Virtual Heroes & Villains
NC Senate Debates Violent Video Game Ban

When I was a little kid of about four or five, I would join the neighborhood gang of similarly aged ruffians for marathon outdoor sessions of cowboys and Indians. Which side you were on depended on what accessories you were wearing on that particular day. Actually it didn’t really matter if you were a cowboy or an Indian because we took our cue from The Lone Ranger and Tonto and would form odd alliances of cowboys and Indians to fight other groups of cowboys and Indians…with the occasional soldier or policeman thrown in for plot development.

If you didn’t have a plastic gun or bow and arrow on you, you would simply point your index finger at your foe when you got the drop on them and declare, “Bang! You’re dead!”

If this happened to you, you were honor-bound to grab your chest and hit the dust in dramatic fashion, stare wistfully at the sky, and expire as only a five-year-old thespian can manage. Of course, there was always one ultra-competitive combatant who felt that dying was beneath him. He would claim that our point blank shots had missed him completely and he was free to run away. This was the type of kid who would grow up to run corporations like Enron.

I mention cowboys and Indians because state senators in Raleigh are currently debating the pros and cons of Senate Bill SB2. If passed it would give the state the right to regulate what video games can be sold and/or rented to kids under the age of 18.

On the surface, it looks like a classic case of legislators—many of whom won their seats running on a “less intrusive government” platform—trying to impose their personal morals on everyone else. Proponents of the bill argue that violent video games desensitize children to violence and lead to aggressive behavior. Opponents of the bill claim that the games’ contents are covered by the Free Speech component of the First Amendment and that they are no more destructive to behavior than comic books.

The devil, of course, is in the details and in that gray area between those two points of views.

Last Tuesday, Dr. Michael Rich, director of the Center on Media and Child Health at the Children’s Hospital of Boston spoke to the NC Senate Commerce Committee on the issue.

Rich cited a recent national study that found that 83% of American families with children ages 8 through 18 have at least one video game system in the home. The study found that in those households, boys play on the system an average of 72 minutes per day while girls play 25 minutes a day.

If that study is true, maybe worrying about the violent content of the games should be secondary to worrying about the amount of actual time wasted on them. 72 minutes per day adds up to 438 hours in a single year. Can you imagine what your average teenage boy could accomplish if he dedicated 438 hours a year to homework? To baseball? To learning to play the piano?

The last time I checked, colleges and employers weren’t all that interested in their applicants’ video game skills.

And the thing to remember is that 438 hours per year is the average. Some kids are probably spending over three hours per day every day playing them. Even if the content of the game is as benign as a virtual Boy Scout helping a virtual old lady across a virtual street, that’s way too much time to watch pixels on a screen without getting paid for it.

Before you dismiss video games as having no redeeming qualities, however, you need to hear from the other side. That’s just what our NC senators did on Tuesday when they heard from Andy Ellen, general counsel for the NC Retail Merchants Association. Ellen stated with a straight face that a new Harry Potter video game was encouraging children to read more and also cited a recent study by researchers at Duke University that suggests that increased use of video and computer games has kept children indoors and therefore has contributed to a decrease in youth crime.

If you follow Ellen’s logic to its illogical extreme you can see where locking all kids indoors and letting them play video games 24/7 might eliminate youth crime altogether.

But are the new violent video games any worse on our kids’ psyches than 1950s Tom & Jerry cartoons where animals regularly got hit upside the head with cast iron skillets? Who knows for sure? One would hope that the free market system and a common sense of decency would filter out the truly heinous types of graphic games without the government having to step in. In last Tuesday’s senate hearing, committee members learned about a new video game where players can scan in the yearbook photos of their classmates and teachers and then shoot and kill them as they beg for mercy. Makers of this game are callously cashing in on past tragedies such as the massacres at Columbine and Red Lake high schools, even if you can’t prove that they are contributing to the inevitability of future tragedies.

But will a state law prevent such games getting into the hands of kids? Probably not. It’s just a way of passing the responsibility buck from parents to merchants. Even if every video game merchant in the state followed the letter of the proposed law, kids could still purchase them during trips to neighboring states (while their parents buy lottery tickets) or through catalogues or online.

In many ways, the issue of video game violence mirrors the brouhaha about heavy metal music in the late 1980s. A few black T-shirt kids committed some violent atrocities and a few committed suicide and all the hand-wringers of society were ready to blame Ozzy Osbourne and Metallica. The whole thing went to the halls of government and all we ended up with were some parental guidance stickers on heavy metal and rap albums.

Expect the same thing out of this current exercise in futility by our leaders in Raleigh. They will do a lot of talking, a lot of hand-wringing and a lot of finger pointing. At the end of the day, of course, they won’t do anything that will earn them the wrath of Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Circuit City or any of the other merchants of video games.

And ultimately that may be for the best because it is neither a government issue nor a free speech issue. It’s about making those kids drop the video game controllers and go and play outside for a while. Who knows? Maybe there’s a gang of cowboys and Indians who could use some new players.