Children and Violent Video Games: A Warning

December 15, 1998

Children and Violent Video Games: A Warning

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Join a Discussion on National Issues: The Parent's View

By CAREY GOLDBERG

OSTON -- It's almost Christmas. Do you know what your children are playing? Might they perhaps be ripping out the spines of their enemies, perpetrating massacres of marching bands and splatting their screens with sprays and spurts of pixelated blood?
Such hair-raising queries have become as seasonal a ritual as gift-giving. Each year since 1995, as parents have bought more and more computer and video games for their children, a posse of two United States Senators and a media-watch group has issued a report card meant in part to warn of certain games' violent content.
This year, the report card issuers focused on a small group of ultra-violent games they said would be better termed "kill-for-fun murder simulations" than games. They cited evidence that such thrill-killing was being marketed to children, who can gain access to the games in poorly policed stores or on the Internet, and warned of their "antisocial" and "perverse" bent.
They did not list the ultra-violent games, but one of the Senators, Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, particularly complained about advertisements for the games Point Blank, Die by the Sword and Cardinal Syn.
For the last four years, "whack-and-hack" players have responded pretty much like Sylvainson Gelin, an 11-year-old aficionado of Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil, when caught between plays at an arcade in Somerville, Mass., this week. Politicians who condemn violent games, he said, "should try it out themselves."
"If they try it out, they'll see why we like it so much," Sylvainson said. "It's fun."
Game makers, for their part, have often reacted to the report card much like Jamey Harvey, the chief executive officer of Digital Addiction, a game company: "We tend to ignore all that hype," he said.
Harvey compared the political hubbub around video games to the outcry from some Senators in the 1950's "screaming about how rock-and-roll was going to destroy the country."
But one difference is that the technology of video games is exploding, and every year brings new questions and issues, even as the game market expands wildly. It is expected to amount to about $6 billion in retail sales this year, almost rivaling movie box-office receipts, and has been growing at a rate of more than 30 percent annually, according to the Interactive Digital Software Association, the industry's trade group.
Games obtained on line often do not get parental scrutiny, so this year, the watchdogs set their sights on the Internet.
The report card issuers -- who, in addition to Lieberman, include Senator Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat, and the National Institute on Media and the Family, based in Minneapolis -- acknowledge that the rating system established for video games in 1994, run by the Entertainment Software Rating Board, is working very well.

Virtually all games sold in stores carry ratings that range from EC for early childhood to M for mature (over 17) and AO for adults only; and parents in doubt about a game can call the ratings board's toll-free number -- (800) 771-3772 -- or go to its Web site, at www.esrb.org.
But increasingly, young players can download demos and sometimes entire games on line, often without a credit card, and the vast majority of those cyberversions are not rated.
The rise in on-line games, said David Walsh, a psychologist and president of the National Institute on Media and the Family, prompted the report card writers to call parents' attention to the need to monitor their children's Internet play.
"The knowledge gap between parents and kids in this whole realm of media is an enormous knowledge gap," Dr. Walsh said.
The report card cited its own survey of more than 500 parents, which found that fewer than 5 percent of them had ever heard of Duke Nukem, a violent game rated M, while 80 percent of junior high students said they were familiar with it.
Video game supporters say that parents should indeed pay better attention. But the Interactive Digital Software Association says that surveys show that 9 of 10 buyers of games are adults, and that adults are the main players of M-rated games as well. Over all, 7 of 10 players of computer games and 6 of 10 players of video games on special consoles are over 18, the association says.
Ultimately, said Douglas Lowenstein, the association's president, rather than "spanking the industry" each year, the issuers of the report card would do better to "use their bully pulpit to deliver a message to parents, saying, do not buy games without looking into these ratings."
The report card also warned of what seemed to be a growing tendency by some makers of violent games to market to youngsters, from Duke Nukem action figures in toy stores to the rebellious advertisements in video game magazines popular among young boys.
Indeed, some of the advertisements do get graphic: "As easy as killing babies with axes," was one slogan quoted by the report card, along with "More fun than shooting your neighbor's cat" and "Happiness is a warm cranium," accompanied by a picture of a severed head.
If adults out buying games recently at the Best Buy store in Cambridge, Mass., were any indication, some do worry about the games' content, and stick to sports or scholastic games for their children.
"Most of the games that you see, like this right here, this is outrageous," said Harvey Lemay of Malden, Mass., gesturing toward a shelf of violent games. "This is teaching kids to go out and fight in school, and get a bad attitude."
But others are not worried.
John Sedleski, 44, a computer technician, said he let his 13-year-old son, James, start playing video games as soon as he could handle a control pad, and introduced him to Mortal Kombat when he was 7.
"I ignored what it said on it -- PC 13 or whatever it said on it," he said. "I laid the rules down to him a long time before that: that this is pretend -- it's not real life. He buys that.
"My son doesn't get himself into trouble at school," Sedleski said. "He doesn't get in any trouble with the law; and he's a real nice, polite kid, no matter who talks to him. It all depends on how you bring your children up. It has nothing to do with how violent the game is."
That point is the subject of jousting as lively as in any fantasy fight, because, as both sides acknowledge, no research has shown conclusively that playing violent on-screen games produces violent real-life kids.
The National Institute on Media and the Family and others argue that extrapolating from studies of violent television, and positing that interactive play provides an even more intense experience, points to a real danger. The Interactive Digital Software Association and others counter that children distinguish clearly between reality and fantasy, and that studies have shown that it is real-life clashes and problems at home that induce youth violence.
A sampling of preteens interviewed at the arcade in Somerville showed that most fell into the latter camp. Jean Syllien, 11, of Cambridge, said: "It's just watching TV and playing. It's not real life."
And 8-year-old Richard McCoy of Malden, Mass., accompanied by his encouraging mother as he shot miscreants with a blue plastic handgun, allowed as how he thought the games might actually be good for him.
"I want to be a cop," he said. "I like to play gun games -- especially when I shoot all the bad guys. I think it's good practice."

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