Violent video games and violence

You kind have to know about Firefly, specifically to the revelations about reavers in the movie Serenity to get the picture.

Recently, Fox Business had a story on the link between adulthood violence and violent video games. I usually scoff at anything Fox has to say, but further reading into the research shows more validity than I usually give such thoughts. But after reading a bit more on Dr. Bushman's website, I'm reconsidering my thoughts.



The research is quite sound. Most of it is comprised of 300 different studies, some by himself, some by others to create a long range study of video game activities and adult violence. In one study in particular was quite brilliant. Basically he took several school age children and had them play two types of video games coded as violent and non-violent. After 20 minutes of this, the child is then given a simple competitive task against a fictional child. The winner is then asked to punish the other child by giving them a blast of sound through a set of headphones. The sound is ranked from 1 through 10, and the child is told that anything above 8 would cause hearing damage. It turns out that the group that played violent video games were more likely to use a punishment above 8. A study like this is very costly and difficult, so I have a great deal of respect for it.

One of the major things that Dr. Bushman is concerned about is a generalized concept of why people behave violently. Many of this research studies break the traditional myths of violent behavior. One in particular that interests me is his theory on how violent people are not people with low self-esteem.

Narcissists, says Bushman, believe that they are entitled to admiration and respect and, when they don’t get it, they become aggressive. Bushman blames the self-esteem movement of the past 20 years for producing a generation of people who think the world has been turned upside down when they are not singled out for their “special-ness.”

“Because of the self-esteem movement, you have sports teams where everybody gets a trophy regardless of skill,” says Bushman. “There’s a school in Alabama where they had a mirror with a banner above it that said, ‘You are now looking at the most special person in the world.’ Children in elementary school fill out forms that begin, ‘I am special because …’ and they have ‘All about me’ weeks where they celebrate themselves. The problem is not low self-esteem.”

I find this interesting. (Mostly because it flips modern educational theory on it's head.) One of the things that I try to advocate on the video games controversy is to exert that video games is a medium. Like books, movies, music, theater, dance, and comic, they have no moral value or intellectual importance in it of itself. As the preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray said, "There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or poorly written. That is all." There are well created games like Final Fantasy VI, Dance Dance Revolution, and PacMan. These games challenged the mind to understand and practice routines outside of their normal world. There are also poorly constructed soulless million dollar corporate projects made merely to produce profit at the expense of the public. (I'd care not to name names here.) Consider this, when you see how things are marketed, are these attempts to communicate human interaction, or are they a selling you the promise of solving all the ills in your life?