Video Games and Violence: Mario Made Me Do It

Something makes Americans more violent than the people of other nations. Something holds our crime rates high above those of other western nations. Something made “two student gunmen kill twelve students and a teacher before turning the guns on themselves” at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado (Lowenstein). Something other than video games. Video games help the American economy and even help train surgeons. They do not sneak their way into children’s hands behind parents’ backs, and are not mastered solely by adolescent males. They do not raise crime rates. Video games serve as a scapegoat to those who would rather ignore the actual causes of isolated violent incidents involving youths. Numerous detrimental myths haunt the video game industry, which actually just provides an entertaining pastime that helps the very nation condemning it. Hitting a block with your head to get a coin like Mario has nothing to do with shooting anyone.

Video games do not cause violence; in fact they actually help American society. Japan devours American pop culture, but still “has one of the lowest crime rates in the world” (Valentini). Japan’s example shows that something else, not the games both our countries share, causes America’s violent tendencies. Rather than harming America, the video game industry enriches the economy. It “is a $7 billion industry in the U.S. alone—the second largest entertainment industry in the world, after film and television” (Costikyan). Video games provide a major boost to the economy, including exports, which remain constantly lower than imports. Video games even serve to train doctors: “Researchers found that doctors who spent at least three hours a week playing video games made about 37 percent fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery and performed the task 27 percent faster than their counterparts who did not play video games” (Dobnik). The difference between a doctor who plays Super Monkey Ball or Super Mario and a doctor who believes video games make him shoot people could mean the difference between life and death for the patient. Video games provide important economic and medical benefits to American society.

A number of myths, believed primarily by “concerned” individuals who have never touched a game in their lives, haunt the video game industry. The counter to one of the key myths that video games somehow cause violent behavior in adolescents is that most gamers are adults: “The average game player is 33 years old and . . . The average game buyer is 37 years old.” (ESA “Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry”). Those affected by violent games aren’t even the youths everyone worries about. Mature adults, not feeble-minded children, play video games. Of course, whatever their age, gamers spend all of their time indoors and have pasty white skin and no life, right? No: they actually “devote more than triple the amount of time spent playing games each week to exercising or playing sports, volunteering in the community, religious activities, creative endeavors, cultural activities, and reading” (ESA “Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry”). Games do not isolate their players from society; they simply provide a temporary form of amusement: a little fun. A surprising number of people believe the youths who actually buy games go all alone to obtain Mature rated shooters that their parents forbid. In truth children’s parents accompany them 92 of the time (ESA “Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry”), and “45 of parents who are aware of the video game rating system say they do not use it” (Lowenstein). Most youths do not buy games in rebellion, they; do it with their parents—who lack the responsibility to shelter them from mature material—handing over the money! Then again, they probably want an E rated game anyway: “70 of games are appropriate for everyone; only 9 are rated mature (M)” (Lowenstein). The public sees only what it wants to, and it wants games to be bad. Most video games are harmless, but the relatively few more adult games reach everywhere from commercials to news stories to ruthless word of mouth. Only a misinformed American culture believes video games spawn merciless violence in its children.

Many Americans believe video games cause an increase in crime without realizing that crime rates are falling. According to Michael Males, “Recent polls and focus groups show that adults, nationally and locally, believe youths commit three to five times more violent crime than they actually do.” The news media’s love of gore creates the illusion that teenagers commit numerous atrocious crimes, so they inflate the magnitude of crimes and, as a result, society’s perception of them. In fact, “rates of murder, school violence, drug abuse, criminal arrest, violent death and gun fatality among middle-and upper-class teenagers have declined over the last 15 to 30 years” (Males “Teenagers Are Not Becoming More Violent”), and “adults (persons 18 years of age and over) accounted for 84.7 percent of all persons arrested” (FBI). Adults commit the majority of crimes, while we focus on adolescents and ignore the majority of criminals. Overall crime rates peaked in the three year span from 1991 to 1993, and have gradually fallen ever since (Disaster Center). Id Software’s release of DOOM, one of many first-person shooters blamed for teenage violence, in December of 1993 coincides with the falling crime rates (Game Spot). DOOM did not increase violent crime in youths. It gave them a way to express their aggression without harming anyone, supporting Costikyan’s statement that violent games “channel antisocial impulses in societally acceptable ways.”

Video games serve as a convenient scapegoat for “concerned” parents and politicians who seek the cause of violence in adolescents. When “the students in seven schools committed… widely-publicized shootings,” many Americans ignored the falling crime rates among teenagers (Males “Teenagers Are Not Becoming More Violent”). They determined that even though only ten of “twenty five million teenagers” committed these violent murders, all youths suddenly became horrendous monsters with violence crawling beneath their skins while Mario leads them in a bloodthirsty gun battle against harmless Donkey Kong (Males “Teenagers Are Not Becoming More Violent”). Their decision came primarily because the media showed the scenes so often, and “less than 1 of news stories focused on the responsibility and moral character of the perpetrators themselves” (ESA “Games and Violence”). The strong media attention to the crimes and the focus on their interest in video games continued until “the spike in public attention reaches a point when politicians feel they must do something” (Chapman). Of course doing something means identifying the cause of such rampant violence, or finding something the public might believe to have caused it. Politicians and the public alike turned to the familiar scapegoat of media violence. Then they carried that even further to claim the increasingly realistic violence in video games caused what they perceived to be increasing violence in teenagers throughout America. It fits all too well with the Macmillan Dictionary for Students’ thirteenth definition of the word “game”: “object of ridicule, attack, or pursuit.”

Researchers have plenty of proven reason for violence and violent crime, none of which result from jumping on pixilated turtle shells. Violent behavior “is tied to the stress of economic adversity,” which rarely goes hand-in-hand with expensive video games and game consoles (Males “The Problem of Youth Violence Is Overstated”). Also, “Numerous studies have shown that there is a higher prevalence of neurologic abnormality in recurrently violent individuals than in non violent control subjects or the population at large” (Myslinski). Many Americans play video games, so a naturally violent person could do so as well, but the games never caused the violence produced by neurologic abnormality. The use of drugs and alcohol also “quite literally leads people to commit impulsive, destructive crimes, including crimes of violence” (DuPont). And as to the American tendency to murder victims: “There is something in our culture, he says, that makes us ‘Much more likely to… use means that threaten deadly results” (Dionne). That something is not video games. That something causes the violence in games, not the other way around. American society houses numerous causes of violence as well as their results, but violent video games only fall under the category of the latter.

Something causes violence in America, but crime rates fell since the early nineties. As the scapegoat video games rose, crime fell, though they cannot take complete credit for that any more than they can for causing violent acts. Violence “and the attraction of violence, is a fundamental part of human nature,” and unrelated to video games except that it caused them (Costikyan). DOOM causes as little violence as Mario, which even fictionally, supports no more than rescuing princesses, hitting blocks with your head, and jumping on or avoiding turtle shells.

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I'm not sure what to do with my works cited page... I couldn't get the format to work right on here, but all the little references make no sense without it. And am I allowed to make it it's own chapter? It's not comments... I don't know. Anyway, this got me a good grade in my English class, so I thought I might as well post it. That and I spent a lot of time on it. It was a big end of the year research paper project thing.