Friday, April 20, 2007
Pundits Blame Video Games for VT Massacre. I blame Toby Keith, and the Republican "Culture of Violence" who solve problems with violence over reason.
And the battle will rage
This big dog will fight
When you rattle his cage
And you’ll be sorry that you messed with
The U.S. of A.
`Cause we`ll put a boot in your ass
It`s the American way
-- Courtesy of the Red White and Blue Toby Keith
Were video games to blame for massacre?
The shooting on the Virginia Tech campus was only hours old, police hadn't even identified the gunman, and yet already the perpetrator had been fingered and was in the midst of being skewered in the media.
Video games. They were to blame for the dozens dead and wounded. They were behind the bloodiest massacre in U.S. history.
Or so Jack Thompson told Fox News and, in the days that followed, would continue to tell anyone who'd listen.
"These are real lives. These are real people that are in the ground now because of this game. I have no doubt about it," said Thompson, a Florida attorney and fervent critic the of video game industry.
The game he's talking about is "Counter-Strike," a massively popular team-based tactical shooting game that puts players in the heavily-armed boots of either a counter-terrorist or terrorist.
But whether Cho Seung-Hui, the student who opened fire Monday, was an avid player of video games and whether he was a fan of "Counter-Strike" in particular remains, even now, uncertain at best.
Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the school shootings and the finger-pointing that followed, game players and industry advocates say they're outraged that the brutal acts of a deeply disturbed and depressed loner with a history of mental illness would be blamed so quickly on video and computer games. They say this is perhaps the most flagrant case of anti-game crusaders using a tragedy to promote their own personal causes.
"It's so sad. These massacre chasers — they're worse than ambulance chasers — they're waiting for these things to happen so they can jump on their soap box," said Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association.
"It disgusts me," said Isaiah Triforce Johnson, a long-time gamer and founder of a New York-based gaming advocacy group that, in response to the accusations, is now planning what is the first ever gamer-driven peace rally.
‘Mental masturbation’
When Jack Thompson gets worked up, he refers to gamers as "knuckleheads." He calls video games "mental masturbation."
When he's talking about himself and his crusade against violent games, he calls himself an "educator." He likes to use the word "pioneer."
Certainly Thompson has made a name for himself. After all, he knows a thing or two about publicity. He's spent no small bit of time in front of a camera.
On those rare occasions when a student opens fire on a school campus, Thompson is frequently the first and the loudest to declare games responsible. In recent years he's blamed games such as "Counter-Strike," "Doom" and "Grand Theft Auto III" for school shootings in Littleton, Colo., Red Lake, Minn. and Paducah, Ky.
He's blamed them for shootings beyond school grounds as well. In an attempt to hold game developers and publishers responsible for these spasms of violence, Thompson has launched several unsuccessful lawsuits.
But in the hours after the Virginia Tech massacre, Thompson wasn't the only one rushing to make a connection between the shootings and video games. Police were still struggling to piece together the nightmare that had unfolded on campus that morning when Dr. Phil McGraw appeared on Larry King Live and took aim at the usual suspect.
"The problem is we are programming these people as a society," he said. "You cannot tell me — common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they're on a mass killing spree in a video game, it's glamorized on the big screen, it's become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the suggestibility is too high. And we're going to have to start dealing with that."
Meanwhile, by Tuesday, the Washington Post had posted a story on its website stating that several youths who knew Cho said that in high school he'd been a fan of violent video games, especially "Counter-Strike."
But a short time later, the newspaper removed that paragraph from the story without explanation. Meanwhile, authorities released a search warrant listing the items found in Cho's dorm room. Not a single video game, console or gaming gadget was on the list, though a computer was confiscated. And in an interview with Chris Matthews of "Hardball," Cho's university suite-mate said he had never seen Cho play video games.
None of this seems to matter to Thompson.
"This is not rocket science. When a kid who has never killed anyone in his life goes on a rampage and looks like the Terminator, he's a video gamer," he told MSNBC.com.
And in a letter sent to Bill Gates Wednesday, he wrote: "Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable (for) the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill."
(Microsoft did not create "Counter Strike" but did publish a version of it for the Xbox. The company's representatives declined to comment on Thompson's letter. MSNBC.com is a Microsoft-NBC Universal joint venture.)
While Thompson concedes that there are many elements that must have driven Cho to commit such a brutal act, he insists that without video games Cho wouldn't have had the skills to do what he did.
"He might have killed somebody but he wouldn't have killed 32 if he hadn't rehearsed it and trained himself like a warrior on virtual reality. It can't be done. It just doesn't happen."
Kids these days
Dr. Karen Sternheimer, a sociologist at the University of Southern Calfornia and author of the book " Kids These Days: Facts and Fictions About Today's Youth," disagrees. She believes that it didn't require much skill for Cho to shoot as many people as he did. After all, eye witness accounts indicate many of the victims were shot at point-blank range.
And for all of Thompson's claims that violent video games are the cause of school shootings, Sternheimer points out that before this week's Virginia Tech massacre, the most deadly school shooting in history took place at the University of Texas in Austin… in 1966. Not even "Pong" had been invented at that time.
"One thing that people often don't realize is that in the years since video game sales have really exploded, not only have youth violence rates decreased but violence rates in the U.S. have declined precipitously," she added.
Meanwhile, Sternheimer says the rush to blame video games in these situations is disingenuous for yet another reason. Although it remains unclear whether Cho played games, it seems nobody will be surprised if it turns out he did. After all, what 23-year-old man living in America hasn't played video games?
"Especially if you're talking about young males, the odds are pretty good that any young male in any context will have played video games at some point," Sternheimer says.
"I think in our search to find some kind of answer as to why this happened, the video game explanation seems easy," she says. "It seems like there's an easy answer to preventing this from happening again and that feels good on some level."
The blame game
Jason Della Rocca agrees. "Everyone wants a simple solution for a massively complex problem. We want to get on with our lives."
As the leader of an organization that represents video game creators from all over the world, Della Rocca knows the routine all too well.
Someone opens fire on a school campus. Someone blames video games. His phone starts ringing. People start asking him questions like, "So how bad are these games anyway?"
Of course, he also knows that this is far from the first time in history that a young form of pop culture has been blamed for any number of society's ills. Rock and roll was the bad guy in the 1950s. Jazz was the bad guy in the 1930s. Movies, paintings, comic books, works of literature…they've all been there.
Still, Della Rocca believes that people like Thompson are "essentially feeding off the fears of those who don't understand games."
For those who didn't grow up playing video games, the appeal of a game like "Counter-Strike" can be hard to comprehend. It can be difficult to understand that the game promotes communication and team work. It can be hard fathom how players who love to run around gunning down their virtual enemies do not have even the slightest desire to shoot a person in real life.
"It's the thing they don't understand," Della Rocca says. "It's a thing that's scary."
Fed up with the scapegoating and lack of understanding, gamer groups have begun to get increasingly organized in their attempts to change public perception of their favorite hobby.
Hal Halpin, president of the Entertainment Consumers Association, says there's more than 30 million gamers in the U.S. alone. He says the ECA, a non-profit membership organization, was created last year specifically to represent the needs and interests of those who play computer and video games.
Meanwhile, the members of Empire Arcadia — a grassroots group dedicated to supporting the gaming community and culture — have been so incensed by the recent attempts to blame video games for the Virginia Tech shootings that they've begun planning a rally in New York City with the assistance of the ECA.
"There we will protest, mourn and show how real gamers play video games peacefully and responsibly," organizer Isaiah Triforce Johnson wrote on the group's Web site. "This demonstration is to show that gamers will not take the blame of this tragic matter but we will do what we can to help put an end to terrible events like this."
Johnson says that, ultimately, he hopes the rally — scheduled for May 5th — will help people better understand video game enthusiasts like him.
"We are normal people," he says. "We just play games."
Labels: Republican "Culture of Violence", Toby Keith, Virginia Tech shootings
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Our benevolent Surveillance State
The expansion of the Surveillance State is endless. Buried within an ABC report on the Virginia Tech shootings is this paragraph (h/t reader DT):
Some news accounts have suggested that Cho had a history of antidepressant use, but senior federal officials tell ABC News that they can find no record of such medication in the government's files. This does not completely rule out prescription drug use, including samples from a physician, drugs obtained through illegal Internet sources, or a gap in the federal database, but the sources say theirs is a reasonably complete search.Is there any good reason whatsoever why the federal government should be maintaining "files" which contain information about the pharmaceutical products which all Americans are consuming? The noxious idea has taken root in our country -- even before the Bush presidency, though certainly greatly bolstered during it -- that one of the functions of the federal government is to track the private lives of American citizens and maintain dossiers on what we do.
If that sounds hyperbolic, just review the disclosures over the course of recent years concerning what data bases the Federal Government has created and maintained and the vast amounts of data they contain -- everything from every domestic telephone call we make and receive to the content of our international calls to "risk assessment" records based on our travel activities to all sorts of information obtained by the FBI's use of NSLs. And none of that includes, obviously, the as-yet-undisclosed surveillance programs undertaken by the most secretive administration in history.
It is true that much (though not all) of this data is already scattered in the hands of various private corporations and insurance companies. But, for multiple and self-evident reasons, it presents a fundamentally different type and level of threat when it is all consolidated and centralized in the hands of the federal government. Amazingly, it is the political movement that spent all of the 1990s stridently warning of the dangers of federal government power -- The Black Helicopters And Janet Reno Are Coming -- which has brought us this Surveillance State and continues to cheer on its infinite expansion.
The federal government data base which contains all of our controlled substance prescriptions, for instance, was mandated by a law -- The National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting Act -- passed in 2005 by the Republican-controlled Congress (though with full bipartisan support) and signed into law by the "conservative" Leader. That law appropriates funds to each state to create and maintain these data bases which are, apparently, accessible to federal agencies, federal law enforcement officials, and almost certainly thousands of other state and federal employees (as well as, most likely, employees of private companies).
Along these lines, the Department of Homeland Security last month promulgated proposed regulations for enforcement of the so-called Real ID Act of 2005 (.pdf). Those regulations require that every state issue technologically compatible Driver's Licenses which enable, in essence, uniform and nationwide tracking of all sorts of private information about every individual. Just as the Prescription Drug Tracking Law is "justified" by the Drug War, these national ID cards are justified by the War on Terrorism. As the Homeland Security Department explains:
The 9/11 Commission endorsed the REAL ID requirements, noting that: "For terrorists, travel documents are as important as weapons . . . All but one of the 9/11 hijackers acquired some form of identification document, some by fraud. Acquisition of these forms of identification would have assisted them in boarding commercial flights, renting cars, and other necessary activities."EPIC notes that "the deadline for public comment [on the DHS regulations] is May 8, 2007" -- and from what I understand, more public comments are needed from people who have strong views about these regulations. EPIC explains why these regulations are so disturbing:
The requirement for non-REAL ID-compliant DL/ID to have explicit "invalid for federal purposes" designations, turns this "voluntary" card into a mandatory national ID card. Anyone with a non-REAL ID-compliant card would be instantly suspicious. Compliant cards would be necessary for federal purposes such as entering courthouses, air travel or receiving federal benefits, such as Medicaid or Social Security. It would be easy for insurance companies, credit card companies, even video stores, to demand a REAL ID-compliant DL/ID in order to receive services.That the "conservative" movement is ushering in measures such as a federal law mandating that every state create National ID cards is ironic on multiple levels. But as Wired's Ryan Singel notes, numerous states -- the latest being Montana (after Idaho, Arkansas and Maine) -- have enacted laws refusing to comply with these requirements on the ground that they infringe on the privacy of the citizens of that state and/or on the ground that the law violates federalism principles by taking over areas (i.e., regulating driver's licenses) traditionally preserved for the states. For those reasons, many other states, particularly in the Mountain West and even the Deep South, are on their way to enacting similar laws refusing to comply.
It is simply no longer news when the "conservative" movement violates every "small-government" and states' rights principle it pretended to embrace ("conservatives" Andy McCarthy, David Frum, and John Yoo tonight are appearing at an event to argue for this Orwellian proposition: "Better More Surveillance than Another 9/11"). Apparently, we need to empower the federal government to maintain comprehensive dossiers on all Americans, otherwise our freedoms might be at risk from The Terrorists.
It is hardly worth pointing out that the idea of the Federal Government engaging in massive surveillance of innocent American citizens is about as far away from the core beliefs of the American Founders as one can get. Anyone who does not realize that is likely beyond the realm of persuasion.
But the only people who would think that it is fine to have the Federal Government compiling dossiers like this are those who place blind faith in our Leaders not to abuse their power. But that is the ethos that is the exact opposite of the one on which the country was founded, but which has come to dominate so much of our political culture.
Labels: Bush Administration, secret files, Surveillance, Virginia Tech shootings
