New York Times - April 26, 1999
DIGITAL COMMERCE
Linking Entertainment to Violence By DENISE CARUSO
By producing increasingly violent media, the entertainment industry has for decades engaged in a lucrative dance with the devil.
Over the years, parents and consumer groups have continued to sound alarms about the effects that violent films, television and ever-more-realistic video games are having on their children and society at large. The response -- from what may be the most influential industry in the world -- has consistently been a kind of indignant shock that anyone would think a silly old movie or game could have a measurable effect on anyone.
"Kids can tell the difference between fantasy and reality," these executives have repeatedly asserted. "Why can't you?"
But a growing body of evidence suggests it is the producers who may be having a hard time telling the difference between their apologist fantasy and grim reality.
The evidence, say those who study violence in culture, is unassailable: Hundreds of studies in recent decades have revealed a direct correlation between exposure to media violence -- now including video games -- and increased aggression.
This is not because people cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy, but because ultra-violent media systematically employ the psychological techniques of desensitization, conditioning and vicarious learning.
Dave Grossman, a former Army officer and professor at West Point and the University of Arkansas, says these are the same techniques that were used to great effect during the Vietnam War to increase the "firing rate" -- that is, the percentage of soldiers who would actually fire a weapon during an encounter -- from the 15 to 20 percent range in World War II to as much as 95 percent in Vietnam.
Grossman has written "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society" (Little, Brown, 1995), in which he discusses how conditioning techniques were used to teach Vietnam-bound soldiers to kill automatically in battle encounters, yet respect authority and make split-second distinctions between friends and enemies.
The difference, he says, is that today these same techniques are not tempered by such respect or distinctions. What is worse, he adds, they teach us to associate violence with pleasure.
America's adolescents spend countless hours watching action or horror movies -- the exquisitely detailed suffering and killing of human beings -- on television and in movie theaters, places we associate with entertainment, pleasure, favorite foods and the intimacy of dating.
And interactive video games, Grossman asserts, are even more directly connected to behavior. Addictive, increasingly hyperreal in their effects and long since shed of the goofy monsters that were targets in the old days, contemporary video games often are what he calls "operant conditioning firing ranges with pop-up targets and immediate feedback, just like those used to train soldiers in modern armies."
As a result, Grossman wrote: "We are reaching that stage of desensitization at which the inflicting of pain and suffering has become a source of entertainment; vicarious pleasure rather than revulsion. We are learning to kill, and we are learning to like it."
The two boys apparently responsible for the massacre in Littleton, Colo., last week were, among many other things, accomplished players of the ultraviolent video game Doom. And Michael Carneal, the 14-year-old boy who opened fire on a prayer group in a Paducah, Ky., school foyer in 1997, was also known to be a video-game expert.
Michael Carneal had never fired a pistol before stealing the gun he used that day. But in the ensuing melee, he fired eight shots, hit eight people, and killed three of them.
The average law enforcement officer in the United States, at a distance of seven yards, hits fewer than one in five shots, Grossman asserted in a interview in the current issue of Adbusters magazine.
"When Michael Carneal was shooting, he fired one shot at each kid," Grossman said. "He simply fired one shot at everything that popped up on his screen."
Grossman's sentiments are echoed by Joel Federman, co-director of the Center for Communication and Social Policy at the University of California at Santa Barbara. In his former job as the research director of Mediascope, a nonprofit policy organization that promotes media responsibility, he published an annotated bibliography called "The Social Effects of Interactive Electronic Games."
Although he says that only seven or eight studies specifically focused on aggression in interactive games, the majority of them showed that aggressive games increased the likelihood of aggression just as certainly as violent television did. "In games," he said in an interview, "aggressive behavior is not only seen as appropriate, but you're rewarded for doing it well."
Federman drew a parallel between producers of violent media and the tobacco industry, which denied causality in the face of irrefutable evidence of a direct correlation between smoking and cancer. A study proving that TV or video games cause violence would mean that at least one study participant would be inspired to commit murder -- clearly an untenable ethical situation for the entertainment industry.
"Same as the tobacco industry, the evidence is there," Federman said. "These effects do exist, and everyone from the American Psychological Association to the Surgeon General has acknowledged them. But since not every kid experiences the extreme effects, people can continue to deny them."
What, then, to do? The industry's attempts at self-policing were never intended to stem the creation or distribution of ultraviolent games; in fact, despite their superficial intent to protect, every producer knows the best way to guarantee a best seller is to give a movie or video game a "restricted" rating. Nor is censorship seen as a solution.
"There's a very legitimate First Amendment concern," Federman said. "And because of freedom of speech, because there's a value that we don't want to compromise, then it really comes down to the people creating these games. That's where the responsibility lies."