Real Mayhem Renews Cry Against Video Game Kind

By STEPHEN BRAUN

May 1, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

In the dimly lit Internet and video game chambers that Paul Thureen prowls for hours at night, he is known as Filth--an alias earned for his coldblooded knack for gunning down a ghostly procession of alien invaders. When the 20-year-old Minnesotan goes hunting with a real .22-caliber rifle in the North Woods with his grandfather, Thureen shrinks at firing at prey and usually misses.

“I’m just as bad a shot,” he admits sheepishly, “as I’ve ever been.”

Thureen and Filth, ham-handed rifleman and ace smoker of cyborgs, Kentucky Fried Chicken cook and savior of the universe, coexist in a world where fantasy and reality meet in video “shooter” games, a staple of American teenage life now blamed as a desensitizing influence on the two youths who massacred 13 people at Colorado’s Columbine High.

Accounts that student killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold reveled in playing Quake and Doom, video games that feature slaughters of computerized enemies, have provoked recrimination from a growing faction of psychologists, politicians and social critics. President Clinton cited the games during a radio address as hazardous influences that “make our children more active participants in simulated violence.”

The stylized theater of blood that has fascinated tens of thousands of teenagers would seem to be the perfect breeding ground for real-world violence. But a handful of psychological studies has yet to show any direct link between video games and criminal acts such as the massacre in Littleton, Colo., leaving parents with little to go on but their own instincts.

“If we’re going to start looking at anything, it ought to be what children learn and from whom they learn it,” says Christopher Weaver, 48, a suburban Maryland father of a 6-year-old boy. “I’m bothered by the constant attempt to deny, to look to others for the responsibility that’s ours.”

Weaver’s interest is more than parental. He is a successful video game designer whose own computer simulations have at times featured swordplay and gunplay. He is caught between his insider’s awareness of the artificiality of his products and mounting worry about young players who become first-person participants in imaginary gore-fests.

“The bottom line is these are indefensible products,” insisted Dave Grossman, a former Army officer and West Point instructor who contends that violent video games give adolescents the same kinetic ability to kill that modern soldiers learn--but also conditions them to enjoy it.

Studies Show Altered Behavior

Grossman and other cultural critics cite studies that show a heightened level of sensory reactions and behavior by players of violent games. But their crusade against the industry has no smoking gun of its own. There is only the barest circumstantial evidence, industry figures and even some cautious scientists say, that teens who go overboard in plunging into screened violence will become desensitized to the real thing.

“It’s still a long leap to say that a video game, however violent it is, can produce the sort of internal changes in a child that can send him on the road to committing violent acts,” said Geoffrey Loftus, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington who wrote an early look at the mind set of video game players.

Video industry figures worry about a drive by Grossman and others to make violence-ridden games as stigmatized as pornography. Video games already are marked by an industry-wide rating system, defenders point out.

Vince Desiderio, whose Arizona firm puts out Postal--a “mature only” game that lets players pretend to massacre unarmed construction workers and churchgoers--likens the effort to limit access to the 1950s hysteria that panicked a thriving comic book industry by linking its gory excesses to national paranoia about juvenile delinquency.

“Black humor has always been a part of teenage life,” Desiderio said. He takes the threat of legislation against his industry so seriously that last year, in the wake of outrage spawned by earlier campus shootings in Kentucky and Arkansas, Desiderio helped form GamePAC, a political defense arm for video designers.

The video industry has much at stake in the survival of shooter games. Although the most violent games accounted last year for less than 6% of the industry’s $5.5-billion annual sales, that segment is still worth more than $300 million a year, said Douglas Lowenstein, president of the Interactive Digital Software Assn. Quake II, one version of the popular shooter game, sold 200,000 copies last year. And every week, noted Jonny Wilson, editor of Computer Gaming World magazine, “there’s at least one shooter in the Top 10 [video game] sellers.”

The brainy computer programmers who devise shooter games have become as notorious as rock stars in a subculture barely 6 years old. The first of the new wave of shooter games was 1993’s Wolfenstein 3D, which let players rain pretend gunfire on a horde of Nazi killers. The designers of Wolfenstein’s successors, Doom and Quake, now are so celebrated that they seed their own cartoonish corpses and disembodied faces inside hidden game chambers and promise new and improved versions with higher kill ratios and cutting-edge graphics replete with anatomically correct “gibs,” or entrails.

Shooter game addicts can play alone, returning nightly to the make-believe butchery in the privacy of their bedrooms. Many more go online, linking up as “clans” that clash over the Web. Devoted shooters tinker with the games’ mechanics, replacing standardized ghouls with their own pretend enemies--often as inoffensive as Barney, the treacly TV dinosaur, and sometimes as racist as blacks and other minorities.

Even avid game reviewers like Wilson have been unnerved by reports of white supremacist Web sites that use Doom and Quake games to espouse racist agendas. Wilson was stunned when he found one Quake Web site that replaced the game’s Gothic corridors with the master plan of venerable Trinity College in Dublin. “I’m Irish, and I was horrified that you could go into a revered place like that and blow it up and splatter blood all over,” Wilson says.

Yet as vocal as industry figures are in protecting their investments and passions, the most unwavering supporters of shooter games are the teenage players themselves.

At PlanetQuake, an Orange County-based Web site that hundreds of thousands of game fans log on to, one 15-year-old Wisconsin student complained he was sent home from school for wearing a “Quake II” T-shirt. A teacher told him he “had serious problems that needed to be dealt with.”

Thureen admitted he is sometimes swept away by the sensation of godlike omnipotence he feels when he dispatches computerized enemies. But when Quake’s monsters fade to black on his computer screen, he said, the game is over. Reality intrudes.

“It’s like we don’t have brains enough to know the difference between Quake and real life,” Thureen said. “It’s real easy to blame video games. That way you don’t have to look at your families and your friends and inside yourself.”

When flood waters threatened his river town of Moorhead, Minn., two years ago, Thureen spent wearying days and nights manning the levees. “Yeah, I’d play when I got home,” Thureen admitted, adding that “it helped me deal with all the stress going on in real life.”

He has been a devoted video game player since the age of 8, when his father, a college mathematics and computer science instructor, came home with first-generation games like Centipede and Pong. He paid little heed to the introduction of early violent games, such as Death Race and Mortal Kombat, which raised the first warning flags.

First-Person Game Is a Landmark

But the 1993 emergence of Wolfenstein was a landmark because of its ability to let players fire away at lifelike enemies who advanced face-on over television and computer screens. When Quake appeared four years ago, Thureen mastered the game at a summer space camp, outdueling another camper so quickly in one match that the admiring teen snapped: “You’re filth!” The name stuck.

Thureen admits the games seeped into his life. He played when he should have been studying. But Thureen insists his fascination has good aspects. He still plays, although less than he once did. Intent on becoming a video game designer, he plans on taking computer programming and other courses that would give him a head start in that direction.

Obsessiveness is not the only danger shooter video players risk when they hunch over their screens, said Jeanne Funk, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toledo.

Funk and other experts claim to have found evidence that violent games produce the same sort of heightened sensory reactions and anti-social behavior found in excessive watchers of violent television programs.

When Funk surveyed 357 seventh- and eighth-graders in 1993, she found that 32% preferred games that had “fantasy violence.” And a recent study of sixth-grade video players showed many appeared to become more desensitized to violence. “We found signs that children who enjoy these games can lose the emotional cues that trigger empathy.”

But studies hinting of such scarring effects are a long way from establishing a direct link between playing games and becoming more likely to commit violent acts, others cautioned. No one knows if video games can permanently influence children’s thoughts and actions, Loftus said, adding: “How long do those effects last?”

There is no certainty that researchers will ever establish definitive links between the fascination aroused by shooter games and the chain of decisions that led teens like Harris and Klebold to kill.

The fact that Harris wrote “KILL ‘EM AAAAALLL!!!” in his last message to fellow Doom players is evidence enough to Grossman that links exist. Grossman, who studied the video simulation techniques used by the Army to improve hand-eye coordination and break down young soldiers’ resistance to killing, believes shooter game players are altered in much the same way.

A former Army lieutenant colonel and author of “The Psychology of Killing,” Grossman warns that young video gamers are learning to “inflict pain and suffering on human beings.”

But social scientists like Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, contend that Grossman and other video game Jeremiahs offer “conclusions that don’t take us very far,” failing to see video games as only an extension of the age-old martial play that young boys have always practiced.

Historians also caution that researchers have sometimes inserted themselves into past public debates with chaotic results.

In the late 1940s, psychologists linked gore-crammed comic books, such as “Vault of Horror,” with juvenile delinquency. Fearing government controls, comic book distributors cracked down on the most licentious publications. The industry kept its independence “but at the cost of ruining the careers of some talented people,” said Maggie Thompson, a popular culture historian.

“In the ‘50s, it was monster movies and comics. In the ‘60s, it was rock music and TV. In the ‘70s, Dungeons and Dragons,” Wilson said. “Adults are always taking something their kids love and demonizing it because they don’t understand it.”

On the cusp of adult responsibilities, Thureen knows that the alien-slayer Filth will one day be consigned to youthful memory.

For now, he still uses the moniker as he alights on planet Strogg--taking on its crab-like, automaton soldiers and enemy Quake fans and dispatching the hordes in familiar explosions of blood and viscera.

“I still feel more comfortable,” he says, “in the fantasy.”

Times researcher John Beckham in Chicago and Times staff writers P.J. Huffstutter and Jennifer Oldham in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

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Growth in Video Games

The interactive game industry saw 29% growth last year.