Jason Yu

Video Game Violence and School Shootings

Jason Yu
CS240 Final Paper
Prof. Hyde
8 May 2001

On December 1, 1997 14 year old Michael Carneal walked into Heath High School in Paducah, Kentucky, and opened fire up a prayer group with a .22 pistol, killing three girls and wounding five others. The incident launched a series of copycat crimes in schools throughout the country. One incident took place less than two years later, in April 1999, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold carried bombs, shotguns, and assault rifles into their school in Littleton, Colorado, and caused the bloodiest school shooting in American history. Carneal, Klebold, and Harris all had much in common: feelings of anger and frustration pent up aggression, and an obsession with a computer game called Doom.

Doom, created by Texas-based id Software, was released in 1993 as a shareware title, the successor to id’s wildly successful Wolfenstein 3D. For its time, Wolfenstein 3D was unprecedented in the gaming industry: a high-speed First Person Shooter (FPS) – that is, a game where the player’s perspective is from that of the character in the game itself – where the player was charged with the mission of escaping from a World War II-era Nazi dungeon and slaughtering low-resolution-rendered armies of Nazi foot soldiers, SS, mutant zombie war experiments, and ultimately Adolph Hitler himself. Doom brought the technology of Wolfenstein to the next level, simulating the third dimension of height absent from the essentially two-dimensional Wolfenstein world, and also bringing enhanced visual resolution to the gore inflicted upon the player’s victims, this time demons and zombies, through the use of an arsenal of weapons including sawed-off shotguns and chainsaws.

Retired Lt. Col. Dave Grossman is a former psychology professor at West Point and author of Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill and On Killing: the Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Founder of "Killology," a new field of scientific endeavor, Grossman is one of the world’s foremost experts in the field of human aggression, the roots of violence and violent crime. He has been called as an expert witness for various court cases, the most widely known being the Timothy McVeigh/Oklahoma City bombing trial. He appeared on CNN and 60 Minutes after the shooting incidents in Littleton and Paducah, stating that “every time a child plays an interactive video game, he is learning the exact same conditioned reflex skills as a soldier or police officer in training." In the Phi Kappa Phi “National Forum”, Grossman explained that there are three methods which the military uses to train its soldiers to kill. This includes Brutalization, Classical Conditioning, and Operant Conditioning.

Brutalization is the process of “values inculcation”: the induction of the subject into a “brutal new world” where he is stripped of his own values and individuality – as in boot camp, where recruits have their heads shaven, are herded together naked, and dressed alike – and forced to embrace “violence and discipline… as a normal and essential survival skill.” This similarly happens through violence in the media, Grossman asserts, beginning at the age of 18 months, when children “begin to understand and mimic what is on television… [yet] unable to discern the difference between fantasy and reality. When a young child sees somebody on TV being shot, stabbed, raped, brutalized, degraded , or murdered, to them it is real, and some of the embrace violence and accept it as a normal and essential survival skill.”

Classical conditioning is a classical psychological process in which a subject is rewarded every time he performs a certain action, until he comes to expect the reward every time the action is performed. In World War II, the Japanese conditioned some of their soldiers as such; they were made to bayonet innocent prisoners as their colleagues cheered them on, and afterward they would be rewarded with a good meal, sake, and a comfort girl. This is not unlike the reward of winning a computer game after the player has successfully gunned down all other opponents on the level.

Operant conditioning is the third method the military uses, a “powerful procedure of stimulus-response training.” Essentially, it is the active training of soldiers to shoot at people. Formerly, in World War II, soldiers were given bull’s-eye targets to shoot at – this proved ineffectual since infantry do not wear targets on their uniforms. The current method is to have soldiers practice shooting at “realistic, man-shaped silhouettes that pop up in their field of view.” It is a process not unlike a carnival game: a man-shaped target appears, and the soldier only has a few seconds, if that, to shoot the target before it disappears behind a doorway or obstacle. “Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, repeated hundreds of times.” It is the same training which FPS games provide, only the extra step is taken to make the targets actually appear and behave like humans. The player must shoot his opponent before his opponent shoots him.

Grossman’s assertion is that these three methods are the same which FPS games such as Doom exercise. The brutalization comes from the excessive, uncensored gore which the games portray: images of people being killed and dismembered repeatedly inflicted upon the player to the point where he becomes inured to the violence and accepting of it as a part of his life. This criticism is levied by Grossman at a particular FPS game called “Soldier of Fortune”, which presents graphic depictions of realistic violence. The classical conditioning is caused by the nature of the game itself; the goal of FPS games is, generally, to kill all opponents on the level, or kill the opponents more often than they kill the player. The end result is the player winning the game – being rewarded – for his success in doing so. Operant conditioning comes in to play, again, by the nature of the game itself, where the goal of the player is to run around and shoot as many opponents as possible before getting shot himself.

Yet, aside from the similarity in the methods violence depicted, there is as yet no documented and statistically supported correlation between video game violence and the real-life military training violence that Grossman wants to assert exists. A study performed by the Norwegian State Film Board showed that game-playing children between the ages of 11 and 19 were, in fact, “more interested in how games are designed and played than in violent graphics.” Violent video games are played throughout the world, including Japan, the veritable video game capital of the world, yet Japan has fewer than 100 gun deaths every year. Even those who agree with the assessment of excessive violence in computer games will concede that any kind of evidence of violent games causing violent behavior is, as found by a study of the Australian government, “at best weak and ambiguous.” Jeanne Funk, a psychologist at University of Toledo, confessed regarding her study of video game violence that “we’re still at the if point.”

Dan Snyder, former Marine sergeant who designed training simulators for the military has even suggested that the games are poor instructors of habit and so devoid of relevant context that they are nothing like military training. “If your real targets are sprites on a screen and you’re handling a plastic pistol that shoots beams of light,” Snyder says, “these games will make you ready.” There is a world of difference between playing a computer game and firing a gun. A Quake player is successful because he knows how to move a mouse to make the game character move and aim exactly where he wants, not because he knows how to load a 12-gague shotgun; clicking a mouse button is not the same as firing an assault rifle. A child is not any more likely to learn any soldiering skills by playing an FPS than he is to learn how to fly a plane through a flight simulator. Simulations are ultimately just that – simulations, not actual experience.

In response to the question of whether or not video games promote violence, one game developer responded half-jokingly, “I'm a little more annoyed that my games don't inspire kids how to breed psychics, harvest gold and ore, build bases, dungeon delve properly, or cast 'Fireball.' I mean, you'd think that would make school a little more fun for the li'l ones.” This developer was responsible for a game in the “Command & Conquer” series, modern/futuristic war-based “Real-Time Simulation” (RTS). The game is played not in the first person as in Doom, but rather from an overhead perspective not unlike a board game, or more accurately, a game of plastic green toy soldiers. Players compete against computerized or human opponents in a competition to control resources, build military bases and structures, construct military vehicles, and armies of tanks, jets, and soldiers. The goal is, ostensibly, to wipe out the opposing army; this is done by the mind-numbing action of clicking the mouse pointer on a unit you want to control, and then clicking on the enemy you want the unit to attack. But in spite of this, success at the game requires more than an ability to quickly click the mouse button. Players must also must mine for resources and manage them in order to efficiently balance production of more troops and structures. A Command & Conquer player will not win a game by simply throwing his army at the opponent; rather, he must be aware of whether or not he has enough money to train infantry and build tanks in the first place, and be able to design the most effective base to protect his structures. These are basic concepts of economics and resource management. Yet why do we never hear about economists referring to the game as training material?

Sim City, and its sequels Sim City 2000 and Sim City 3000, places the player in the role of mayor of a city. The player is given a sum of money and must construct his city, literally from the ground up, including designating commercial, residential, and industrial areas, designing a water system, and managing traffic. In addition, he must also balance the needs of the city with his own popularity – an increase in taxes will generate more revenue to allow the restoration of damaged roads, but as in real life, the citizens of the simulated city react adversely to tax increase: A tax rate too high will cause the population to decline, residents leaving for other cities. Even worse, the citizens may riot, in which event the mayor must deploy police and fire department units… if the city has the budget for police and fire departments. There are winning strategies for success in the game, one based largely on 80’s-era Reganomic theory, but in spite of this and real-world situations which the game presents, no known politician has ever openly confessed to using Sim City as a blueprint for his or her political policy.

Correlating Command & Conquer and Sim City with real-world counterparts is silly, but then, how is associating Doom with military training not? Why don’t we see children inspired to “breed psychics, harvest gold and ore, build bases, dungeon delve properly, or cast 'Fireball’”? The fact of the matter is that children do not translate what they do in a video game to real life; there is simply no evidence supporting otherwise. There have been numerous school shootings since the Paducah incident; why is it that Paducah and Littleton are the only ones with which violent video games are associated, especially with said games being more popular now than ever before? Because children can and do know the difference between a game and reality, and the distinction is not as difficult as Grossman would like to assert.

Parents of students killed in Paducah filed a thirty-three million dollar lawsuit against a group of entertainment companies, including game makers Atari Corp., Nintendo of America, Sega of America Inc., and Sony Computer Entertainment. The case was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Edward Johnstone, who explained that “tragedies such as this simply defy rational explanation.” Families of those slain at Columbine have recently filed a similar five billion dollar class-action lawsuit against video game producers, including id Software, creator of Doom, and Activision, publisher of Soldier of Fortune. The results of the suit have yet to be determined. With games like Soldier of Fortune being assigned “mature” ratings and in some cases even banned from sale, it is difficult to deny that violent computer games do exist, and are, if one chooses to see it as such, a problem. But when schoolchildren are driven to inflict violence upon their classmates, the problem is very likely much larger than an obsession with video games.

Bibliography

Grossman, Dave. “Violence in Society.” Bucknell University. Lewisburg. 17 April 2001.

Killology Research Group: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill. Dave Grossman, 2000, Killology Research Group. 19 April 2001 <http://www.killology.com/>.

“Kmart, Wal-Mart say they won’t sell violent video games to buyers younger than 17.” CNN.com 8 September 2000. 19 April 2001. <http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/09/08/violent.games/index.html>.

Mariano, Gwendolyn. “Columbine families sue gaming companies.” Cnet News.com 24 April 2001. 5 May 2001 <http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-5712037.html>.

“Parents of students killed in Kentucky lose lawsuit.” CNN.com 7 April 2000. 19 April 2001. <http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/04/07/prayer.circle/index.html>.

Roleff, Tamara L., editor. Crime and Criminals. San Diego: Greenhaven Press: 2000.

Singer, Dorothy G, and Jerome L. Singer, editors. Handbook of Children and the Media. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2001.

Wilson, Dave. “The Blame Game Gets More Play.” LATimes.com 29 March 2001. 19 April 2001. <http://www.latimes.com/business/columns/bizcol/2001329/t000026894.html>.