In the last fifty years, interactive video games have transformed from a minor blip in the larger computer revolution into an artistic medium that supports a $10.5 billion dollar industry in the United States alone. Gamers themselves make up a diverse community: in the U.S., a staggering 67% of households play video games, 40% of gamers are women, and the average gamer is 34 years old, according to The Entertainment Software Association’s 2010 statistics. Yet, some non-gamers still maintain that gaming is nothing more than a useless pastime of violent adolescent males, despite the fact that there are far more adult women gamers than teenage male gamers. (ESA) Thankfully, this false perception, once widespread, is declining.
This decline directly correlates with the mainstream media’s coverage of gamers and the gaming industry. In the past, the overwhelming majority of the mainstream media did an atrocious job covering the gaming community and industry, focusing almost exclusively on video game violence while blindly ignoring the medium’s many redeeming qualities. As a result, gamers tended to dismiss the mainstream media—as many still do—relying on specialty magazines and websites like PSU.com for their gaming news. As the gaming market continued to expand over the last few years, however, mainstream media coverage improved for one simple reason: the savvy media outlets began to hire actual gamers to write about gaming (what a novel idea!). Unfortunately, those outlets still represent a minority, though their numbers are growing every day. As a result, there is an increasing polarization in the mainstream media between those who understand and appreciate gaming culture and those who remain absurdly ignorant and biased.
FOX News "SE"XBOX" segment
The cable networks are some of the worst offenders when it comes to sensationalistic video games reporting. FOX News, unsurprisingly, is the worst of the worst. The network blatantly ignores the facts when it finds an opportunity to smear games as sex-filled, violence-inducing trash. On January 21, 2008, for example, FOX ran a segment on BioWare’s sci-fi role-playing game Mass Effect entitled “SE”XBOX? New Video Game Shows Full Digital Nudity And Sex.” In the introduction, FOX news anchor Martha MacCallum claims that the game allowed “players to engage in graphic sex and the person that’s playing the game gets to decide exactly what’s going to happen between the two people.” She then mentions that the game is rated M for Mature, but that “critics say the game is being marketed to kid and to teenagers.” Another FOX contributor, in the panel discussion that follows, dubs the game “Luke Skywalker meets Debbie Does Dallas.”
A sex scene from Mass Effect—hardly “Luke Skywalker meets Debbie Does Dallas"
Anyone who has actually played Mass Effect—MacCallum admits on air that she hasn’t—would immediately recognize that the segment was filled with factual inaccuracies and wild exaggerations. There is no explicit or frontal nudity in the game; during the sex scenes, which are non-interactive and last all two-or-so minutes of the 30 hour narrative, BioWare employs only side and profile shots of characters, on par with what is acceptable for a prime time television program. Meanwhile, MacCallum’s claim that unnamed “critics say the game is being marketed to kid and to teenagers” is flat-out wrong. The game’s marketing was reviewed and deemed suitable by the ESRB (Entertainment Software Ratings Board); Microsoft and Electronic Arts weren’t trying to target anyone younger than 17 years old with their Mass Effect ad campaigns. In a public letter sent to FOX News, EA’s Vice President of Communications, Jeff Brown, commented, “Judging by the inaccuracy of their comments, they have had zero experience with Mass Effect and are largely ignorant about videogames, the people who play them, and the ESRB system that governs their ratings and sales.”
But FOX didn’t learn its lesson. On November 11, 2009, the network ran a segment on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which supposedly allows players to play as a terrorist. FOX & Friends host Stephen Doocy opens, “A popular new videogame actually allows you to be a terrorist and kill people,” pointing at the camera for emphasis. Modern Warfare 2, which has an M for Mature (17+) rating, doesn’t “actually allow” players to play as a terrorist—rather, they control an undercover CIA agent attempting to infiltrate a terrorist organization. After guest John Christensen of SlashGamer.com informed him of that fact, it didn’t stop Doocy from declaring, “Sure, but nonetheless guys, you bring a game into a house—nothing to stop an eight year old kid from becoming a terrorist and shooting people.”
It’s quite clear that these gaming “critics” have never actually wrapped their hands around a game controller. “Many critics [of video games] have little or any experience with them and therefore don’t understand where there could be artistic or educational value,” says Joseph Olin, president of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. “No different than with film and TV, media sensationalism and ignorance can contribute to the fear that games are harmful…”
How Call of Duty might transform children—who shouldn’t be playing it in the first place—according to FOX (photo credit: Ali Ali/EPA/Wall Street Journal)
Such misleading coverage undoubtedly angers the gaming community, too. “The media … clump us all in to one big stereotype — basement-bound losers who are so mentally unstable that even losing one match in a game will send us over the edge and on a killing spree,” writes ‘Jaeger’, a user on PlayStation Universe’s forums. “…If that were the case, I’m pretty sure 95% of the world would be dead.”
“I recall one shootout in America being blamed on Call of Duty, after the killer had just lost a game,” Jaeger continues. “It was, in fact, down to him splitting from his partner but that didn’t stop the media blaming video games.”
Another forum member, ‘squirrelbo1’, is also fed up with the media’s blame game. “When ‘bad’ instances are linked to gaming," he comments, "the mainstream media is all too willing to run with the ‘games are bad and look what they have done’ headline, and often real investigations are not carried into the sensationalist headlines that sell papers."
Indeed, many newspapers love to pair video games with death, even when games have little to do with the matter at hand. Stories in the New York Daily News like “9-year-old Damori Miles dies in jump off Brooklyn apartment, may have been imitating video game” and “Anthony Maldonado, 9, stabbed to death over video game while visiting family in Harlem” unfairly link the games WWE Smackdown vs. Raw and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater with lunacy and murder. Smackdown didn’t make a nine year old jump off his apartment building roof with a crude, homemade parachute, nor did Tony Hawk cause a spineless, mentally disturbed 25 year old to murder a child, yet they were key components of both articles. “He was killed over a game,” one begins, while the other leads, “A 9-year-old wrestling fan jumped off his Brooklyn apartment roof wearing a homemade parachute in a fatal imitation of his favorite video game character, friends said.” The New York Times also covered the Maldonado murder, but Times reporter Al Baker did so without lumping the blame on video games. Baker’s article, “Boy, 9, Fatally Stabbed During Manhattan Visit,” mentions games only once, all the way in the seventh paragraph: “…a law enforcement official and Anthony’s family said that he had been playing video games with other young men in the apartment and that he was stabbed after he was left alone with one of them while the others went to get food.” The article doesn’t indicate that a game caused the stabbing—because it didn’t.
A murder over this—not likely
In addition to reflecting common media bias, The New York Times is one of the growing number of mainstream publications with insightful analysis of games and gaming culture. In a recent NYTimes article, “On a Hunt for What Makes Gamers Keep Gaming,” science columnist John Tierney tackles some questions beyond the judgmental ‘why are people wasting their time playing video games?’ “[O]nce puzzles and gaming went digital, once the industry’s revenues rivaled Hollywood’s, once children and adults became so absorbed that they forsook even television, then the activity was routinely denounced as ‘escapism’ and an ‘addiction’,” Tierney writes. “Now some other experts — ones who have actually played these games — are asking more interesting questions. Why are these virtual worlds so much more absorbing than school and work? How could these gamers’ labors be used to solve real-world puzzles? Why can’t life be more like a video game?” What those researchers have found is absolutely fascinating. Gamers seem to achieve a state of ‘flow’ not unlike that of “master musicians and champion athletes, but the gamers [get] there right away instead of having to train for years.”
A video spotlight on Quest to Learn, a new Manhattan-based school that teaches through video game design and play
It looks like there’s just a bit more to video games than sex and violence after all. Hopefully, the media outlets that continue to denounce games as a waste of time and a bad influence will recognize that soon.
[Editor’s Note: The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of Eric Blattberg.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baker, Al. “Boy, 9, Fatally Stabbed During Manhattan Visit.” The New York Times. Published January 2, 2010.
Bendel, Mike. “EA Responds To Fox News “SE”XBOX Segment.” Exophase.com. Published January 23, 2008.
Doocy, Stephen. “Video Game Too Violent? Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.” FOX & Friends, FOX News. Aired November 11, 2009.
Entertainment Software Association (ESA). “Industry Facts.” Updated in 2010.
Karoliszyn, Henrick; Jackson, Joe; Lysiak, Matthew; Lauinger, John. “Anthony Maldonado, 9, stabbed to death over video game while visiting family in Harlem.” New York Daily News. Published January 2, 2010.
Lysiak, Matthew; Gendar, Alison. “9-year-old Damori Miles dies in jump off Brooklyn apartment, may have been imitating video game.” New York Daily News. Published April 17, 2009.
MacCallum, Martha. ““SE”XBOX? New Video Game Shows Full Digital Nudity And Sex.” America’s Newsroom, FOX News. Aired January 21, 2008.
Steinberg, Scott. “Why does the media still think video games are bad for kids?” CNNTech. Published July 28, 2010.
Tierney, John. “On a Hunt for What Makes Gamers Keep Gaming.” The New York Times. Published December 6, 2010.