action game Klunk has stopped into the bar for a bit of a drink. Unfortunately, he only has 3 minutes until the bar closes, in which time he needs to get as pissed as he can!" Apparently the goal is to mouse-click as many mugs of booze as possible down the bar and into the tipsy character, who keeps swaying side-to-side and even falling off his stool.

Alcohol seems to be a common denominator of kids' strategy games, such as Drunken Masters: "Epic bartending action! Choose one of ten different bartenders and start your adventure. With fast-paced gameplay and quick-thinking action, you'll learn to mix drinks for up to 5 impatient customers at once. There are plenty of tricks and special moves that you'll need to master to keep the customers entertained. At the end of your shift, view your list of achievements, challenge other bartenders, purchase upgrades with your tips, and train to perfect your moves."

The perfect middle-school cocktail: equal parts science and psychology, and a shot of sociology. Cheers!

Aren't there any wholesome videogames, ones that can prepare kids for a career other than psychotic assassin or boisterous bartender?

How about Dark Cut 2? "Fall into the thick of the Civil War, and perform three surgeries on some of the worst wounds imaginable! This game contains extreme violence, alcohol references, and realistic medical procedures." A sigh of relief. My son, the doctor!

Career Day Violence

At Career Day at my son's middle school, I conducted role-plays with the students to illustrate the mechanics and magic of mediation.

We'd establish a simple hypothetical problem, with multiple perspectives and interests, and give everyone a chance at suggesting possible resolutions -- sky's the limit, no constraints. The idea was to "wring dry the towel" of ideas -- "Good! What else?" -- and illustrate the multiplicity of potentially satisfying outcomes that diverge from the traditional zero-sum, win-lose scenario of courtrooms and battlefields.

I obviously had been fantasizing a beautiful lesson in negotiation and compromise and active listening and "underlying interests vs. intractible positions." Expanding the pie vs. dividing the pie. Collaborative peacemaking.

What was horrifying was the natural inclination of these students to adopt a "punishing" stance -- and instinctively offer a "lose-lose" verdict. Could this have been passed down from their parents? It certainly sounded that way: "You both have to give the [contested object] to me, and I'll keep it [or discard it], and you're both grounded for fighting."

Worse was the proclivity toward blatant violence: "He should smash him over the head with a rock and just take [the object of dispute] and run away." Or (from a girl): "Just kick him in the nuts and grab it from him, and tell him you'll kill him if he tells anybody." Again, these were pre-teens.

What's to blame? Parents? TV? Movies? Rap music? Violent videogames?

I ponder the ancient Myth of Redemptive Violence, as articulated by Walter Wink.

Violence simply appears to be the nature of things. It’s what works. It seems inevitable, the last and, often, the first resort in conflicts.

He uses "Popeye" as an example:

In a typical segment, Bluto abducts a screaming and kicking Olive Oyl, Popeye’s girlfriend. When Popeye attempts to rescue her, the massive Bluto beats his diminutive opponent to a pulp, while Olive Oyl helplessly wrings her hands. At the last moment, as our hero oozes to the floor, and Bluto is trying, in effect, to rape Olive Oyl, a can of spinach pops from Popeye’s pocket and spills into his mouth.

Transformed by this gracious infusion of power, he easily demolishes the villain and rescues his beloved. The format never varies. Neither party ever gains any insight or learns from these encounters. They never sit down and discuss their differences. Repeated defeats do not teach Bluto to honour Olive Oyl’s humanity, and repeated pummellings do not teach Popeye to swallow his spinach before the fight.

But he draws parallels to all popular culture, and of course real life:

We have already seen how the myth of redemptive violence is played out in the structure of children’s cartoon shows (and is found as well in comics, video and computer games, and movies). But we also encounter it in the media, in sports, in nationalism, in militarism, in foreign policy, in televangelism, in the religious right, and in self-styled militia groups. What appears so innocuous in cartoons is, in fact, the mythic underpinnings of our violent society.

The psychodynamics of the TV cartoon or comic book are marvelously simple: children identify with the good guy so that they can think of themselves as good. This enables them to project out onto the bad guy their own repressed anger, violence, rebelliousness, or lust, and then vicariously to enjoy their own evil by watching the bad guy initially prevail. This segment of the show – where the hero suffers – actually consumes all but the closing minutes, allowing ample time for indulging the violent side of the self.

When the good guy finally wins, viewers are then able to reassert control over their own inner tendencies, repress them, and re-establish a sense of goodness without coming to any insight about their own inner evil. The villain’s punishment provides catharsis; one forswears the villain’s ways and heaps condemnation on him in a guilt-free orgy of aggression. Salvation is found through identification with the hero.

The Myth of Redemptive Violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has even known. Furthermore, its orientation toward evil is one into which virtually all modern children (boys especially) are socialised in the process of maturation.

So what can we do -- as parents, educators, mediators -- to offset this horrifying trend? Wink offers some solid ideas. What are yours?

Violence as a Public Health Issue

In Blocking the Transmission of Violence , Alex Kotlowitz (nytimes.com) takes an in-depth look at innovative efforts to curb violence by treating it not as an ethical issue but as an infectious disease:

CeaseFire’s founder, Gary Slutkin, is an epidemiologist and a physician who
for 10 years battled infectious diseases in Africa. He says that violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS, and so, he suggests, the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source. “For violence, we’re trying to interrupt the next event, the next transmission, the next violent activity,” Slutkin told me recently. “And the violent activity predicts the next violent activity like H.I.V. predicts the next H.I.V. and TB predicts the next TB.” Slutkin wants to shift how we think about violence from a moral issue (good and bad people) to a public health one (healthful and unhealthful behavior). ...

In his book “The Bottom Billion,” Paul Collier argues that one of the characteristics of many developing countries that suffer from entrenched poverty is what he calls the conflict trap, the inability to escape a cycle of violence, usually in the guise of civil wars. Could the same be true in our inner cities, where the ubiquity of guns and gunplay pushes businesses and residents out and leaves behind those who can’t leave, the most impoverished?

Slutkin sees a direct parallel to the early history of seemingly incurable infectious diseases. “Chinatown, San Francisco in the 1880s,” Slutkin says. “Three ghosts: malaria, smallpox and leprosy. No one wanted to go there. Everybody blamed the people. Dirty. Bad habits. Something about their race. Not only is everybody afraid to go there, but the people there themselves are afraid at all times because people are dying a lot and nobody really knows what to do about it. And people come up with all kinds of other ideas that are not scientifically grounded — like putting people away, closing the place down, pushing the people out of town. Sound familiar?”