Video Games and Violence

Earlier this week, Walmart started instructing employees to hide video game marketing materials that show violence in response to the shooting in their El Paso store on Saturday [1]. While jumping into the ‘conversation’ around guns feels pretty futile most days, in regard to video games I consider myself something of a connoisseur, if you will. Games and music have been my two lifelong hobbies until I chose to study the latter professionally, so while I can’t point you to any credentials, I’ll let my 300+ titles across digital platforms, 4 shelves of physical games, 6 different consoles and a VR headset speak for themselves.

When it comes to games, I have thoughts.

Which is great, because it turns out that thoughts are one of the two things we’re collectively allowed to offer in times of utterly preventable, daily national tragedy.

After the back-to-back shootings in El Paso and Dayton, some major conservative political figures including President Trump more or less drew a causal link between violence in video games and the epidemic of gun violence in America [2]. This conveniently avoids addressing any gun-related factors that would inevitably lead to regulatory solutions, but it seems Walmart has taken the bait by removing displays of games that “glorify violence.” Displays of actual guns are still okay, though, no problem there.

Frankly, it’d be too easy to pile-on how frustratingly wrong this idea is, so I’m not going to do that. Here’s a couple sources if you’re wondering [3] [4], but long story short, video games don’t kill people, people kill people (did I use that phrase right?). What I’d rather talk about is that this isn’t some new idea that Trump et al pulled out of nowhere. It’s actually a pretty old idea that people in games and other fields have already been exploring for decades (which just betrays the bad-faith application we’re seeing of it now to distract from our real issues with gun violence).

Seriously, it has a name: Cultivation Theory. The basic question of Cultivation Theory is reductively “How does media affect us?” This roughly started in the 60s with the ubiquity of television, and is now more broadly applied to any media consumption [5], but if we’re being picky we can take it all the way back in some form to Plato and aesthetic philosophy:

“And the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure, which are held to be inseparable from every action—in all of them poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to increase in happiness and virtue.”

— The Republic, Book X

Similar ideas resurface in music in the 17th century with the Doctrine of Affections, the basic idea being that abstract musical qualities have the capacity to arouse involuntary emotional affects in its listeners. Interestingly, this is watered down from earlier ideas that art can change our behavior, because now only the listener’s emotions are subject to manipulation.

Here lies the fork in the road for how to approach Cultivation Theory. If we take as a given that media affects us in some way (otherwise, why bother?), is it because consuming media affects our behavior, or our perceptions? Does playing a violent video game make us want to commit violent acts, or does it communicate ideas about the prevalence, frequency, and acceptability of violence that occurs in our world?

Spoiler alert: it’s the second one. And if that were how our politicians framed the issue, Trump et al could actually be right on this one! Violence in video games matters. Not because it makes us do violent things, but because it gives us ideas about how violence can or should work in our society, just as it would in any other medium.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to know exactly what those ideas are, and they don’t even have to be the same for all members of an audience. Games are capable of a lot, and people are capable of responding to them many different ways. This is why we need people whose job it is to interrogate these stories, asking questions about the media we consume to help make us all more aware of the primarily unspoken ideas the work in question draws upon. Diversity here is a strength and a necessity. I routinely learn more about how I see the world, and how media represents the world, from critics whose lives and experiences are the most different from mine.

A particularly illustrative example of this is when Ghost Recon: Wildlands’ depiction of a narco-state Bolivia as the site of an interventionist military fantasy prompted the Bolivian government to complain to the French embassy. The game’s publisher, Ubisoft, adamantly maintains that their games aren’t political, while other games they’ve published include a fight against a militaristic religious cult in rural Montana (Far Cry 5) and a series where you fight to survive a post-apocalypse brought on by eco-terrorists (The Division). The opening cutscene to the latter game’s sequel includes a line that may as well be an ad spot on NRATV: “With no police to protect you, did you own a gun?” [6]. Just last week, two years after Wildlands was released, one of its writers, former military, wrote an article complaining that it was unfairly criticized, unfortunately being released after Trump’s election, which “didn’t set a tone that welcomed a story of American interventionism” [7].

I think of Ghost Recon: Wildlands when I hear that a man drove 10 hours just to find Mexicans to kill so that he could stop their invasion. I know Bolivia isn’t Mexico, that’s not the point. I also know that trying to attribute these tragic events to a singular cause in such a direct manner is the same fallacy that gets one to blame video games for violence in the first place. But that’s not what I’m saying.

How do our stories shape our view of the world? How do they utilize the same ideas that our politicians use to gain political capital? How do they normalize violent acts (such as American interventionism) as necessary to stop the spread of evil? Who decides what is evil in the first place?

These questions are fundamentally philosophical. The stories of our culture are one facet among many that contribute to our experience of the world; there are no direct and easy answers here. People have argued and disagreed about these kinds of questions for as long as there has been art in the world. If you claim to want to understand violence in media, this is the conversation you’re stepping into.

Video games don’t cause mass violence. However, video games can contribute to the normalization of violence in our world. To put real guns in a video game, the publisher has to work out a licensing agreement with all of the gun manufacturers represented. Buying games with the likeness of a real gun gives money to the manufacturer just as if you bought their gun yourself [8]. Another way video games contribute to violence is through the use of conflict minerals to build the electronics necessary for games. As of last year, Nintendo and Sony still lag behind Microsoft in the conflict mineral filings from major tech companies [9]. If we expand our definition of violence beyond just physical violence, other possibilities include Fortnite’s repeated theft of dances from largely black content creators [10] or the plethora of reports on workplace abuse in game development (#gameworkersunite) [11, 12, 13].

This brings us to the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare [14], the 4th game in the Modern Warfare series, not to be confused with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which was the first game in the series (sorry, games are weird). Notice how this line near the end of the trailer implicitly justifies the actions of the American military that the player presumably participates in: “We get dirty, and the world stays clean.” Recently asked by Game Informer if Modern Warfare was political, two of the developers tried to explain why the answer is “no.” You should really watch the video yourself, it’s only five minutes long. I’ll wait.

“Do we touch topics that bear a resemblance to the geo-politics of the world we live in today? Yes, because that is the subject matter of Modern Warfare. Are we telling a story that has anything to do with the specific governments of any countries that we are portraying? No.” Colonialism, occupation, proxy wars in the Middle East, none of this counts as ‘political’ because it’s not specifically about a real-life administration or conflict: “I feel like if you wanted a situation where I would say yes, it is a political story, I would have to be telling a story about specifically the exact administrations and governments and events in our world today” [15].

This hyperliteralism, the idea that things are only political if they relate specifically to what we think of as politics—narrowly defined as governments, elections, world leaders, etc.—would confine the political to the realm of moralistic nonfiction, exempting fiction from the consequences of its portrayals. Even more than that, it fundamentally misunderstands the definition of ‘political.’ Politics is the imagination and application of power in society. The government is political because it has the power to structure our society, largely whether we agree to that structuring or not. Political activism is the process of consolidating power for action to apply power to change, and this has to begin in the imagination. Preceding any concrete political institution is the imagination of how to structure that entity.

If politics include the imagination in any capacity, all of our media is political because it all contains the potential to reinforce or critique the assumptions present in the work and our society. Making art only works because we choose what to put in it, and the act of choosing presupposes that what you’ve chosen matters, on some level, when compared to everything else in the world. The idea that we can make art that is neutral, with no messages, no politics, no perspective, from some fully objective vantage point, is either willfully ignorant at best, or consciously malicious at worst.

This same kind of hyperliteralism that stifles the game industry’s understanding of itself is used to obscure our political reality. Stop me if this sounds familiar: No, this mass murder wasn’t a political act, it was a deranged, mentally ill individual. Never mind that the gunman wrote a white supremacist manifesto explaining his motivations in terms eerily reminiscent of Trumpian anti-immigration rhetoric, if he doesn’t specifically say that Trump inspired him to do it, how can you blame Trump for this?

Well, I don’t blame Trump for it. I blame Trump for further normalizing the dehumanization of immigrants and people of color, making fertile ground for white supremacist violence to grow. You don’t even have to take my word for it; video games have been doing this for years already. Gamergate—an online harassment campaign primarily targeting women game developers—was a premonition of the online tactics of the Alt-Right we’re seeing now, with similarities to the misogynistic violence of incel subculture [16, 17]. Steve Bannon considered online gaming communities viable targets for recruitment because of their “rootless white males” who have “monster power” [18]. Just this month news broke that the Entertainment Software Association had the personal contact information of over 2,000 games journalists and others in attendance at the E3 games expo easily accessible on their website [19]. It immediately leaked and has been propagated among these hostile online communities, resulting in the harassment of many of those on the list [20]. Since Gamergate, the archetype of the white male gamer angry over women and people of color trying to take away their games is impossible to consider without the parallel image of the angry white male conservative voter.

The irony here is that if you actually cared about representations of violence in video games, the people getting harassed and targeted by Gamergate and its offspring are the very people arguing for more nuanced criticism of games and their portrayal of real-world problems like violence, sexism or racism, who are then often the same people threatened with real-world violence through the normalizing effect of white supremacist political rhetoric. So, when Donald Trump says we should do something about violent video games, you’ll have to forgive me for not taking him seriously in the least. He’s already doing something about violent video games. He’s contributing to it.

Sources:

[1] NBC News, “After massacre, Walmart pulls violent video game displays. Firearms remain on sale.”

[2] NBC News, “Fact check: Trump suggests video games to blame for mass shootings.”

[3] Time, “No, Video Games Don’t Cause Mass Shootings. But The Conversation Shouldn’t End There.”

[4] New York Times, “Video Games Aren’t Why Shootings Happen. Politicians Still Blame Them.”

[5] Mass Communication Theory, “Cultivation Theory.”

[6] YouTube, “The Division 2 Opening Cinematics.”

[7] Gamesindustry.biz, “What to do when Bolivia hates you.”

[8] Eurogamer, “Shooters: How Video Games Fund Arms Manufacturers.”

[9] Gamesindustry.biz, “Nintendo barely improves conflict minerals sourcing over two years.”

[10] The Verge, “Fortnite Keeps Stealing Dances—And No One Knows If It’s Illegal.”

[11] Game Workers Unite