Recent shootings in Norway, Colorado, and Connecticut have all been casually linked in media speculation to the video game habits of each shooter. By contrast, little mention was made of their film-viewing habits.
Then we have a lesser known story out of Texas. As alleged in the shooter's confession, the plan to kill his mother and sister was "inspired" by the Rob Zombie remake of Halloween. In an open confession letter, Jake Evans claims he viewed the film 3 times the week he committed murder.
As I watched it, I was amazed at how at ease the boy was during the murders and how little remorse he had afterward. I was thinking to myself, It will be the same for me when I kill someone.
The aftermath of these and various other gun massacres, mostly in the U.S., has many pundits howling over violent depictions in the film and video game industries. Most popular media coverage of this debate seems to side with the creative industries' insistence that there is no link, or at least not enough evidence of such, between violence in real life and on-screen.
Although media consensus is difficult to gauge, there seems to be a stronger inclination to blame video games for violent behavior rather than films. It certainly isn't my belief that either medium deserves blame for real-world acts of violence; nevertheless, there seems to be a trend here.
Without explicitly thinking about it, those who link video gaming to violent massacres have tapped into discourses of agency in regards to video games versus other media forms. The ability of players to control the violent actions of characters in first-person shooters, for example, seems to carry more influence in media speculation than watching shooters on film. Is the ability to act violent as a game character possibly any more influential than watching Django doing the same things on film? I'm not in any way aligning with the rhetoric that violent video games and films are to blame for crazy people doing evil things, mind you. It may just be that the agency of gamers in violent games is the undercurrent of this tendency to blame video games more than films.
More likely, however, is the simple evolution of moral panics around new media. As films were more the center of violence debates before, and likely crime novels before that, video games are simply the latest media scapegoat used to explain the unexplainable.
I wonder what we will blame next?
ReplyDeleteI find it funny that no one seems to question the other aspects of the person's life. As you mentioned, they've moved on from exploring whether or not the person enjoyed gory or violent films, but no one really seems to mention any other possible characteristics that would result in violent behaviour. Then again, this seems to apply mostly to white and/or educated people. When it come to the poor, or to ethnic minorities, we can quite easily accept that it was their cultural context that influenced them.
ReplyDeleteI think that there is an important counter argument in the violent films vs violent video games debate- the impact of visual realism. Whereas violent films may not have the same element of agency, what they do have is a sense of visual realism that just cannot be achieved in the same way by games. Today when watching that clip "Strange Days" in the lecture I found the scene quite unsettling. Yet when I tried to imagine the same scene in a simulated environment, I realised that it probably wouldn't have the same effect. Similarly, the scene from Prey wasn't particularly disturbing, yet I can imagine if that scene was re-enacted with real human actors, I would have found it quite shocking. To me, the graphics in video games create a crucial distance as when you enter into a virtual or simulated reality, you're entering into a different visual field. This changes the way you react to certain actions such as killing as the visuals don't correspond to the visual field of the "real world". Or, put another way, there is another step in the process in order to make it as impacting as a film- the translation of the simulated scene into something that lines up with what we'd see in our own physical world. Most people don't take that extra step, and in my opinion, this makes all the difference in something being "representational" violence and violence that is "real".
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