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This month the Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments regarding a California law banning the sale of violent video games to minors. And the college students! Were outraged! Writes Lydia Statz at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's The Daily Cardinal:
Remember the countless hours you spent in the basement as a child playing "Mortal Kombat," "GoldenEye 007" and in your later years the "Call of Duty" series? Nearly every student in our generation has experience with one of these, but a new California law seeks to stop minors from accessing these violent video games.
Ah, the memories. Just can't wait for "game of the year" Black Ops to unleash some awesome tomahawks:
The four game modes are: "one in the chamber" - each player gets one pistol, one bullet and three lives; "sticks and stones" - crossbow, ballistic knife, and tomahawk, with the twist that if you toss the tomahawk and hit someone, you bankrupt that player; "gun game" - in which you start with only the pistol and, with every kill, progress to the next higher weapon: from pistol, through to shotgun, to sniper rifle and RPG; and finally "sharp shooter" in which each player start with the same weapon, use it for a fixed amount of time, then everyone switches to a new weapon.
My distaste for media violence for children started with the opening sequence of Bambi. After Bambi's mom got popped, the movie vastly improved. Still, it shocked me at whatever tender age I was, and after that I started hiding my eyes and waiting for the sharp or flammable objects to come and threaten or devour one of the main characters of every single movie I watched as a child.
Are we all done reliving the pain inflicted on families by senseless violence? And that was Bambi.
"It's not real, right, Mommy?" my six-year-old daughter asks, as she inevitably sees some death-inducing plot twist play out, be it Nemo's mom or Simba's dad or what have you. And as I reassure her, "No, it's just a movie," I'm caught in the conundrum all parents find themselves in -- how do you explain away the fearful scene your child just witnessed without sending the message that it's not still pretty horrifying for -- in Bambi's case -- a mother to just disappear due to violence?
If Bambi had witnessed his mom mating, all hell would've broken loose. But a little blood and guts with adverse psychological consequences for the main character? No worries, mate.
Clearly, I'm blowing the Bambi thing out of proportion for the sake of my point. I vascillate between worrying about the effects of violence on our entire society, not just kids, and laughing when my friend lent her ninja kid the family butter knife because she lost his plastic sword on Halloween. Part of me wonders why kids need to arm themselves even in play, and part of me writes it off to evolution and a human's need to dominate the world around her. It's difficult to break down violence, because in some ways, it helped us survive as a species and still does in certain parts of the world in which families must be defended on a daily basis. But then, here, in a country in which we are for the most part safe, we seek it out for entertainment. I don't get why we do that.
Legislating access to violent games isn't the answer. Any law would be toothless because -- like drugs -- people are going to buy what they want to buy, and legislating against it just creates a black market and the taxpayer burden enforcing an ineffective law. I'd rather my tax dollars were spent on stopping violence in real life.
I don't think we should pass the law. But I think we should ask ourselves what we're getting out of the violence, why we've chosen it for so long that it's become a mainstay in our culture to the extent
