Some Just Laugh, Others Want to Zap Gory Video Games

Kim Crutchfield slides a video game into its player, like some blood-and-guts devotee ready to catch a gory monster movie matinee.

“This one is really great,” she says. “It’s called Splatterhouse 3. You get to see monsters eating people’s brains. It’s really gross. But it’s cool.”

At age 20, Crutchfield is an expert in the ghoulish realm of video game violence. She knows the best games to see five-headed monsters with 16 dangling eyeballs lurking inside deserted mansions.

She knows all about juicy beheadings and sorority sisters hanging from meat hooks, about street fighters who plunge their hands into an adversary’s chest and yank out his spinal column and still-beating heart, holding up his severed head like some subhuman trophy.

Yeeeech.

She works at Game City, a video store on Ventura Boulevard. Every day, when she is not studying child psychology at the College of the Canyons, Crutchfield is renting out video games, mostly to pre-pubescent boys--games with no-nonsense names such as Mortal Kombat, Night Trap and Total Carnage.

When she’s not renting the games, she’s playing them on the video screen inside the store--watching the blood and guts fly as her opponents are decapitated.

This video game expert says that California Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren is out on a limb with his recent announcement that he wants to get violent games off store shelves.

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Lungren said he was “issuing a strong consumer warning to the parents of California” about the violent nature of many video games on sale this Christmas season--an industry that sells 73 million game cartridges a year, according to Lungren.

The announcement was part of a move to clean up gratuitous sex and violence in mass media entertainment watched and played by millions of American youth--from racy rap lyrics on records and compact discs to popular movie images. In recent years, the call for less sex and violence has moved from the big screen to the TV screen--and now to the video screen.

As part of their campaign, officials cite a sharp jump in youth crime: 119% in juvenile murder arrests nationwide between 1986 and 1991 as well as a 135% jump statewide during the same period.

“Continual exposure to violent images and themes in various entertainment may not be the direct cause of these atrocious acts,” Lungren wrote in a letter sent to 12 U.S. video game companies. “But interactive video games which promote violence do have a deadening, desensitizing impact on young, impressionable minds.”

Game company officials deny that their products inspire or encourage violence among American youths.

“It’s just entertainment,” said Allyne Mills, a spokeswoman for Acclaim Entertainment of Oyster Bay, N.Y., maker of a home video version of Mortal Kombat. “We’ve not heard of any negative occurrences as a result of someone playing our video game.”

On some versions of the games, players entering a special code can make blood fly when their street fighters land a punch or a kick--as well as pull an opponent’s heart from his body and rip off his head.

Mills said the company has no plans to pull its games from the market.

“Obviously, not every entertainment product is for every customer,” she said. “Just as there are ratings for movies, there are ratings for video games. Mortal Kombat has an MA-13 rating that appears on the box, which means we recommend it for an older audience, at least 13 to 15 years old.”

This spring, she added, Acclaim will introduce a game based on a popular arcade attraction that will outstrip Mortal Kombat as the most popular video game in the United States.

“It’s called NBA Jam and it’s hot, hot, hot,” she said. “It’s not violent at all. It’s a slam-dunking, hot-rodding basketball game. So much for the theory of kids lusting after just violent games.”

From her vantage point behind the counter of a video game store, Kim Crutchfield said that video games--even violent ones--are harmless.

“I think this stuff is funny,” she says. “If you don’t like it, don’t look. It’s not going to hurt you.”

As she talked, she played several games, including Splatterhouse 3, in which a muscular superhero fights headless monsters, turning their bloodied bodies into a messy green mulch with his kicks and jabs.

Then there was Night Trap, a game on compact disc that showed intruders dressed in black masks and get-ups stalking a sorority house, where screaming young women are murdered and hung on meat hooks unless the player saves them in time.

As Crutchfield played, 10-year-old Benjamin McCaully entered the store and looked over her shoulder.

“Oh, weird,” he said, as the blood flew on screen. “That’s cool.”

Benjamin was accompanied by 10-year-old Christopher Robinson and his dad, Brian--a child probation officer who did not like what he saw on the screen.

“I see all kinds of messed-up kids come through Juvenile Hall,” he said. “This stuff just cannot be good for them. It desensitizes them to the violence they see on the streets. With ugly scenes like the riots and all, we just don’t need to see any more of it on our television screens.”

Chris Robinson said his mother will not let him buy Mortal Kombat because of the violence. So does he think she has his best interests at heart?

“Yeah, a little,” he said. “I guess those games would change me if I played them all the time. My mom wants me to wait until I’m older, so I can decide for myself.

“Anyway, my dad always tells me that violence begets violence. And he’s a professional. He should know.”