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Madison Seale
Doctor Zawilski
R C2001-401
9 November, 2015
Video Games and Violence: Controversy of Miscommunication?
As of October 10th, 2015, there have been 52 shootings in
schools across the United States, leaving many people to wonder why
such horrible acts have become so commonplace. A fairly common
argument made by many people, including former presidential
candidate Ralph Nader who once referred to video game creators as
electronic child molesters and current republican party frontrunner
Donald Trump who posted Video game violence & glorification must
stop - its creating monsters! In once instance, the CEO and executive
vice president of the National Rife Association (NRA) Wayne LaPierre said
there exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow
industry that sells, and sows violence against its own people, and
then referred to a number of well known video games, such as Mortal
Kombat, Grand Theft Auto, and Bulletstorm as examples thereof;
despite such claims, as an artistic medium, video games have a right
to depict violence. Art of all mediums has depicted violence as a
theme for centuries, and as creator of 1000 Days of Syria Mitch
Swenson believes, may even give one a better understanding of
violence as a dark reality of life. This is not helped by the fact that

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many video game makers deliberately produce controversy to help sell
their games. Despite this, it has been shown in numerous instances
that video games do not contribute to real-world violence.
One common argument that has been made against video
games is that by depicting violence, they desensitize their players, and
make them aggressive - the monsters referred to my Mr. Trump.
However, researchers seem to be divided on this issue. While it has
been shown that violent video games can increase aggression and
desensitize players to violence in a laboratory setting, meta-analyses
of the rates of violent crime compared with video game use actually
indicate that the rise of video games have coincided with a reduction in
violent crime. While one cannot use this to imply that video games
have caused this reduction which, considering the aforementioned
lab results, would be a stretch anyway it does make one fact very
clear: whatever increases in aggression and desensitization
researchers are observing in laboratory environments, these effect
clearly are not translating to the real world. Otherwise, we would be
experiencing a crime epidemic of mind-boggling proportions, especially
considering that an estimated 99 percent of American boys and 94
percent of American girls play video games for nearly two hours, and
54 percent of the American population overall and that around 90
percent of popular games depict acts of violence. To quote Dr. Vic
Strasburger, distinguished professor of pediatrics emeritus at the the

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University of New Mexico Murder is rare. Video games are
extraordinarily common.
Additionally, there are some who believe that video games
may be a medium that can be used to teach about the realities of
violence in the real world. For example, the game 1000 Days of Syria,
created by the aforementioned Mitch Swenson, puts the player in the
position of a diverse set of characters, all of whom are personally
affected by the conflict in Syria. Whether playing from the perspective
of a Syrian mother separated from her husband, a rebel fighter, or an
American journalist, Swenson - who spent time as a correspondent in
Syria for the blog War is Boring - designed the game with two goals in
mind: to increase American awareness of the crisis, and to present
players with difficult moral dilemmas that force them to empathize
with the characters theyre playing, and giving them a simulated
experience of the kind of violence that happens in real life every day.
And while 1000 Days of Syria may be far from what one might call a
mainstream game - the game is a text-based adventure, a style of
game that fell out of vogue decades ago - many other games similarly
present players with difficult moral decisions that force them to face
the consequences of violence, especially violence that they have
committed against others. On the surface level Spec Ops: The Line
seems like a run-of-the-mill shooter in the same style as anything in
the Call of Duty franchise. However, those who play the game find the

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experience to be very different. In one particularly chilling scene, the
player is given a choice of fighting their way through a massive group
of rogue American soldiers - a suicide mission - or drop a white
phosphorous mortar on them - horrible fate. While many video games
would give the player the choice without showing players the
consequences, Spec Ops: The Line forces the players to confront the
consequences of their actions by having them wade through the
charred, broken and sometimes still moving bodies to get to the next
objective, all while hearing screams of pain and pleas for death.
However, the real emotional blow comes when the player finally
reaches their objective in the area, and discovers the burned corpses
of a large group of civilians that had sought refuge within the
encampment. The whole scene plays out more like a re-enactment
from a documentary about war crimes than the Tarantinoesque
glorification of violence that many videogames are accused of
portraying.
With all this evidence against video games causing violence,
and people making games designed to teach players about the real-life
effects of violence, one begins to wonder why so many different
sources are claiming that video games should not depict violence. As
this theory from the Youtube channel The Game Theorists posits, many
game companies have deliberately created controversy around their
games to as a form of free advertising. One notable example is that of

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the original Grand Theft Auto (GTA). This game started its life as an
entirely different game called Race and Chase where players were
given the choice of playing cops or criminals. However, the developers
soon found that it was far more fun to play as criminals - where they
could break or ignore the rules as they saw fit - than it was to play as
cops - where players had certain rules to abide by and enforce. They
began increasing the incentives to play as criminal, and eventually the
game evolved into the game we know today as the first GTA. However,
the developers faced a huge problem now that the game was finished:
how were they going to market their game - which was all about
having fun while committing cartoonish and unrealistic crimes - in a
market where a stabbing death perpetrated by a 13 year-old was
blamed on Mortal Kombat 3 in the same year as their games release?
The developers of GTA hired infamous publicist Max Clifford, known for
fabricating elaborate the headline-grabbing lies to gain his clients
attention in the media. Clifford proceeded to plant a number of stories
in conservative publications about GTA, and spoke to concerned
politicians about the effects the game might have. Because of his
careful manipulation of the controversy (which he created) the makers
of GTA appeared before British Parliament, to defend the violent
content with its game, and by extension, all games. Because of all this
notoriety, GTA became a best-selling franchise with many loyal fans to
this day. And GTA hardly the only game to use such a marketing

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scheme. More recently, game studio Destructive Creations used a
similar strategy for their game, Hatred, in which player take the role of
a spree shooter, not unlike real-life events that video games are often
blamed for. After a brief period during which the game was removed
from Steam Greenlight - a program which allows users of online video
game platform Steam to choose some of the games that will be sold on
the site - Hatred garnered much attention in the media amid
accusations of corporate censorship. Regardless of what people were
saying about the game, Destructive Creations received exactly what
they wanted: free publicity for their game.
In conclusion, video games have just as much right to portray
violence as any other artistic medium. Despite popular claims to the
contrary, video games do not cause their players to become more
violent, and in fact, can even be used to better educate the public
about the real-world consequences of violence. One factor
contributing to the continued demonization of video games as a means
by which violent behavior is encouraged or created are the publisher of
the games themselves creating controversy as a means of inexpensive
or free advertising.

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