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The Video Game Industry Made Me Do It! Print E-mail
Written by Scott Meadow   
Saturday, 05 March 2005 (read 1562 times)
"60 Minutes" tonight did a piece on a story I'd been following regarding the murder of three police officers in Fayette, Alabama by Devon Moore in June 2003. As a result of the murders, "[a]ttorneys for two Fayette families have filed a 57-page, $600 million lawsuit against Wal-Mart, Sony, Game Stop video game stores and Take 2 Interactive," reports MSNBC in their coverage of the story. Why, you may ask? Because Moore played a game in the "Grand Theft Auto" franchise, a popular and especially violent video series of video games, and the victim's families have decided that it was the "video game industry" that made him kill their loved ones.
There's more "evidence" here too:
At a recent hearing leading up to his murder trial, the teenager was quoted as saying "Life is like a video game. You have to die sometime."

With that statement in mind, lawyers from central Alabama, other states and those representing two families of the slain Fayette officers have filed a lawsuit against the game makers and sellers. Attorneys said they had the full support of the entire Fayette Police community, the mayor and the chief of police. (from the MSNBC story).
Hmm. Well, I guess so, especially with $600,000,000 on the table.

Of course, this is a very old argument, going back to comic books in the 1950's, resurrected with Doom, Marilyn Manson, and the Columbine shootings: entertainment kills. Your delivery vehicles of mass culture carry a potent, mind-altering message capable of pushing already twisted minds over the edge of sanity. Of course, they offer this hypothesis with circumstantial or no evidence at all.

GTA: Vice City
When Eminem is forced to sing Christian Rock ballads, we'll turn this into Vinny's Bunny Hunt.
Yep, that's right: no solid, repeatable, independently verifiable evidence. Nothing whatsoever that indicates, per capita, there are any more murderous psychopaths after playing GTA than already existed in the general population beforehand. That's, of course, the real question, and one that creative attorneys seeking large settlements from entire industries (rather than the indigent families of the people who actually commit the crime) never ask and no one bothers to study. Of course, I don't know for certain, but my hypothesis is that it's a wash: if you isolate it sufficiently to where playing a single video game is the only variable, you will discover that there is no per capita difference in anti-social behavior between the two populations (GTA players and the general population at large).

Bubkis. Nada. Zero. Nothing. It's not talked about nor mentioned. Rationalism rarely makes good political book and sure doesn't pay as well as suing a nearly $2 billion video game franchise. (Yes, GTA profits are approaching $2,000,000,000. That's 9 zeros, son!)

Listen, I feel very, very sad for the victims of this senseless tragedy, I do. And I'm not defending the "message" of GTA as being equivalent to watching a "700 Club" marathon. It's a violent game with fairly psychopathic values. My knowledge is not theoretical either: I've played it for many hours. It's not something with a "positive moral message," but who cares? Not me, and not millions of other players who haven't so much as squashed a bug thanks to GTA, that's for certain.

I don't play video games because of their "message." The overwhelming majority of non-psychopathic humans can distinguish a game from reality, and the few that can't didn't need GTA to suggest the "benefit" of murder to flip out. If video games really altered your behavior -- really made you do something that you weren't already predisposed to do -- how do you explain the millions of Madden players? What about the Dance Dance Revolution crowd? World of Warcraft nuts? Lonely Playboy Game playas? Hmmmm? All successful franchises, none of them accused of producing a disproportionate amount of football managers, professional dancers, wizards, or pornographers, but, of course the year is still young.

Now I like ad hominem attacks as much as the next ape descendant (*ook oook*!!), but in the total absence of proof this is clearly a misguided effort and waste of both time and money. The victims should grieve, and grieve rightly: a terrible crime was committed and the person responsible should be tried and punished in accordance with the law and sentencing guidelines. Had this been my loved one, I'm sure I'd feel a righteous need for justice, but justice directed at those responsible, not those with the largest pocketbooks.

If we really do care about justice, we do need to separate the need for justice from generic revenge, and both from the  ambitions of creative attorneys who smell blood in the waters of ignorance.
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