Video Games Will Be the Next Venue for Debate on Violence

Last week, I watched Captain Kangaroo criticize one of my best friends on national television as a menace to innocent little children. Rob designs video games; he’s very talented.

Since we both grew up watching Captain Kangaroo, I called him up: “Rob,” I said, “are you aware that Captain Kangaroo is attacking you on national television?”

“I know,” he replied wearily. “I’ve been getting calls all day. . . . But Michael, it’s just not fair! In our game, the goal is to prevent violence. In Mortal Kombat, the goal is to rip your opponent’s heart out of his chest! There’s no comparison. . . . I’m losing sleep over doing something that Captain Kangaroo denounced.”

Rob’s latest 15 minutes of notoriety have come thanks to Night Trap, a cheesy, sleazy, low-budget parody of a teen slasher film, but with an interesting twist: It’s interactive. By carefully springing “night traps” in this video house of horrors, players can interactively rescue scantily clad young women from monsters. Unsuccessful (or perverse) players get to witness the monsters drag their struggling victims to the dungeons below. In terms of interactivity, Night Trap is clever; visually, it’s tasteless.

Needless to say, this is not the sort of wholesome family entertainment of which Captain Kangaroo approves. As a result, Rob has become an unhappy participant in the growing controversy surrounding video game violence and children. The good Captain, members of Congress and concerned parents have expressed outrage over the spate of best-selling holiday video game releases that are not merely violent, but graphically so. Indeed, the major video companies are already in talks to adopt a self-imposed ratings system.

But why are people so shocked, shocked by this trend? This mass-market move toward explicit video game violence is less the byproduct of a society in decay than digital technologies in the ascendant. Only three years ago, video game technologies were too crude to let designers create high-resolution characters with high-definition detail. That’s why pop culture video game stars like PacMan and the Mario Brothers have been more iconic than realistic. To compensate for the primitive graphics, game designers focused on making the interactivity as intense and immediate as possible.

Ironically, now that the media gurus are preaching the gospel of interactivity, technologies like CD-I and souped-up silicon chips have transformed the design emphasis. All of a sudden, it’s cheap and easy to bring greater realism to the video game screen.

The new breed of video game merely does a better job of mirroring the violence in other video media. So creative energies have been shifting away from new forms of interactivity--a greater challenge--toward prettier (or uglier) pictures. Consider, for example, the ad campaign for Panasonic’s new 3DO multimedia player, a campaign that stresses the virtues of video resolution over interactivity.

Technology-driven explicitness has thus transformed the entire video game genre. Video games that once looked like benign cartoons now increasingly look and play like digitized slasher films with a realism that is anything but cartoon-like. Just how endearing would the Road Runner cartoons be if we saw Wile E. Coyote’s entrails smeared across the bottom of the cliff?

“We do need to be more accountable about what goes into these shows as the graphic resolution gets higher and higher,” Rob asserts. “We need to have ratings for video games just as we have them for movies.”

The real issue for the design of children’s video games, Rob insists, isn’t in the nature of conflict and violence--it’s in the graphic depictions of violence. It’s one thing for Mario to toss charms that make a Goomba disappear in a puff of smoke; it’s quite another when a Kung Fu video rewards a player by displaying a lovingly detailed fountain of blood that very much wants to look like the real thing.

“All these games are about having a goal and having something preventing you from achieving that goal,” says Rob. “You as a player have to remove what’s keeping you from achieving that goal--and there are going to be consequences for those actions.”

Rob argues that “those visual consequences are going to be the basis upon which these things are rated. . . . If it’s a Barney Teaches Gardening disc and you don’t garden correctly, the little flowers will die in a cute, Barney-like way and Barney will sing ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’ and be sad. Those are appropriate consequences for a Barney.

“But,” Rob adds, “if the theme of the game is Dracula, failing to do things correctly will cause your neck to be bitten. At that moment, the designers have to decide just how graphic they want to be.”

That decision, in turn, says Rob, should determine whether a video game should be rated G, PG, R or NC-17. “There’s no inherent reason why video games should be judged on a different standard than movies or television media,” he says.

Actually, there is a good reason why interactive video games should be judged differently. Whereas a passive medium such as television only gives you the choice of switching the channel or turning the set off, interactive media can give the player the choice of rescuing people or killing them, rewarding destruction or encouraging ingenuity. Precisely because interactive media designers are creating choices as well as images, they have a rising responsibility to explain why they choose to create the games they do.

There should be little question that explicitly violent video games require labeling. And there should be no doubt that advances in technology guarantee that debate about the quality of interactive media will soon overshadow the debate about quality of television.