mjp19xx said:
I love video games. I am even writing an English literature thesis on interactivity's affect on storytelling, but Leland Yee is right. There are mounds of studies that clearly show that violent media increase aggression, and we are not just talking short-term. The long-term effects are, in fact, even more detrimental. Also, we are not just talking about correlational studies here, but solid experimental evidence. Albert Bandura, the man who founded social learning theory, built much of his career off of the most famous of the experiments in question (His 1961 "Bobo doll experiment"). At this point the only thing still up for discussion amongst psychologists is how extensive the effects are.
Children and adolescents should not be playing violent video games, and parents are not all going to know what is right or wrong for their child. I would say that many if not most parents are not aware of the contents of the video games their children play, and before anyone jumps to the conclusion that they are simply bad parents, keep in mind that being a parent is extremely difficult and time consuming. The California law that was proposed would have simply made it to where it would be required by law that the purchaser of an M rated game be an adult. My only problem with the law was that it did not cover all types of media. Video games should not be singled out in that sense. They, however, do warrant some special attention, because it is a form of media that parents are less likely to be knowledgeable about.
By all means enjoy video games, but realize that doing so does not mean that you should defend them from all criticism. Some criticism is warranted, and one bit of criticism will not doom the whole medium. We should, in fact, take criticism as an opportunity to improve the medium. My personal cause in this sense is the rampant militarism in video games. I cannot even name one video game that sends a clear anti-war message. Movies have also been developing a problem with this since Top Gun (just look up "military entertainment complex"), but there are a great many anti-war movies at least. I have had a bit of time to ramble, and hopefully this will generate some thought and perhaps a few good comments.
I seem to recall seeing research that said that watching cartoon violence on TV, say, involving Bugs Bunny or the Roadrunner had a similar effect to more explicit violence, and that there really wasn't much of a difference between explicit movie violence and explicit game violence. I'm not saying these things don't have effects. I'm just saying that if someone objects to, for example, Lord of the Rings: War in the North video game, they should also object to The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King movie. Of course, none of them say that if they do object to it, because the ship sailed on movie and TV violence years ago, but it leaves them looking a little hypocritical and single-minded.
As for anti-war statements, I personally think, especially in RTSes, that the more they push for realism, the better an anti-war statement they make, but the player has to be receptive. The strongest feeling like that I ever got was actually from Total Annihilation, way back when, because the adaptive music (brooding when there's no shooting going on) conspired with the salvageable wrecks to play what felt like an impromptu funeral dirge for the fallen since I had to scroll across the evidence of my losses to go retrieve my next wave of units. (I never said I was good at the game!) I think there's plenty of room for statements in games about war as waste and possibly even war as horror. The challenge is making a game someone would want to play anyway... and the problem with that is that it might have the opposite effect from the one you want, if people get used to working against the mechanics.
