#oneaday, Day 39: Games Maketh the Man

“Is Bulletstorm the worst video game in the world?”

That’s the question Fox News asked earlier with an article that was hyperbolic and scaremongering, even by their questionable standards. According to Fox’s “experts”, including Carol Lieberman, a psychologist and book author, “the increase in rapes can be attributed in large part to the playing out of [sexual] scenes in video games”.

Whoa there. Hold on a minute. The playing out of sexual scenes in video games (which, I might add, are typically incredibly tame and rather immature in the way they are handled) is a “large” contributing factor to the increase in rapes?

This is scaremongering against games taken to a whole other level. Unbelievable stuff. And, of course, complete and utter nonsense. If we follow through Lieberman’s arguments to a natural (and exaggerated) conclusion, here’s how the life of an average gamer would generally go:

09:00 – Wake up wearing same clothes you’ve been wearing for the last six months because game characters never change their outfits. Skip breakfast because game characters never eat. Skip going to toilet for same reason.

09:05 – Leave house. Run down road because game characters never walk except in cutscenes.

09:06 – See passer-by, assume they’re enemy. Kill them for XP and loot and/or rape them if they’re female.

09:07 – Repeat process ad nauseam until reaching work.

09:30 – Reach work, still running. Enter work building. Start lurking around corners.

09:35 – Shoot out security camera in case it sees you, despite the fact you actually work here.

09:40 – Run around office using cubicles as cover, shooting anyone you happen to catch a glimpse of in the head.

10:00 – Called into boss’s office.

10:05 – Defeat boss by filling him full of lead.

10:10 – Rape him for good measure.

10:15 – Loot his body, because bosses always carry the phattest lewt.

11:00 – Take elevator up to next level. Repeat process.

12:00 – Police arrive. Shootout ensues.

12:10 – Die. Fail to respawn because you don’t get to do that in real life.

Now, granted, there are some absolute fuckwits in the world to whom that probably sounds like a great way to live out the last few hours of their lives. But, as is frequently pointed out by rational people every time such a tragedy happens, if someone is going to go on a killing and/or raping rampage, it’s probably not games that caused it in the first place. To assume that the average person doesn’t have the appropriate filters in their brain to differentiate between the darkly comic, over-the-top, ridiculously exaggerated violence in Bulletstorm—a game intended for (immature) adults, let’s not forget—and how horrifying it would be to witness real-life violence or rape? That’s just insulting to, well, everyone.

The article does raise one valid point about control and “censorship”, though. Parents still aren’t taking responsibility for the entertainment their kids are interacting with. Personally, I strongly believe that there should be tighter controls on how games are sold. I’m not talking about censorship, I’m talking about stricter enforcement of age ratings—and a change in the ridiculous policies that most retailers adopt that allow parents to buy age-inappropriate games for their children. If the parent is by themself, then sure, there’s not much that can be done. But as it stands right now, if a parent is obviously buying a game for the kid they have with them, most retailers won’t do a damn thing about it.

The above will probably have made clear that I don’t believe that there’s a direct causal link between violence and sexual content in the media and the way people behave. But I do believe that children shouldn’t be exposed to such content from such an early age these days—more so they can hold on to the increasingly-irrelevant concept of “youth” more than anything else.

Sadly, though, it’s pretty clear that it’s too late. To backtrack now and enforce tighter controls would be difficult, if not impossible to do. So we’re just going to have to live with the consequences. Which, according to Fox News, is a society full of joypad-wielding rapists.

I shall leave you with two interesting thoughts to mull over: