As regular readers will know Keith Vaz, who is a member of parliament and chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, has been a persistent critic of video games.
He demanded that Rockstar Games’ Manhunt(certified 18 by the BBFC) be banned, because it allegedly influenced the 17 year old killer of 14 year old schoolboy Stefan Pakeerah. Despite the police denying any such link. Despite the Judge denying any such link. Despite it actually being the victim Stefan who (under-age) had a copy of “Manhunt” and not the killer.
Obviously someone who upholds our morals in such a manner must be morally correct himself. So this quote from the BBC may come as a surprise:
“Claim: The chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee claimed more than £75,000 to fund a second home in Westminster, even though his family home is just 12 miles away in Stanmore. The Telegraph also suggested he changed his designated second home for a single year to property in his Leicester constituency, before claiming more than £4,000 on furnishings.”
I have written many times on here about the current inept, execrable British labour government. One feature of socialists is that they think that they know better than the public who voted them into power. And this know all attitude manifests itself in control freakery. The current labour government have stripped away our rights and freedoms more than any previous British government. They now have more oppressive powers against the electorate than in any other democracy.
This nanny state mentality manifests itself in many ways. And one of these is in spending huge amounts (£275 million) telling us that being overweight is bad for us. Something we obviously need to be told. Their Change4Life campaign is costing a lot of our money and has met much criticism. That it is simplistic, has unsuitable partners such as Nestle, PepsiCo and Mars and that it simply won’t work.
If having the Government hectoring us wasn’t bad enough, a number of charities have decided to waste our contributions to them by joining in this silliness. The British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and Diabetes UK have got together in a joint campaign. The adverts have been designed by The Gate agency and will be in women’s weeklies including Heat, Closer, OK and Hello! also in TV listing titles like What’s on TV and TV Choice. The campaign will last for four weeks and will target parents with children under 11 years old. There are two adverts, the one at the top of this article that says that video games kill children and one which says that eating a small cake will also kill you.
These are lazy, simplistic shock adverts that tell a lie. The Gate agency and the three charities involved should be ashamed of themselves. All they are doing is exposing their uneducated prejudices. Everyone reading this knows just how much good video games do for children. And anyone who doesn’t should read some of the articles here on the subject.
You wonder why these people didn’t create an advert attacking books. Books are far more sedentary than video games and reading is an anti social solitary activity that ruins your eyesight.
So I urge everyone who reads this to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority. If possible these adverts must be stopped and the public need to know that they are being lied to. Also I urge everyone to desist from contributing to the three named charities that are doing this, they obviously don’t deserve our hard earned money. In the meantime here is a video that shows just how sedentary video games are:
Jeremy Clarkson called Gordon Brown a “one-eyed Scottish idiot” and the whole world cheered. Clarkson was probably referring to Brown’s gross mismanagement of the British economy whilst he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, but this is not Brown’s only idiocy. When he blamed knife crime on video games he was being patently stupid. Studies show that the graphs over time of video game playing and of violent crime by youths tend to be inversely proportional. So the reality is the opposite of what Brown said. No surprise there.
And then there are the other idiots, the ones in the “old” media, who consistently attack gaming. Partly out of sheer ignorance and partly out of fear that their days are numbered. Fox News in America and the Mail in the UK are prime examples of this. What they report would be totally laughable if it weren’t for the fact that some people are gullible enough to believe what the news media say.
How about this for a quote from the report: “Video games can stimulate learning of facts and skills such as strategic thinking, creativity, cooperation and innovative thinking, which are important skills in the information society.” Sounds just like this blog, doesn’t it? So I commend the European parliament on their erudition and judgement.
The fact is that video gaming is merely a communication medium, just like books, television, film and newspapers. The detractors seem to continually fail to get their heads round this one. What video gaming has over the older media is that it is interactive, non linear and connected. It is for these three reasons that we are taking over.
Parents are responsible for bringing up their own children. So allowing kids to have an 18+ game is just the same as allowing them to watch Debbie Does Dallas or giving them a bottle of Laphroig to drink. The politicians and the news media would be far better occupied getting this message over than their current Pavlovian responses to gaming.
You see, what most people don’t realise is that we are still at the very beginning of video gaming. In the near term it will grow to be bigger than TV and Film put together. But over the longer term the three technical advantages it has as a medium will make it all pervasive. It will take over older methods of human communication in many aspects of every one’s lives. Education, certainly, will be far more effective once it fully embraces gaming. As will many areas of business. Just wait and see.
And just so I am not accused of being a propagandist for gaming being the best thing on planet earth, let me say that there is a major problem with what our industry does. A problem that is not properly addressed and a problem that has featured on these pages before. And that problem is game and internet addiction. But I am not proposing that Vaz, Brown etc now jump on this in a misinformed, alarmist tirade. What I am saying is that this is an area that deserves far, far more informed debate.
ELSPA (European Leisure Software Association) is the slightly self aggrandizing name for the UK’s game publisher’s club. They work hard at scratching the surface of game counterfeiting, but their main function is the glad handing and mutual back slapping that some people see as an essential part of business. They have the potential to present a unified voice that represents the industry and just now they have found a reason to do this.
The British government, in their normal Pavlovian reaction to the gutter press, commissioned a TV celebrity psychologist, Tanya Byron, to review the effect the internet and video games on children. From a games point of view this was a pure waste of tax payers money (no change here from this awful Labour government) because there was no problem that needed addressing, other than the continued existence of the Daily Mail.
Amazingly there was no call for a simultaneous review of the effect of “books” on young and impressionable minds. These “books” contain vastly more, highly graphic, sordid and perverted sex than games. They also contain the worst violence than man can imagine. Yet they have no age rating, none, zilch, nada. The failure of this government to address this shocking situation will go down in history as one of their greatest failures.
The Byron Review was overshadowed in the real world by the publishing of the book Grand Theft Childhood. This contained extensive original academic research on the subject. Something that eluded the Byron Review. Anyone reading Grand Theft Childhood will know just how stupid the gutter press and the government were being over this whole issue. And reading this book is something everybody involved in this issue should do before opening their mouths to speak.
So when the totally unnecessary (from a gaming point of view) Byron Review came out it said that there wasn’t a problem other than stupid parents not being able to read the massive age rating logo plastered on the front of every game (but show me the age ratings on books). Fair enough, but this isn’t the most stupid thing that parents do with their children. Many poison their children by smoking in the same room or car. Or even permanently damage their child by smoking whilst pregnant. Alongside these sorts of issues the issue of games is insignificant.
But there was a nasty, evil ticking time bomb within the Byron review. Tanya had come up with the patently absurd idea that game age rating should be handled by the bureaucratic film industry QUANGO known as BBFC. This despite the fact that there is a far better, proven, working, Europe wide game rating organisation called PEGI. The mind, quite frankly, boggles at the stupidity here and you have to wonder how Tanya came up with putting such a ridiculous idea to the government. Didn’t she realise that they might actually do what she suggested? Especially when this awful Labour regime are looking for scapegoats to cover their gross, inept incompetence.
Imagine, for a moment, a most graphic and prolonged portrayal of testicular torture on film. What age rating would you give this? The Spanish thought 18 was right. Yet the BBFC in the UK thought that 12 was a good age for seeing Casino Royale.
Other than their judgement there are a lot of other things wrong with using the BBFC. It will introduce considerable and unnecessary costs, delays and bureaucracy to the industry. And for a global industry like game publishing to go from a Europe wide standard to a purely national one is just silly in the extreme.
So it is refreshing to see Peter Jackson from ELSPA standing up at a Labour conference fringe meeting to tell them that the BBFC is unfit for purpose. Even if he is stating the obvious, our socialist brothers aren’t the brightest of people and need it spelling out for them. Whether he will be heard over the clamour for places in the queue to stab the inept Gordon Brown in the back is another matter.
So, now that ELSPA seem to have grown some on this issue, why don’t they do something about all the many video game university courses that are not fit for purpose? These do far more damage to young people than any game censorship issue. Quite frankly I hope that this is one scandal the Daily Mail get hold of.
“Violent crime, particularly among the young, has decreased dramatically since the early 1990s, while video games have steadily increased in popularity and use.” “With millions of sales of violent games, the world should be seeing an epidemic of violence. Instead, violence has declined.” Obvious truths that politicians and journalists choose to ignore.
“However, it is possible that certain types of video game could affect emotions, views, beahviour and attitudes”. “Similar to books, video games permeate a person’s life and will likely interact with numerous other factors”. It’s nice to see someone at last realising that games are just another form of popular entertainment media. It is about time that politicians and journalists also realised this.
I have always thought that games act as a catharsis, as way for people to let off steam. This is suppored by anecdotal evidence in Grand Theft Childhood and by this new report. But obviously the effect of games on people can be complex, depend on a whole load of other factors and vary widely between individuals. In his report Patrick Kierkegaard says: “Computer games can, of course, lead to violent behaviour under certain circumstances – such as triggering aggression in certain people that are already predisposed to violence.” It seems that the door is open for a lot more research.
I don’t want this blog to become some sort of media watch, but we are at a very critical point in the development of the video gaming industry and it’s relationship with the press. We are in the middle of a transition of gaming from being a hardcore niche hobby to it being a mainstream activity enjoyed by most people. Eventually it will be bigger than film and TV combined. And the popular press are having problems getting a grip on this. Especially Fox News in America and the Daily Mail in the UK.
The issue here is ignorance of journalists and the problems are age and perception.
The perception problem is that a lot of the media persist in the notion that gaming is a solitary activity for adolescent boys. Which is completely wrong. Gaming is most prevelant for people in their late 20s and early 30s. Unlike all previous popular entertainment media gaming is immensely social with multi player on a single platform or via online connection. It has bought about a quiet (and largely unreported) revolution in human relationships. And gaming is relatively non violent compared with films and books.
So we have a situation where a lot of media are at odds with many of their readers. The press are generating a plethora of anti gaming articles that bear no relationship whatsoever to reality. And most readers of these articles can see just how stupid they are. Which reflects very badly on the journalist writing them and on the media who publish them. Basically the Daily Mail, Fox News etc are just shooting themselves in the foot.
However some of their readers and viewers don’t understand gaming and so may believe these stupid articles. Which is leading to a polarisation. On the one hand there is now a majority who understand gaming and who are bemused by the ignorance of the media. And there is a minority who have taken the lies on board and who believe that gaming is some sort of great social evil. I have had discussions with some of these people and they have been totally brainwashed.
The Rosie Millard article was so bad that the Mail website did not receive one positive comment that they could publish. Instead it was inundated with negative comments that they refused to publish. Many people wrote letters to the editor. And there was a uniform negative response across the online media. I hope the fee that Rosie Millard received for this article was worth the massive damage to her reputation.
Which brings us to GTA IV. The Mail’s attitude was that it is ”a squalid game that steals young minds”. Which flies in the face of academic research such as the book Grand Theft Chidhood. In other words they were wrong, as usual. So it is amazing that they have now done a complete about turn. A 180 of enormous ramification for the popular reporting of gaming. If we can win the Mail over then we have a chance at defeating ignorant prejudice everywhere.
The volte-face comes in a TV &showbiz review of GTA IV by James O’Brien. He obviouly realises that this is one of the greatest games ever, but more than that it is a major global cultural event. At last the Mail reports gaming as it really is: “There’s no denying, however, that this latest version of the Grand Theft franchise is a phenomenal technological and creative achievement that is set to generate more money for its British designers than any Hollywood release in years.” and “The action is as epic as it is violent, with graphics and cinematic “motion capture” technology delivering a degree of verisimilitude so great that it frequently feels more like participating in a movie than playing a game. Stunts are better than ever, but the driving itself is a revelation.” and “Killing is occasionally optional, dialogue and cut scenes are devoted to Nikos’s inner turmoil and while criminality and violence are certainly glorified, its perpetrators are somehow not. Even Nikos has sufficient soul to see his employers for the scum they are.”
Intelligent and informed stuff. And almost unbelievable that it was in the Mail. Let’s hope they can maintain these new, high, journalistic standards. And not fall back to the ignorance and prejudice that was their former hallmark on the subject.
After all the fuss with Tanya Byron and Grand Theft Childhood recently I thought it might be an idea to write what I think about violence in games. Firstly it is very obvious that society doesn’t have any problem here. These games have been played for decades now, they are played by hundreds of millions of people and there are no social problems. None. If there were, then the sensationalist newspapers would be throwing it in our faces. So the debate is mainly self publicist politicians and journalists using video games as a punchbag so as to further their own self interests. Gordon Brown and Hillary Clinton have said some very stupid things on the subject.
It is the job of parents to bring up their children, it is not the job of government. Unfortunately anyone can have a child any time they want, if they are physically capable. There is no intelligence test, no aptitude test and no means test. So all sorts of unsuitable people become parents. And governments use this as an excuse to force stupid legislation on the rest of us. We have nanny states that poke their noses into areas where they have no business and where things would work a lot better without them.
When it comes to games the current age limits are self evidently stupid. Children develop emotionally at different speeds, they don’t magically take a jump in maturity on a given birthday. And they each have different attitudes and sensitivities. So it is fortunate that children are self censoring. They avoid that which they don’t like. Kids just aren’t interested in all the sexual material that surrounds us all in our daily lives. And when they do get old enough to be interested it is entirely natural. The same with violence. Below a certain development level kids just aren’t interested and walk away.
One things that the anti violent game lobby forget is that video gaming is mainly an adult hobby, this is a fact. Also they have this strange perception that all the nation’s children are cooped up in their bedrooms playing solitary video games. When in reality virtually every game these days is fundementally social in it’s game play and has the additional social benefit of being a conversation focus amongst peers. Games are far more social than books, film or music.
People try and compare violence in films and in games. They try and make out that games are worse because of their interactivity. This is very stupid. I have read pschologists who say that in reality films are worse because you are passive and can do nothing about events. You are subjugated by the violence. Whereas in games you are active and can sort out the baddies, which is psychologically a lot healthier. Then there is the fact that films are hugely more realistic allowing greater audience immersion and suspension of disbelief. Finally the actual violence content in films is horrendous compared to games. James Bond is subject to testicle bashing torture in the 12 rated Casino Royale and there are very many 18 rated films that are pure evil from beginning to end. The violence in games is far, far tamer. It tends to be stylised. And, in virtually all instances, it forms just one part of a coherent and balanced whole.
Another aspect of this whole debate is that it is demeaning of children. Children are sentient, intelligent human beings. They know that when they are playing a game they are playing a game. They know it is not real life. In the 1950s legislators in America made a lot of noise about superhero comic books. They thought that chidren would think that they could fly and so throw themselves off tall buildings. We know now that this is absurd. So too are most of the concerns about violence in games.
In fact there is a way in which violent video games are good for children. Very good. Quite simply they act as a catharsis, as a means to vent pent up anger and frustration. Children can interactively get all the negativity out of their system without hurting anyone or anything in the real world. I think that this is a very significant effect and has contributed to the huge drop in juvenile crime that we have seen in every country where video games are widely played.
It is useful to remember that age ratings are a relatively recent artifice. They were invented by the film industry when they found themselves under the same sort of scrutiny that the game industry is now under. Books are entirely comparable with films and video games as popular entertainment media. Yet books have no age rating despite frequent sex and violence. Just look at the Bible and the Iliad for instance.
So what is worse, a Mickey Mouse Tom and Jerry cartoon on television or Grand Theft Auto on a video game console? For me it has to be Mickey Mouse Tom and Jerry. As discussed earlier the viewer is passive and is subject to unremitting violence with no morality message whatsoever. Whereas Grand Theft Auto is an interactive game of near infinite possibilities of which violence forms but a small and integral part.
