Correlation Between Real and Virtual Violence

From the blazing guns of Grand Theft Auto to the painful, self-inflicted injuries depicted on both Real T.V. and MTV’s Jackass, virtual violence is almost impossible to avoid in western society. Fighting games like Mortal Kombat and FPS’s (First-Person Shooters,) like Activision’s Soldier of Fortune and the ever-popular title of Sierra and VaLVe entertainment, Half-Life 2, have parents up in arms, rallying to save their children from the horror of interactive violence. They ban, they censor, they post warnings, and some even go as far as writing threatening and/or accusatory letters to designers of violent video games; in some extreme cases, lawsuits have even been pressed against the companies responsible for these “abominations.” Given all of the violence present in interactive mediums, we must ask ourselves, are graphic television programs and the “less than tame” games available to our children really at fault when violence strikes in our schools or homes?Since the beginning of recorded history, men have killed each other. Women have been beaten and raped, children have been stabbed or brutally murdered, and even our elderly have been abused. In most instances it has been looked down upon or declared a criminal action by mainstream society, more so in recent years than in feudal times. When Adolf Hitler invaded France in 1940, violent television was still several decades away, and as for violent video games, they were to be invented long after Al Capone’s death in 1947. Even in more recent history there are good examples of virtual violence’s innocence; who in their right mind would blame popular television shows, action films, or best selling games for the death of Lacy Peterson or the horrific events that came to pass on September eleventh, 2001. Switching to a more reasonable and realistic look at virtual violence, can we really trust the word of teens like the Buckner brothers, who blamed the idea for their Tennessee highway shooting-spree just a few short years ago, which resulted in one death and critical injuries to at least one person, on the major “Cash-Cow” of the gaming market, Grand Theft Auto?Targeting an innocent medium of expression by playing off of the fears of the more timid and narrow-minded individuals of society is by no means a new practice used by members of the mass media to whip the general public into a rabid frenzy; even in the early years of the nineteenth century, popular and exciting forms of “interactive” entertainment were targeted and decried as dangerous or corrupting to an individual’s moral stability. Fiction in general was one of the earliest to come under fire in recorded history, targeted no less, by the great Thomas Jefferson himself, who blatantly declared all fiction a “Poison,” one that “Destroys its {the mind’s} tone and revolts it against wholesome reading.” In more modern times, the target of such criticism has shifted from one medium to another, finding something infinitely corrupting to yank from the bowels of whatever they had chosen to become fixated upon. The latest movement of the media’s ongoing witch-hunt has become focused, now more than ever, upon the film’s interactive cousin, the video game. With support from experts and former military officers to backup their attacks on virtual violence, the media has gotten steadily bolder in their fear-inspiring calls to action against slasher films, action films, television, and video games. A typical example of this, Lt. Col. David Grossman, a former U.S. Military Academy psychology professor and author of “Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill” was quoted saying: "There's a generation growing up that the media has cocked and primed for draconian action and a degree of blood-lust that we haven't seen since the Roman children sat in the Colosseum and cheered as the Christians were killed."Despite all of the evidence to the contrary, the Media continues to target virtual violence and announce it as a savage threat to the moral stability of our impressionable youth, a threat of which every parent should be fully aware. They often cite well known and wildly popular examples, usually console games, and demean them, breaking them down into a 30 second onslaught of the most savage, indeed the choicest bits available from the target; A gory, disjointed collage of images and sounds that would often shock even the most desensitized of people. Members of the Media often blame school shootings on far-outdated FPS games like ID Software’s Doom or slightly older hit, Wolfenstien 3D, two PC titles that fell into the “Abandonware bin” almost a decade ago, and since have been replaced by far more graphic titles such as ID’s latest release, Quake III and Electronic Arts’ hit series: Medal of Honor. Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto III, as well as it’s insanely popular sequels, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, are targets of “anti-virtual violence” sentiment as well, claimed as responsible, seemingly on a daily basis, for the commission of hundreds of crimes, suffering the blame for the causation of everything from Car-Jacking and Elder Abuse. They interview hundreds of Psychologists and Doctors until they locate one with evidence to support their claims, though it often achieves nothing more than to rehash the well known facts: Violence, both real and virtual, promotes the release of adrenaline, an experience that most people who live in western society enjoy, and go to great lengths to experience. There is a very important fact missed here as well; In most individuals, Violence does not cause a release of Dopamine in the brain; playing (and more importantly, winning) a game however, does.The Interim Secret Service Report on school violence clearly states that their “study findings revealed that there is no ‘profile’ of a school shooter; instead, the students who carried out the attacks differed from one another in numerous ways”. Everyone gets mad at one time or another; to deny it is both foolish and unrealistic. Likewise, everyone has their own ways to vent. Some people yell, others mutter, some go on long walks, while others take a jog down the block or even find relief within the teachings of their own religions. More commonly however, people indulge in violent activities, whether that be by playing Blizzard software’s endlessly popular Diablo, watching an Arnold Schwarzenegger film such as Predator, one of the ever popular Terminator movies or, in more extreme and exceedingly less common circumstances, by actually committing violent crimes. This is not to say that it is “okay” to punch your grandmother, murder your boss, or instigate yet another ‘Columbine’ incident, as all are atrocious and heinously unforgivable crimes, but rather to state that it is a mal-adapted form of venting that is becoming far less common as evolution steadily weeds out those that employ it. In the end, of course, it all comes down to a single question: is it reasonable to assume that false or interactive violence begets it’s far more dangerous and inherently socially-unacceptable cousin, real violence? The answer, I believe, is a simple, yet emphatic and resolute “No.”