First, our President, my favorite and yours, gave a speech to the American Medical Association, during which he stated: "It means going for a run or hitting the gym, and raising our children to step away from the video games and spend more time playing outside."
... The implications here are that children are spending too much time playing video games and not enough playing outside. Is this the fault of the video games though? No, not really. But notice how video games have stepped in as the "Americans are unhealthy" scapegoat, taking the place of the once-hated inactivity that was waching TV. I've never particularly agreed with either of the statements: we are not becoming an obese society because of watching TV or playing video games. We are becoming that way because of personal irresponsibility.
To use myself as an example, I play video games. I play a lot of video games, in fact, but I am not an unhealthy person. I am capable of removing my behind from the couch and doing active things, such as going on hikes or riding a bike. Video games to not prevent me from doing these things. I'm sure they would if I let them, but I take responsibility for my health and I always make time for things that promote that idea.
Speaking of irresponsibility, I've got a story for you. For those of you that don't know, I make my living working for a cable company. I don't do it any more (yay promotion!), but I used to take calls, listen to customers, and help them any way that I could. There were times when the troubleshooting I could perform over the phone was not adequate, and I'd have to schedule a technician to come out to the home to investigate the problem there. My favorite response to this adequately illustrates the point I'll be making here in a moment. "Well, what are my kids supposed to do without TV until the technician gets here?"
No, I'm sad to say, this was not a rare question.
There were many thoughts that ran through my head when one of these questions was asked of me. The list of things to do without a TV seems endless. Your children could:
- read a book
- go on a hike
- do something with friends
- spend time with their family
- draw
- write
- ride their bike
- take a nap
- go to the park
- do homework
- play a sport
- take up a new hobby
- play a board game
The list goes on and on and on. More to the point, though, is the question "why are you asking me that?" It takes a sad parent indeed who can't think of something to do with their kid and who thinks the TV should do the the kid's parenting. The response that wanted to come out of my mouth during those conversations was always "Why don't you spend some time with them? You know, do a little bit of that parenting thing you may have heard about?" Not wanting to get fired, I refrained from the sarcastic answers and merely said "I don't know."
Perhaps IGN's lovely Jessica Chobot puts it best in the Daily Fix for June 16 when she said, quite simply: "Good advice Mr. President, but yet again, is this just making video games the scapegoat? Maybe you should have just stopped your speech at 'We need to raise our children.' Period." Ah, common sense. Gotta love it. I wish I could've said that to some of my customers.
Anyway, part 2.
Daniel Petric, an Ohio teenager who shot and killed his mother and seriously wounded his father after his mother banned him from playing Halo 3, was sentenced to life in prison with perole eligibility after 23 years. The sentence was handed down earlier this week. This is great news. People who kill people should be sentenced as such. Rock on.
At least, that's great news until we get to the judge's little post-verdict speech, in which he basically blames "violent video games" for this young man's reaction to his mother... Quote the judge (emphasis mine):
The Court must enter a finding of guilty on the counts set forth in the indictment. That being said, it's my firm belief as a human being - and not as a jurist - that Daniel does suffer from a serious defect of the mind.This Court's opinion is that we don't know enough about these video games. In this particular case, not so much the violence of the game because I believe in the Halo 3, what it amounts to is a contest to see who can shoot the most aliens who attack.It's my firm belief that after a while the same physiological responses occur that occur in the ingestion of some drugs. And I believe that an addiction to these games can do the same thing. The dopamine surge, the stimulation of the nucleus accumbens - the same as an addiction. Such that when you stop, your brain won't stand for it.The other dangerous thing about these games, in my opinion, is that when these changes occur, they occur in an environment that is delusional. Because you can shoot these aliens, and they're there again the next day. You have to shoot them again. And I firmly believe that Daniel Petric had no idea, at the time he hatched this plot, that if he killed his parents, they would be dead forever.
His poor speaking skills aside, he firmly believes that video games killed this man's understanding of what it means to kill somebody? Really? This entire statement is just idiocy. His statement makes two arguments I believe are completely false. First he says that video games are addicting in the same way that a chemical drug is addicting. Second, he says that video games skew perception of reality, of right and wrong.
I don't believe that video games can be addicting any more than I believe sex can be. Chemicals, such as drugs, are addicting because your body gets to the point that it cannot function correctly without them, because it becomes used to their presence. A body comes to depend on the chemical reactions that take place when a certain chemical or combination of chemicals is ingested. For example, a chemical dependency to painkillers is formed when the following things happen:
- A person takes the painkiller often enough that the body develops a tolerance for it. The dosage being taken until this point starts to become ineffective.
- Because the painkiller is no longer working as desired, the person begins to take either a larger dose or begins taking doses more often.
When the person, for whatever reason, stops ingesting the chemical(s), the body reacts, as it must get used to functioning without the chemicals on which it has come to depend. In the above example, the body must learn once again to deal with pain on its own, without the aid of chemical painkillers.
A physical activity, such as playing video games or having sex, does not involve foreign chemicals entering the body. It involves fun or interest, and a person reacts to that fun in the same way he'd react to any fun or interesting activity. The body releases endorphins that say "this is awesome." Now, everybody likes to have fun, whether by playing video games or playing football, but most people are capable of continuing on with their lives even when denied their particular favorite method of having fun. It is the people who lack the willpower to restrain themselves - the people who allow their need for this fun experience dominate their lives - who become obsessed with the experience, and we label them addicts. Saying that a person is addicted to an experience that doesn't involve chemicals is really just a way to shirk blame from that person and place it on this imaginary addiction. This alleviates the need for that person to take responsibility to change things, because "this person can't help it, he's addicted."
The judge's second point is that video games skew the real world and diminish the thought of real world consequences that might prevent a person from doing something bad. I find the notion that a person's moral compass is skewed because that person just finished playing a video game (where you are shooting pixels on the screen) to be ludicrous. I find it much more likely that any person, such as Mr. Petric, who will shoot somebody over a video game had an off-kilter moral compass long before laying hands on a video game.
Jessica Chobot also weighed in on this matter in the June 17 Daily Fix. She put it very simply: "The whole thing is seriously fucked up." Rock on.
I'm reminded of the Columbine shooting and the resulting fallout. It so happens that the two students responsible for the atrocities that took place that day also played Doom. As a result, there was a huge public outcry against violent video games, because these two must have been influenced by this game - which, oddly enough, has you running around killing demons from hell. There was this funny theory that said that people who played violent video games were more likely to shoot up their schools. Hell, I was in high school at the time, and I was yanked into the principal's office (during finals, no less) and interrogated by the Woodland Park Police, because it was known that I was an avid video gamer. They had all kinds of great questions for me, such as "Do you play violent video games like Doom?" and "Do these video games ever make you think you can shoot somebody in real life without consequences?" or how about "Do you think about killing people, such as your fellow students, when you are playing these games?"
The idea that video games lead to violence, as I mentioned before, is ridiculous. Yes, you will always have people who play video games who also kill people. Just like you will always have people who go to church who also kill people, or people who drink wine or appreciate fine art or have jobs or go to their neighbors' bar-be-ques who also kill people. But video games cannot be our scapegoat. We cannot point at them and say "that's why person X killed person Y." To do so misses the entire point.
Person X killed person Y.
It doesn't really matter why this happened, only that it did. Person X should be punished just the same, regardless of whether person Y restricted person X's video games or person Y threatened to punch person X. Hold the person who committed the act responsible for the act rather than finding something else to blame.
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