No sooner do I sit down then I glance at the teleprompter and get a preview of what Donahue had in store for me: "I want to show you a picture. This is 13-year-old Noah. While reenacting the video game Mortal Kombat, he was stabbed to death by his friend." I hear the producer coach Donahue on how to speak with Noah's mother so that it looks like she called spontaneously when they really had prearranged the call. I hear him reassure Daphne White, spokeswoman for the Lion and the Lamb Project and my sparring partner for the show, that he has some especially gristly footage from Grand Theft Auto 3 at the ready and she clucks with glee. And then, whoosh, we are going live in, five, four, three, two, one, seconds -- and you're ON THE AIR. I stare blankly into the camera as a freight train comes barreling toward me.

I hear Donahue explaining about how some school kids got shot in the back of their heads because their slayers had learned about "kill zones" from a video game. I find myself wondering why anyone would imagine a kid needed to play Quake to learn that you can kill someone by shooting them in the back of the head when just moments before, MSNBC was interviewing a former Mafia hit man.

Then, the first question goes to White, who uses it to remind viewers that she is a concerned mother. Never mind that I am a father and have raised a son successfully through his teenage years. On Donahue, activists are moms and intellectuals are presumed to be childless.

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White explains how parents across the country had purchased Grand Theft Auto 3 for their children without any idea of its distasteful contents. Hello! The game is called Grand Theft Auto 3. It's rated M for Mature Audiences -- not appropriate for children under 17 -- "violence, blood, strong language." The hit men and prostitutes are right there on the package. If you are a thoughtful -- er, I mean, "thinkful" -- parent, how much more information do you need before alarm bells start going off in your head?

White notes that the Federal Trade Commission had cited overwhelming evidence that video games were aggressively marketed to youth. The same FTC study found that 83 percent of all video game purchases were either made by parents or by parents and children together. Moms and dads still control the purse strings on what remain high-ticket items in most family budgets. As parents, my wife and I took responsibility for knowing something about the media we bought our son. We didn't expect the storekeeper to protect us from ourselves.

And suddenly, it's my turn. I had composed a little speech debunking the evidence but it seemed beside the point because her last speech was backed by nothing more than her personal distaste for Grand Theft Auto 3. Uncomfortable with the black-and-white framing of the discussion, I search for middle ground, praising the Lion and the Lamb Project for helping parents to make informed choices. And I really meant it. Education, not regulation, is going to ensure that parents get to decide what kind of media their children consume. Maybe we could all work together to improve the quality of resources available to parents.

But seeking middle ground was a classic liberal mistake. On these "Crossfire"-style programs, any compromise is read as weakness. Make no mistake about it, everything here works to exaggerate the differences between you and the person sitting on the other side of the table. It isn't a conversation, a discussion or even a debate by any classical standards. You are opponents, whether you want to be or not. The producers actually keep you in separate rooms before they bring you on the air. They encourage you to interrupt each other and to show as much passion as possible, because what they want is controversy and entertainment. The producers rattle your cages until your blood is pumping and you want them to go down. They flash up captions underneath your image and you have no say over how they shorthand your position. When you cede a point, you can almost hear the folks on your own side booing.

Then, Donahue spooks moms with a clip from GTA3. You can tell he enjoys it: "We're going to kill a cop, or more than one cop, and a prostitute ... This is gratuitous violence here. We're beating, beating. We'll get a little blood here in a minute. The blood, you'll see. Look at this." He shows it over and over like we were watching the Zapruder film. Of course, any violence we see was staged by the show's producers, this being a game and not a movie. If Donahue really believed watching these scenes was harmful to minors, why was he showing them without parental warnings during what used to be considered the family hour? Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Then, he asks me to justify what we just saw. Where does one start? The idea that we are going to get rid of violent entertainment is preposterous. Every storytelling medium in the history of mankind has included violent themes and stories, because we depend on stories to help us sort through our conflicting values and our mixed feelings about aggression. We turn to violent entertainment for the same reason moral reformers turn towards apocalyptic rhetoric -- because it gives us a sense of order in a world which otherwise can seem totally chaotic. We fantasize about a lot of things we'd never want to do in real life, and through fantasy we bring those impulses momentarily under control. What is bad about a lot of games isn't that they are violent but that they trivialize violence. They tell us little about our inner demons because they fall back too quickly on tried-and-true formulas. Without fail, the works that moral reformers cite are not the ones that are formulaic but those that are thematically rich or formally innovative. It is as if the reformers responded to the work's own provocation to think about the meaning of violence but were determined to shut down that process before it ever gets started.

If you want to actually change the quality of popular culture, the best way to do it is not to throw rocks from the sidelines but to get involved in thinking through the creative challenges confronting the games industry. And that's what I've been doing, speaking at trade shows, doing workshops with individual companies, trying to figure out how to develop a richer and more complex vocabulary for representing violence in games.

The Free Software Project
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