Steven Johnson
I have no problem with people — parents or politicians — looking seriously at the question of media violence and its effects on kids. I have no problem with rating games for violence, and enforcing those ratings. Of course, there have already been numerous studies on the impact of interactive violence, with many finding no correlation whatsoever between violent gameplay and behavior. And it's worth noting that during the last ten years — a period where the onscreen violence in games has grown increasingly vivid and extreme — we have lived through the most dramatic drop in violent crime in the history of U.S. crime statistics. The current generation of teenagers is the least violent in generations. So if the games have some direct causal impact on real-world violence, it is by definition far less significant than the other social forces that affect violence in our society. ...read more

Steven Johnson
I have no problem with people — parents or politicians — looking seriously at the question of media violence and its effects on kids. I have no problem with rating games for violence, and enforcing those ratings. Of course, there have already been numerous studies on the impact of interactive violence, with many finding no correlation whatsoever between violent gameplay and behavior. And it's worth noting that during the last ten years — a period where the onscreen violence in games has grown increasingly vivid and extreme — we have lived through the most dramatic drop in violent crime in the history of U.S. crime statistics. The current generation of teenagers is the least violent in generations. So if the games have some direct causal impact on real-world violence, it is by definition far less significant than the other social forces that affect violence in our society.

There does seem to be some evidence that extensive exposure to violent gameplay increases "aggressive thoughts" in kids, particularly those who are prone to aggression in the first place. That's a result that intuitively feels right to me, and so if you're the parent of a teenager who has aggression issues, I think it's entirely reasonable to steer him away from Grand Theft Auto. But we need some perspective here. I'm just as convinced that playing high school football increases aggression levels in teenagers, but you don't see Hillary Clinton or Joe Lieberman campaigning against that pastime, do you?

But my primary problem with the focus on violence in games is that it has so thoroughly dominated the coverage of this emerging medium, and distracted us from the really interesting development: how cognitively challenging the games have become over the past twenty years. Let me just quote briefly from the manual that comes with the game Civilization IV, released about a month ago, in a section describing new additions to the game:

...We added a slew of new worker options: Workshops, windmills, and watermills became new choices for increasing food production or commerce, depending on the local environment. Cottages created an interesting option for commerce — over time, they would grow into hamlets, then villages, and finally towns, with each level producing more and more commerce... Another area in which we drastically increased user choice was the civic system, which replaced the old monolithic governments. Instead of static choices, like despotism or republic, the player can now select from a variety of options in five general categories. Free Trade or Environmentalism; Universal Suffrage or Hereditary Rule; Theocracy or Freedom of Religion.

This is what comes to my mind when I hear the politicians and cultural authorities panic over game violence. Civilization IV was the No. 1 selling PC game in November. Now, what do you think is a more newsworthy and unexpected development — that the kids are playing games that involve car chases and shootouts, or that the kids are weighing Free Trade versus Environmentalism as a long-term strategy for growth? Pretend violence has been a part of childhood play forever. But pretend civics lesson is something new. So why isn't that the headline? click to close

Brenda Brathwaite
Sexual and violent content in video games is not a concern. As with any other form of art and media, it has its place. What is a concern, however, is how the games that are clearly rated for adults are getting into the hands of children. That's the issue. I'd like to see that same political might that pushes for sure-to-be-overturned legislation turned instead into political pressure against the retailers who are selling games to kids. Name names. Political and consumer pressure has done wonders to change corporate business practices (Nike, Wal-Mart, etc.). There's no reason it can't work here. ...read more

Brenda Brathwaite
Sexual and violent content in video games is not a concern. As with any other form of art and media, it has its place. What is a concern, however, is how the games that are clearly rated for adults are getting into the hands of children. That's the issue. I'd like to see that same political might that pushes for sure-to-be-overturned legislation turned instead into political pressure against the retailers who are selling games to kids. Name names. Political and consumer pressure has done wonders to change corporate business practices (Nike, Wal-Mart, etc.). There's no reason it can't work here. Also, parents need to accept responsibility for the entertainment their children play. Studies show that parents are present 92% of the time when games are purchased. So, legislate away, but if parents are still buying little Johnny the M-rated GTA, you're still left with the same problem.

As for why there's so much more violence than sex in games, from a game-design perspective, it's easier. click to close

Ian Bogost
Well, of course the concern over sexual and violent content is a legitimate social concern. But that has nothing to do with what Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman are doing. They couldn't care less about the medium or the public; they're using videogames as an easy way to gain favor as centrist, "family-values" oriented Democrats. It's a political red herring.

Now, when I say that sexual and violent content is a legitimate social concern, I don't mean that it's all bad. Rather, it should be in everyone's interest as human beings and members of a society to take interest in the representation of sex, violence, and any other human activity in the arts. We should be very interested in interrogating and understanding ourselves, and videogames have a unique opportunity to show us how the logics of sex and violence work in our society. Whether or not current videogames are taking up that challenge is a whole other question. ...read more

Ian Bogost
Well, of course the concern over sexual and violent content is a legitimate social concern. But that has nothing to do with what Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman are doing. They couldn't care less about the medium or the public; they're using videogames as an easy way to gain favor as centrist, "family-values" oriented Democrats. It's a political red herring.

Now, when I say that sexual and violent content is a legitimate social concern, I don't mean that it's all bad. Rather, it should be in everyone's interest as human beings and members of a society to take interest in the representation of sex, violence, and any other human activity in the arts. We should be very interested in interrogating and understanding ourselves, and videogames have a unique opportunity to show us how the logics of sex and violence work in our society. Whether or not current videogames are taking up that challenge is a whole other question.

For one part, we live in a neurotic and puritanical society that quashes any and all representations of sexuality. As many developers and publishers have noted, any sex whatsoever in a game will earn it an AO rating and make it impossible to sell in the most popular retail outlets. But that's too easy an excuse. For another part, that simulating sexuality is hard. I'm not talking just about the sex act — we saw that on the Atari 2600. I'm talking about all the complex emotional responses bound up with sexuality. This is a hard artificial intelligence problem that no studio is interested in tackling (the best example of an attempt is Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern's Façade, an "interactive drama" that took the two almost six years to complete). Think about it: how much easier is it to perform collision detection between a bullet and a head than to simulate anticipation or lust? And the current consoles aren't even designed to support complex AI — they're designed to produce prettier pictures on screen. And for a third part, the public hasn't yet showed real dissatisfaction with games in their current forms. So long as we keep buying the same games, the publishers feel no inspiration to search for new ideas. click to close

Eric Zimmerman
First of all, it's important to distinguish between sex and violence on the one hand and representations of sex and violence on the other. Games aren't violent — they don't cause harm to people — although they do contain representations of violence. In this respect, they're not all that different than the centuries of art, entertainment, and culture that precede them. As with earlier forms of media, games make use of images, stories, and themes designed to cause emotional excitement in an audience. Some scientific studies have shown that games increase activity in certain emotional centers in the brain — but that is what they are designed to do. ...read more

Eric Zimmerman
First of all, it's important to distinguish between sex and violence on the one hand and representations of sex and violence on the other. Games aren't violent — they don't cause harm to people — although they do contain representations of violence. In this respect, they're not all that different than the centuries of art, entertainment, and culture that precede them. As with earlier forms of media, games make use of images, stories, and themes designed to cause emotional excitement in an audience. Some scientific studies have shown that games increase activity in certain emotional centers in the brain — but that is what they are designed to do. No study has yet shown that games cause real-life errors in ethical judgment on the part of players. In fact, whether you are looking at the relationship between the rise of videogames and the decline of school violence, or between the tendencies of videogame players to nonagressive behavior, there simply is no strong evidence that videogames CAUSE violent behavior. And this is despite millions of dollars earmarked to studies intended to find such a cause. So can we please just bury this tired old debate once and for all? The notion that videogames are negatively affecting children's' minds is part what happens when new media forms (rock & roll, D&D, comic books, the novel, etc) are embraced by new generations of audiences. Does anyone remember when role-playing games were thought to be the brain-destroying work of Satan?

Perhaps this question comes up so forcefully for games because there is something about them that is tied directly to pleasure. On some level, games are indulgent — they are about "fun," however you want to define that term. So it makes sense that guilt and fear would accumulate around this medium that is so centrally concerned with pleasure. I don't deny that games are stuck in a rut of adolescent boy power fantasies (to borrow a phrase from Scott McCloud). But no more so than other forms of popular culture. I hope desperately to see games expand to tackle completely new subject matter in completely new ways. The fears of politicians like Clinton and Lieberman are not only unfounded, but they work against games becoming something more than they are today.click to close

Henry Jenkins III
First, let's put the question in some historical perspective. As we look across the history of popular culture and new media in the twentieth century, we see the same pattern recurring: each new medium is embraced by young people who are seeking out experiences which they can call uniquely their own and are often drawn towards material which shocks and titilates; parents and adults express a growing dismay because this medium was not part of their own childhood experience and they do not know how to protect their young; some kind of incident occurs which can be loosely tied to the emerging medium and we enter an era of moral panic during which people seek to "do something even if it is wrong" and end up doing the wrong things; the medium withstands a storm of controversy and attempts at regulation which go counter this country's stated support for free expression. At the end of the cycle, the generation which grew up with this medium ends up looking back nostalgically at their misbegotted youths and take as given the place of that form of popular culture as the standard against which new media experiences will be judged and this cycle starts all over again. We see this playing out around everything from joke books ("We've got trouble right here in River City!"— The Music Man) to radio, television, comic books, rock music, the internet and now computer games.

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Henry Jenkins III
First, lets put the question in some historical perspective. As we look across the history of popular culture and new media in the twentieth century, we see the same pattern recurring: each new medium is embraced by young people who are seeking out experiences which they can call uniquely their own and are often drawn towards material which shocks and titilates; parents and adults express a growing dismay because this medium was not part of their own childhood experience and they do not know how to protect their young; some kind of incident occurs which can be loosely tied to the emerging medium and we enter an era of moral panic during which people seek to "do something even if it is wrong" and end up doing the wrong things; the medium withstands a storm of controversy and attempts at regulation which go counter this country's stated support for free expression. At the end of the cycle, the generation which grew up with this medium ends up looking back nostalgically at their misbegotted youths and take as given the place of that form of popular culture as the standard against which new media experiences will be judged and this cycle starts all over again. We see this playing out around everything from joke books ("We've got trouble right here in River City!"— The Music Man) to radio, television, comic books, rock music, the internet and now computer games.

Further complicating the case for games is the fact that the center of their marketplace has shifted from children to adults and that they have as a result started to experiment with mature content even as many people still assume that if it is a game then it must be okay for children. Many of us have seen the result at our local retailer as a mom or dad plops down fifty or sixty bucks to buy a copy of Grand Theft Auto for their nine year old. You would think that the title would give them a clue of its content. Can you imagine them buying First Degree Murder or Solicitation and Prostitution without batting an eye? Is there any other fifty-dollar purchase that the average American parent would make with so little reflection or research? Yet, it is precisely this impulse to insure that all content is appropriate to children which we must combat if we want to see games become a more diverse and mature medium of expression.

The stakes for what we jokingly call our political leaders in all of this are pretty clear. Going after video games has been the way that Democratic politicians with national ambitions try to win over popularity with the Red States. Violent video games is a safe target without strong special interests groups, lobbies, or PACs to antagonize. They can simultaneously signal that they are doing something to help American parents and show that they are concerned about the moral decline of western civilization. They can blur the boundaries of the culture wars without compromising on anything they care about. And they can do so safe in the knowledge that they are probably never really going to be asked to pass national legislation which is unlikely to withstand judicial scrutiny in any case.

What sickens me about the stance, though, is that it comes at the expense of doing anything about the actual causes of violence in the lives of young people. For example, when Hillary came out against video game violence, it was in response to a shooting on an Indian reservation involving a kid with a long history of adult neglect and abuse and exposure to all of the social preconditions of violent crime. What kind of liberal targets video games when the same incident could have been used to call attention to the problems confronting Rez kids? Answer: one that cares more about seeming "centrist" (some would say reactionary) than dealing with the real problems in this country.

None of this is to suggest that there isn't a legitimate conversation to be had about the content of video games. For me, the problem with most video game violence isn't that it will turn kids into psycho killers (which I don't believe for a minute) but that it remains formulaic and thus doesn't take full advantage of the potentials of games as a medium. Every storytelling medium created by humankind has dealt with themes of aggression, trauma and loss, because these are fundamental aspects of our experience and because we want art to help us make sense of what seems senseless about the world around us. Games have a particularly valuable contribution to make in representing these themes because of their ability to deal with choice and consequence. But they so often punt rather than trying to knock the ball out of the park and do something thoughtful or interesting with this content. The big problem with most violent video games is that they are boring because they don't have anything to say. Trying to ban all representations of violence gets us nowhere; what we need to be discussing is how to generate more meaningful violence.

Why are video games more apt to be violent than sexy? Well, we can start from the fact that the modern model of video games emerged from earlier amusement park attractions like shooting gallaries and pinball machines. The easiest model for them to duplicate is one where interactivity is marked by firing at things. Then we can add to this the challenges of repositioning games from a children's medium into one which has stronger appeals to adults. Culturally, we have been far more willing to let our children consume spectacles of violence than to expose them to the adult realities of sexuality. Heck, if you go back far enough, adults took kids to lynchings and hangings. There's not much record of adults taking kids to brothels. So, the games industry has generally gone with the path of least resistance, following familiar models, and only tampering with one hot button at a time. And, then, of course, there are the technical issues, which I hope we can get to in subsequent installments of this conversation. My own sense is that we really need to rethink the medium before we can produce really sexy games. click to close

Rob Levine
It's very much a legitimate parental concern, but I'm not sure whether that translates into a legitimate social concern. But it certainly makes for the kind of headlines that can help a centrist Democrat play to the swing voters that decide a presidential race. Just, you know, supposing one of those people was planning on running . . .

Violent video games are not appropriate for children. But they're labeled accordingly — just as movies and music are. And I think they're consumed by their intended audience with a degree of emotional remove that's difficult for people who are unfamiliar with the medium to understand. Pixelated violence is no more real to players than the cartoonish violence in a Quentin Tarantino movie or, well, an actual cartoon. Bugs Bunny is brutal, if you stop to think about it. (And anyone who suggests that first-person shooters offer an experience similar to using an actual firearm have never shot one. I have, and my hours of experience with a hand-held rocket launcher helped me not at all.) ...read more

Rob Levine
It's very much a legitimate parental concern, but I'm not sure whether that translates into a legitimate social concern. But it certainly makes for the kind of headlines that can help a centrist Democrat play to the swing voters that decide a presidential race. Just, you know, supposing one of those people was planning on running . . .

Violent video games are not appropriate for children. But they're labeled accordingly — just as movies and music are. And I think they're consumed by their intended audience with a degree of emotional remove that's difficult for people who are unfamiliar with the medium to understand. Pixelated violence is no more real to players than the cartoonish violence in a Quentin Tarantino movie or, well, an actual cartoon. Bugs Bunny is brutal, if you stop to think about it. (And anyone who suggests that first-person shooters offer an experience similar to using an actual firearm have never shot one. I have, and my hours of experience with a hand-held rocket launcher helped me not at all.)

Compared to music and film, violence in video games makes a great wedge issue for a few reasons: Few voters have enough respect for the medium to see it as one that deserves First Amendment protection, and video game companies don't contribute much money to political candidates. But, just as with music and film, criticism from politicians often has the opposite effect they intended. Gamespot.com, which tracks user interest in games, saw an increase in curiosity about the new Grand Theft Auto game right after Hillary Clinton began making the hidden sex scene an issue this summer. (The scene could only be unlocked with a mod, which means very few people even knew about it until it became a political issue.) But Clinton exploited this issue so successfully that other politicians will follow. Around the same time, Peter Vallone criticized the graffiti game Mark Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure — but he was probably more excited about it than most gamers.

Now — at last — to sex. The obvious answer would involve something about the sickness of a society that objects to several seconds of sex in a game in which police can be shot with flamethrowers. But I wonder if it has more to do with technology. Until recently, graphics weren't good enough to get anyone very excited. Now that they are, there's much more nudity on the Internet. Why would anyone spend $50 on a video game to see sexual content when it's available online for free? click to close

Katie Salen
As one of the most visible and popular forms of popular culture, video games are certainly an easy target. What parent wouldn't be concerned about the impact of a form of media with which their kids were engaged so many hours a day? We should all be concerned with how ideas of sex and violence and race and class (the list goes on) are represented and experienced by players/users/audiences of any media. I would absolutely agree that many videogames are sexist (very few deal with sex per se) and racist and based in hugely problematic stereotypes, but there also a large number of games that are not (I am thinking of games like Animal Crossing, Rez, Advance Wars, FIFA Soccer, etc.). When politicians get involved in the dialogue they tend to focus on the "problem children" as it were, games like Ridge Racer, Deer Hunter, or even early games like Mortal Kombat. They tend to look for games that support their argument (all games are violent and bad) instead of looking to see how these types of games represent one aspect of a much larger landscape. ...read more

Katie Salen
As one of the most visible and popular forms of popular culture, video games are certainly an easy target. What parent wouldn't be concerned about the impact of a form of media with which their kids were engaged so many hours a day? We should all be concerned with how ideas of sex and violence and race and class (the list goes on) are represented and experienced by players/users/audiences of any media. I would absolutely agree that many videogames are sexist (very few deal with sex per se) and racist and based in hugely problematic stereotypes, but there also a large number of games that are not (I am thinking of games like Animal Crossing, Rez, Advance Wars, FIFA Soccer, etc.). When politicians get involved in the dialogue they tend to focus on the "problem children" as it were, games like Ridge Racer, Deer Hunter, or even early games like Mortal Kombat. They tend to look for games that support their argument (all games are violent and bad) instead of looking to see how these types of games represent one aspect of a much larger landscape.

As for why there's so much more violence than sex, games model conflict very well, which is why many games tend to have violent conflict as a primary play mechanic. Sex is a much harder kind of system to model; games so far have not found many good ways to translate sex into a form of interaction that is fun from a game play point of view. Once somebody cracks that nut, though — watch out!  n° click to close