Violent video games and films have been connected with violence in youth a lot over the last few years, but does it ring true? Is GTA desensitising children to violence? Are horror movies influencing children and young adults to lash out?
Though it pains me to have to do this, I want to point out very explicitly before I begin that this is an opinion piece, not a piece of investigative journalism. The facts may be inaccurate, and the opinions may be offensive to you or just downright wrong in general – I’m aware it’s happened to me before and will happen again. If that be the case, please leave a comment below explaining how and why the opinions expressed in this piece are incorrect, and perhaps suggest something I should read or look at to try and alter it. Insults or threats are unlikely to get me to think about my opinion and change it. Nothing closes a person’s mind to change faster than a close-minded response. Or so I’ve found.
Anyway. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the general public view us. By “us” I mean the community of people who appreciate certain kinds of art. Animè, videogames, movies, music, obscure paintings by our best friends, or all of the above. Like it or not, we are a community. And it really is a case of like it or not, because we in the community like it, and those on the outside looking in do not. I’m talking here about the people who view us as lazy, do-nothing dreamers happy to fill our heads full of “weird” media and “weird” ideas, and who believe, to different extents, it has to be said, that these ideas make us evil and dangerous.
We look at a movie like Dawn Of The Dead, we see a taut, enjoyable piece of suspense that’s fun and scary, but no less thoughtful or emotional for that. These other people, who I don’t have a name for because they’re as different from each other as they are from us, and as we are from each other, see that same film and how we enjoy it, and are sure that we’re twisted in some way; to some we might be freaks, or a bit odd; to others, we’re the next Columbine shooters, the next Sandy Hook, the next blah-blah.
You come across these people in the strangest of places – a classmate in a screenwriting course I took, who had lived through the 60s as a free-loving, weed-smoking hippy of the most stereotypical nature, once tried to calmly assert to me and the rest of the class that all modern violence was thanks to the “bang-bang” nature of action movies. A few people corrected him, some even aggressively, and I was among them. But back then I was still formulating my own social identity, and couldn’t quite explain why I felt he was wrong. I didn’t know how to tell him why I watched and enjoyed a lot of violent art, and I couldn’t express why I didn’t think it would make me into a sex-killer or a Neo-Nazi.
Now, years later I know why he was wrong. And now I can at least try and tell you why watching horror movies, serial killer movies and so on hopefully won’t make me or the majority of others into some kind of robotic criminal deviant.
He was wrong, and most of the people who hold the same view are wrong, because they discount the human brain as a factor in the development of someone’s behaviour. Never mind that it’s the most powerful organ in the world, and that just one cell out of place can mean the difference between being able to walk and not being able to breathe (that’s an exaggeration, but you get the idea.) No no, it’s “Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc” all the way for them. That man played Grand Theft Auto, then stole a car and shot someone, so it MUST have been the game that made him do it. That girl watched American History X, then assaulted a Jewish girl in a nightclub, it MUST have been the film’s fault. That nice family looked at a Goya painting, and the father killed his wife and children, it MUST have been the painting. This last one probably never happens, but it would be interesting to see what the reaction would be if someone used it as an excuse.
Fact is, the effect and influence games, movies, etc. have on a person’s actions in the real world, to me at least, come from how that person understands the difference between fiction and reality. I’m not going to point fingers at parents, teachers or anyone else as being the cause of someone not knowing that they can’t walk into a shop and stab five people without consequence or beat someone to a pulp because he or she thinks they’re a supervillain; however a brain gets to know reality from fantasy, the majority of them are capable of learning the difference, and its only when they don’t pick it up or just flat ignore it that you see an Xbox owner becoming a mass murderer.
If that were not the case, then Castlevania players would be deathly afraid of water in the belief that touching it would kill them. We would believe that somewhere in our worlds, invisible walls exist that we could bounce off of with no ill effect to us. We’d paint ourselves blue and try running up walls like Sonic. We’d believe that guns had endless bullet clips, and that radioactive waste would turn us into superheroes.
To cut a long story short, if your brain can’t tell the difference between the world of fiction and the world we live in, then there’s something wrong with your brain.
But that’s only half the argument I was trying to make. The other half is why I feel the need to watch and listen to this kind of stuff, what its appeal is to me and others similar to me. There’s no one reason, for starters, but there is a particularly big reason why I would rather read Carrie or listen to Slayer than the news. There’s a big reason why I’m more interested in pro wrestling than boxing (though both of these have their own negative real-world effects, but that’s a story for a different website), more attracted to Die Hard than Prime Time, more enthused by the next George A. Romero picture than the next Presidential election.
It’s because reality is far too often worse than fiction, and if I want to appreciate anything real, I need to have something fake.These places are where I go to hide.
They’re safe places, where no-one really dies, they only respawn. Where justice is meted out with guns and quips, is always final and is always right. Where love is easy to spot, hard to find, and always worth the hassle. Where the big bad things of the world always look just a little bit man-made. A little bit fake. A little bit SAFE.
Movies or games don’t make me want to commit acts of violence – except perhaps against a console when I’m stuck on a really damn frustrating level – real life does. It’s a comfort to watch Taxi Driver, then be able to see Robert De Niro is alive and well and making a crappy romantic comedy with Ben Stiller, just as it’s a comfort to see Max Payne huffing painkillers and taking ridiculous amounts of severe gunshot damage before he dies and goes to the gaming purgatory known as “Restart at Last Checkpoint.” It’s pleasingly safe to hear Alice Cooper sing about killing young women because I know that when he’s done, he’s probably gone off to church or to play a relaxing round of golf.
No, what makes me want to go nuts is how we treat each other. The war in Syria makes me want to take up arms. Likewise the conflict in Northern Ireland, the Ku Klux Klan, the Westboro Baptist Church, and many others. The way governments and financial institutions combined with our own greed to leave people struggling to feed their families makes a GTA-style heist seem like a good option. Jimmy Savile. Rolf Harris. Gary Glitter. Ian Watkins. The Vatican priests and Magdalene nuns, and 
abusers of all kinds. What I would like to do to those people doesn’t bear writing about.
But I don’t do it. Because I, like billions of others, know the difference between fantasy and reality. If I have to interact with those things at all, it’s usually with dark humour, because one of the best ways to deal with the trauma these things cause is to belittle them, laugh at them, pity them. The smaller they seem, the easier it is to get past them and live.
And when that gets too much, I throw on Scarface, or play Mortal Kombat, or listen to Gama Bomb. I hide, safe in the knowledge that it’s only a movie, a game, a record, a thing brought from someone’s imagination, so that when I come out again, it’s a little easier to get past reality’s horrors and live. Just because we root for Jason in Friday The 13th doesn’t mean we don’t have hearts or compassion. We do. We just like being able to put them away for sometimes.
Finally, to those people who disagree with this stance, I offer two quotes. The first is from Mark Twain (or Robert A. Heinlein, depending on where you read it):
“Censorship is telling me I can’t eat steak just because a baby can’t chew it.”
The other is from Ice-T:
“That’s just my opinion, who gives a fuck?”
