Borrowed from Kotaku
I was reading Kotaku and ran across this very well-worded OpEd regarding the VT shootings, video games, and our society's reactions to both.
Op Ed: SmartBomb Author on Va Tech Shooting
By Heather Chaplin
About 24 hours after Virginia Tech student Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 people and then himself, I received an email from an editor at a New York newspaper asking me to write a piece about violent videogames.
Was there any link between Cho Seung-Hui and videogames? I asked.
There wasn't, as we know now, and even the editor admitted the next day that it was a request that had come from his editor who'd been scrolling through TV that night.
My editor's editor must have stumbled on Fox News where Jack Thompson hypothesized confidently that authorities would soon find videogames on Cho's computer (they haven't as of this writing), or read the online Washington Post story saying that former high school mates said he was a Counter Strike player (a claim later cut from the story when it ran in print form), or Dr. Phil on Larry King Live lamenting the presence of violent videogames in young people's lives.
I've been writing about videogames for six years now and have answered countless questions about videogames and violence on radio, TV, and podcast. So maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. But there was something about the knee-jerk immediacy of the assumption that videogames must have been involved that took me aback. I wasn't being asked for my opinion, but rather to serve up one more version of an apparently accepted truth: violent videogames lead to violent behavior. Sometimes I wonder if these people don't realize that most Americans under a certain age play video games - that it's really not that extraordinary when it turns out that the sick among us do too.
The deep, deep irony in this case is, of course, that Cho's passion was not Doom - but play writing. I certainly haven't seen any op-eds about the dangers of creative writing.
(Though it may be worth mentioning that the debut of fiction as a popular form of entertainment was met with as much distaste and suspicion in its day as the videogame. Were this several hundred years ago, we may very well have been deluged by anti-creative-writing rants.)
It's natural for people to want to make sense of the disorder of the universe. When tragedy strikes at home or in one's community, one feels a keen need to understand. Why me? Why us? If only we could answer that eternal why, we could put to rest the pain of knowing the universe can deliver up something so horrific. How much easier is to say, it was the videogames! then to come to terms with the kaleidoscope of factors that leads to events such as high school shootings.
Just as I refuse to play blame-the-videogame, however, so too do I refuse to pretend that our mass entertainment isn't part of the equation. Frankly, if you're so defensive about videogames that you refuse to acknowledge that they effect us, then I'm going to have to say you're being as knee jerk as Monsieur Thompson.
I found the snap shot Cho took of himself with two guns raised in the air that he sent to NBC News the most disturbing reminder of this reality. It's an eerily generic reference to any number of pop culture images - from underground rap videos, to game stills, to action movie posters. (John Woo flashed into my mind. Who came into yours?) It was as if Cho were mimicking some vague idea of empowered cool soaked up through years of culture osmosis. His pathetic mimicry gave us a glimpse into who he felt he had become midway through his killing spree. It doesn't give us license to lay the blame for Cho's actions at the feet of pop culture, but it does remind us that yes, duh, our culture influences us.
And let's be honest. As a culture, we fetishize violence - and I don't just mean the faux-violence of games like Postal, Gears of War, or Counter strike, or of TV shows like the seemingly endless spin offs on Law & Order and CSI. The fact is, whether we want to admit it or not, we're seeped in violence both virtual and real. We don't just play violent; we are, deep down at our core, violent.
Look at our history. We've been waging war every day since manifest destiny first became popular more than a hundred years ago - some above ground like the current war in Iraq, others clandestine like our campaigns in the Philippines, Afghanistan, and Central America. You don't become the world's super power by sitting on your heels picking daisies Just a few years ago, we gave the go ahead to our government for a policy of pre-emptive strike. What is that if not an emphatic endorsement of violence as the prime solution to a given problem? Members of the Roman Empire would have been proud.
And as the Virginia Tech shootings reminds us once again, anyone who wants a gun can get one as long as they can pay for it.
Most of us learn how to abstract away the faux-violence of pop culture and to stay numb to the real violence in the world around us. But when one of us does become sick - really sick the way Cho was - perhaps it shouldn't be so surprising that the sickness manifests itself as a bloody reflection of all the culture showed him.
To blame violent videogames for this, let alone videogames as a medium, is short sighted, hypocritical, absurd, and, frankly, a little desperate. It's an argument made by people who fear a medium they don't understand and want a bogeyman more than they want real answers.
Heather Chaplin is the co-author with Aaron Ruby of
Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment & Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution. She writes regularly about games and game culture for publications like the New York Times, the L.A. Times and NPR's All Things Considered
Op Ed: SmartBomb Author on Va Tech Shooting
By Heather Chaplin
About 24 hours after Virginia Tech student Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 people and then himself, I received an email from an editor at a New York newspaper asking me to write a piece about violent videogames.
Was there any link between Cho Seung-Hui and videogames? I asked.
There wasn't, as we know now, and even the editor admitted the next day that it was a request that had come from his editor who'd been scrolling through TV that night.
My editor's editor must have stumbled on Fox News where Jack Thompson hypothesized confidently that authorities would soon find videogames on Cho's computer (they haven't as of this writing), or read the online Washington Post story saying that former high school mates said he was a Counter Strike player (a claim later cut from the story when it ran in print form), or Dr. Phil on Larry King Live lamenting the presence of violent videogames in young people's lives.
I've been writing about videogames for six years now and have answered countless questions about videogames and violence on radio, TV, and podcast. So maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. But there was something about the knee-jerk immediacy of the assumption that videogames must have been involved that took me aback. I wasn't being asked for my opinion, but rather to serve up one more version of an apparently accepted truth: violent videogames lead to violent behavior. Sometimes I wonder if these people don't realize that most Americans under a certain age play video games - that it's really not that extraordinary when it turns out that the sick among us do too.
The deep, deep irony in this case is, of course, that Cho's passion was not Doom - but play writing. I certainly haven't seen any op-eds about the dangers of creative writing.
(Though it may be worth mentioning that the debut of fiction as a popular form of entertainment was met with as much distaste and suspicion in its day as the videogame. Were this several hundred years ago, we may very well have been deluged by anti-creative-writing rants.)
It's natural for people to want to make sense of the disorder of the universe. When tragedy strikes at home or in one's community, one feels a keen need to understand. Why me? Why us? If only we could answer that eternal why, we could put to rest the pain of knowing the universe can deliver up something so horrific. How much easier is to say, it was the videogames! then to come to terms with the kaleidoscope of factors that leads to events such as high school shootings.
Just as I refuse to play blame-the-videogame, however, so too do I refuse to pretend that our mass entertainment isn't part of the equation. Frankly, if you're so defensive about videogames that you refuse to acknowledge that they effect us, then I'm going to have to say you're being as knee jerk as Monsieur Thompson.
I found the snap shot Cho took of himself with two guns raised in the air that he sent to NBC News the most disturbing reminder of this reality. It's an eerily generic reference to any number of pop culture images - from underground rap videos, to game stills, to action movie posters. (John Woo flashed into my mind. Who came into yours?) It was as if Cho were mimicking some vague idea of empowered cool soaked up through years of culture osmosis. His pathetic mimicry gave us a glimpse into who he felt he had become midway through his killing spree. It doesn't give us license to lay the blame for Cho's actions at the feet of pop culture, but it does remind us that yes, duh, our culture influences us.
And let's be honest. As a culture, we fetishize violence - and I don't just mean the faux-violence of games like Postal, Gears of War, or Counter strike, or of TV shows like the seemingly endless spin offs on Law & Order and CSI. The fact is, whether we want to admit it or not, we're seeped in violence both virtual and real. We don't just play violent; we are, deep down at our core, violent.
Look at our history. We've been waging war every day since manifest destiny first became popular more than a hundred years ago - some above ground like the current war in Iraq, others clandestine like our campaigns in the Philippines, Afghanistan, and Central America. You don't become the world's super power by sitting on your heels picking daisies Just a few years ago, we gave the go ahead to our government for a policy of pre-emptive strike. What is that if not an emphatic endorsement of violence as the prime solution to a given problem? Members of the Roman Empire would have been proud.
And as the Virginia Tech shootings reminds us once again, anyone who wants a gun can get one as long as they can pay for it.
Most of us learn how to abstract away the faux-violence of pop culture and to stay numb to the real violence in the world around us. But when one of us does become sick - really sick the way Cho was - perhaps it shouldn't be so surprising that the sickness manifests itself as a bloody reflection of all the culture showed him.
To blame violent videogames for this, let alone videogames as a medium, is short sighted, hypocritical, absurd, and, frankly, a little desperate. It's an argument made by people who fear a medium they don't understand and want a bogeyman more than they want real answers.
Heather Chaplin is the co-author with Aaron Ruby of
Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment & Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution. She writes regularly about games and game culture for publications like the New York Times, the L.A. Times and NPR's All Things Considered
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