Today’s Agenda
‘I was in a supermarket in Pasadena looking at the magazines, and three little boys about 7 or 8 years old came over,” says Tom McDonough. “They grabbed all the video game magazines, and they were absolutely ecstatic because some new game came out.
“They were saying, ‘Oh, boy, look at this. When you get to this point, the guy’s head blows off!’ And they were going into all the details. I’ve never seen kids so enthusiastic about something, and it was appalling.”
McDonough, a lecturer in engineering at the California Institute of Technology and author of the best-selling software, Space Adventure, is not alone in his sentiment.
He, along with many adults, is worried about the violence in American entertainment, including gory video games directed at children--the subject of today’s Platform.
Says McDonough, “I am worried today because I do think that there is just so much violence in society and the media is feeding on it. It’s tapping into a primordial urge to clobber the other guy before you get clobbered.”
It’s part of our evolutionary heritage that we want to compete with one another, he says, and each one of us has this potential for violence within us.
According to McDonough, there is a danger that we tap this violent urge too easily, particularly with these increasingly violent video games.
He also says that it’s the responsibility of parents to keep their kids from playing with the more violent video games.
“The violent video games tap into something that is so primitive that it short-circuits the higher functions of the brain. What it does is, it makes the link between the muscular instinct and the visual impulse the primary conduit or reaction, instead of passing through the higher functions that would think about things--think about facts, history, numbers, dates, all the other things that need to go into an educated person,” McDonough argues. “So it really has a very crude effect on people, and the only thing they really learn is how to get to a higher level in arbitrary, fast-paced games. That does have some virtues, especially if you want to train warriors.”
He says that he believes movies and TV and increasingly, video games, have taken the place of myths, creating a new one that says there is no problem so great or complex that it cannot be solved by violence.
But McDonough says he doesn’t favor censorship, calling it a disastrous prescription for a dictatorship.
The primary thing that we should do, he says, is to make parents aware of the danger of these games.
Some toy and video game makers are heeding his concern, adopting a Hollywood-like rating system to help parents make choices about what what their children are exposed to.
Parents themselves, however, can’t be let off the hook entirely. Perhaps they should start monitoring more closely what their children are exposed to--whether it be gory video games, like Mortal Kombat or TV shows like “Beavis and Butt-head,” the controversial MTV show.
