Love affairs, spinerips and explosions

My apologies for the late post, I’ve got my job at Waterstone’s back and coupled with my writing course I’m basically working a six day week. Having said that, I should still find the energy to lumber you with my self-indulgent attempts at wit and comment- I’m just being a bit pathetic. Although if you’ve been paying attention to the blog thus far this shouldn’t come as a major surprise.

I’ve started playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2 in strictly rationed bursts. Rationed, partly because it belongs to my long-suffering and ever-tolerant housemate and I’m already a massive drain on his time and possessions (and, although he doesn’t know it, all the good food out of his part of the fridge) but MOSTLY because my love affair with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 1 got a little… intense. ‘Hanging around in the car park of her job’ or ‘four hundred page letters written in blood’ intense. I got over it (with the help of a 12-step programme) but it didn’t do wonders for my undergraduate degree or my interpersonal relationships.

It wasn’t exactly a new problem either. When it comes to computer games, I am the addict’s addict. Before inexorable and intrusive things like deadlines, bills and council tax started to hammer spitefully at my door, I used to spend hours playing up to the stereotype of my generation. I wasn’t even that good at games, I just had more than my fair share of bloody mindedness and less than my fair share of proper mates. Sigh.

I also treated video games as a true competition; I dislike losing in any circumstances, and video games allowed my to pick my battles a bit. When, at age 9, the final boss on Spider-Man VS. The Kingpin proved too much of a challenge for my tiny thumbs, I put it aside. But I didn’t forget. Instead I waited six years for my motor skills to reach their peak, took the Mega Drive down from the shelf, blew the dust off it, and then rained down pixillated fury on the my digital adversary.

Having an interest in video games and relatively lax parents meant that, like many of my close friends, I was exposed to a high level of simulated violence at a young age. I stress simulated in order to establish the proper context. In Final Fight you would punch, kick and suplex your never-ending enemies (who all for some reason looked like members of Public Image Ltd.) until they kicked the virtual bucket, uttering a touching woeful scream and then disappearing. In an episode of Tom and Jerry that has stuck with me through the years, Tom restrains the local dog with a sturdy rope and, while the dog strains and barks in an effort to escape, smashes all his teeth out with a baseball bat.

I’m being unfair on Tom and Jerry, certainly. They and other classic cartoons of their ilk adhere strictly to the laws of cartoon physics, which establish an easily understood set of parameters relating to violence and its effects. Video games used to operate under a similar set of parameters- it quite clearly wasn’t ‘real’ as the same bad guys appeared each time. And also (and this should not be discounted) the whole thing looked like crap. Up until about five minutes ago most computer renderings of fisticuffs looked like the work of impressionist artists whose chosen medium was Lego.

As graphical accuracy improved, the level of violence seemed to increase. This doesn’t strike me as unlikely; violence can sometimes be a direct partner to excitement, as action films have long demonstrated. The urge to blow things up in video games had always been present, submerged under poor rendering. I’m sure game designers would have been ripping people’s heads of and attaching guns to chainsaws from the very start had the tools been available.

In the last five years or so it has been argued that video games depict reality with such accuracy as to be as direct an influence on people as reality itself. I’m not going to explore this. Really, I’m not. Video games come out of the telly, and you make them go by wiggling your fingers and thumbs. You can’t play them in a power cut, and in them you get to be a racecar driver or an interstellar soldier or a world champion martial artist, whereas in real life you just go to school and watch The Apprentice and your favourite cereal is Wheetos. If you get computer games confused with real life then you are deluded or otherwise mentally handicapped.

An argument I will give more credence to is that accurate depiction or not, people are influenced by what they see. This one is backed up with a lot more in the way of scientific investigation. We learn from what we see and, as social animals, we learn especially from the actions of other people, whether they be real or imagined. Panic journalism and selfish political agendas normally overtake the argument, which leads to it being wildly inflated. Just because in GTA you can have sex with a prostitute, and then run her over with your car to get the money back, doesn’t mean your twelve year old is going to start doing it (he probably can’t even drive).

However, some of the logic is apparent. For example, fairy tales teach children lessons about fear, love, justice and self-sacrifice, and it doesn’t matter that even a child could tell them apart from reality for their lessons to influence.

The idea that children might be influenced by violent video games enough to commit violent acts is therefore a compelling one. And yet… I spent my tweens learning the button combination to make Sub-Zero rip peoples’ spines out, and I have never (successfully) ripped out a real person’s spine. In Call of Duty I shoot on sight. Or maybe grenade on sight. Or stab on sight. But when I bumped into someone on campus today as they unexpectedly rounded a corner I did not frantically thrust my combat knife into their sternum; instead I said, “I’m awfully sorry, pardon me,” and let them brush past. (They just glared at me. I wish I had stabbed them).

The difference, obviously, is that I know that ripping people’s spines out is morally wrong (as well as frightfully rude). The fact that I have attempted it in fiction and enjoyed it is not enough to make me experiment with it in reality.

I have been sufficiently socialised to accept the ‘right’ way of acting in society. I have a moral code implanted in me that overrides all else. I do not want to cause suffering in real people because society has taught me that it is wrong to do so. I can cause in video games if I feel like it precisely because I know it is not real suffering (although that isn’t my normal intention- unless it’s the suffering of my friends as I grind them into paste).

The children most likely influenced by violent imagery are those that lack ‘adequate’ socialisation. If they do not have people to show them the right way to act, they may draw inference from what they see instead. And, if the morals and norms of society are not properly ingrained, just telling them otherwise isn’t going to help. If most of your parenting was done by an Xbox, other people telling you how to act will end up as just that- a set of commands you can choose to ignore.

The problem with this argument is that is identifies those who are vulnerable as those most likely to be negatively affected by violent imagery games and other media. And well, people who are labelled as vulnerable are just that. Obviously they need stronger guidance, closer watching. Removing a single set of influencing risk factors isn’t going to make very much difference. There are more than enough examples of violence and moral skulduggery in real life for them to copy.

So if (God forbid) children ever end up in my care I’ll be more worried about they time they spend on the computer than what they do while they’re there. Except in regards to the Internet, obviously. That invention is a bringer of malice and sin and anyone who uses it is a lily-livered wanksock. You there, you reading this- how do you sleep at night?