To approach the mimetic connection between video games and violence, I want to cheat a bit, or at least use a bit of indirection. I want to consider not what video game violence tells us about the propensity for subsequent violent behaviors, but rather what the concern over violent video games tells us about how we view and negotiate new media. In other words, if violent video games are problematic because they promote violence, we should inquire as to what makes video games distinct enough to merit the sort of sustained attention they receive in the media and in scholarly study. For example, one issue that Steven raised in response to a study noted by one of commentors is that of comparison. Sure, studies may indicate a connection between unsupervised violent video game time and subsequent violent or antisocial behaviors, but what of other activities and their connection to these same behaviors? In his words, "And as always, the authors [of the study] don't tell us what other forms of aggressive recreation -- football, cops and robbers, hockey -- would look like if they were subjected to the same scrutiny."
This is an absolutely critical point, both for its obviousness - football is, from its tactics to its vocabulary, one of the most violent activities imaginable for youth, and yet it receives little to no moral outrage, much less letters from Senator Clinton - and for what it tells us about the reasons why people are studying video games. Suffice it to say that much of the concern over video games stems from their novelty, from their status as one of the newest media and one no doubt destined for significant cultural standing. It is, at this point, common knowledge among that the video game is quickly emerging as dominant social and rhetorical force: the average video gamer is in their mid 20s, the average high school student would rather play video games than watch television, and all this while games become steadily more sophisticated, more immersive, and more potent. With this increasingly dominant social role, the video game has inspired its own oppositon, and now various ideologues have lined up their ducks, and are using research studies that measure positive correlation as proof that we should be blaming games for violent juvenile behavior, providing ammunition for calls to monitor the kinds of content that video games can or should present.
I want to suggest a response to the question of violence in video games along lines slightly less common. Rather than begin with the question, implicitly or explicitly, of what rhetorical and/or psychological study can tell us about video games, I want to begin with a reversal and ask instead, what can video games tell us about rhetorical and/or psychological studies? In other words, why do politicians, the press, and even academics focus so much of their attention on the role that video games play in producing social violence?
I do what Rob Terrell has called a “symptomatic” criticism, which is to say that I am not that interested in the supposed truth of something, or what it is that a certain something represents, but rather I am interested in figuring out why, at any given point in space and time, a certain set of arguments or texts surfaces or crystallize around a particular issue. Video game violence is an obvious example. There are a lot of acts of celebrated violence going on in the world - from the War on Terror and the attacks against insurgents, to football and other violent contact supports, and then there’s the bizarre defense of abortion clinic bombings, and a host of Hollywood movies in which the bad guys get their explosive and bullet-ridden due, and yet it’s video games garnering the vast majority of attention. Why is this happeneing? Well, let’s take a look at a recent academic text, one that aggregates and presents a number of different theoretical approaches to the study of video games - Mark Wolf and Bernard Perron’s The Video Game Theory Reader.
Let me cherry-pick some quotes from the Reader that I think highlight two consistent and related tropes at work in the discussion of video games. I’ll start with the introduction to the book, in which a certain sense of training as mimicry is offered up in order to explain the uniqueness of the video game. On p. 11 Wolf and Perron write: “ And, apart from computer programming out of which it grew, the video game is the first truly algorithmic medium.”
Three pages later, while discussing definitional issues (ie., what makes a video game a video game), Wolf and Perron argue: “Of all the various approaches that have been taken in defining the video game, a few elements seem to appear persistently, under various names and descriptions. These elements are at the heart of what makes the video game a unique medium, and need to be addressed in any discussion of them. The most fundamental of these elements are: an algorithm, player activity, interface and graphics.”
The introduction goes on to offer a historical description of various developments in video games history and describes how different interfaces (which often include graphical representations) allow players (hence the player activity) to, in the words of Lev Manovich, “internalize the algorithm.”
Also at work, complimenting this internalization - or what we might also call a type of mimicry - is the recurrent theme of immersion. Most explicit with Alison McMahan’s contribution, immersion is that sense of being at work or at play within the medium of a particular game. Citing Janet Murray’s popular definition of immersion and arguing for a critical appreciation of the concept as it relates to three-dimensional video games, McMahon highlights the importance of immersion for the theoretical appreciation of the video game. She is not alone. Bob Rehak argues convincingly in his particularly worthwhile contribution that we should think of immersion as a sense of suture. And Marti Lahti contends in a later chapter that (p. 164): “immersion into the fictional world and blurring the distinction between the player and the game world are such central, acknowledged, and celebrated parts of video games’ pleasures…”
In fact, McMahan finds the term deployed so often that she begins by chastising its overly broad application, writing (p. 67): “The shift in design is indicative of an overall trend to make desktop video games feel more like virtual reality. My approach here is to reexamine our concept of immersion in video games and suggest that immersion has become an excessively vague, all-inclusive concept.”
And my final quote comes from Torben Grodal (p. 139), who blends both immersion and mimicry together in talking out the educational effects of the video game. He notes that video games “often demand rather detailed cognitive maps and motor skills, and playing therefore often requires extensive training of necessary skills. One of the reasons why video games are called games is precisely because the repetitive training of coping skills is an important element in many of those activities covered by the term ‘games’”.
And so on and so forth. Two related tropes then - mimicry and immersion - provide the means by which we are to understand the video game as an object of study or influence. But what makes these qualities so special and so important to the video game? In other words, what is it about the video game that calls such attention to the means by which we interact with media?
The not-so-hidden elephant here is the question of mimesis. Mimesis, that question of how we interact with and are constituted by communications media, is apparently brought into particularly stark relief by the video game. The obviousness of the importance of the video game interface, the exceptional divergence between different strategies for getting the player to internalize the algorithm. To a limited extent, the public controversy about video games seems to mirror Plato’s objection to the mimesis of his day. In his Republic, he argued against the immersion and imitation brought on by the Homer-style epic poets, going so far as to call for their banishment from the community as a precondition for rationally governed city-states. Today, the calls are a bit different, with conservative voices in congress and in the mainstream media maligning video games for their violent and lascivious content, as if the possibility of video game immersion represents such a unique and totalizing control over the subject that the content of the video game must be governed because one can maintain no sense of agency once exposed to its seductive interface. The point is that different media have, at different points in time, always been denounced as evil forms of seduction, that rob citizens of their agency and force them to do evil.
Take books as an historical example. Books were, if you believe Victor Hugo’s priest Frollo, the destroyer of the church and a bringer of ruin. Indeed, when de Sade was writing, his books were considered to hold such sway that they had to be destroyed and its author prevented from writing, even while incarcerated. For the Nazis, books deemed Jewish or Bolshevik had to be purged for the spiritual good of the German Volk. And yet today, thanks to our familiarity with more technological advanced media, books are so terribly banal, so simple, that we rarely make much of a fuss regarding their demonic or corrupting potential (apart from some of our more strident evangelicals). Now the blame over social corruption and degredation is being foisted upon video games, as the new kid on the block, because for so many in the press and in politics - and hell, even in academia - video games are just plain new, and that means they give us new insight.
But the insight they should gives us isn’t that mimesis matters uniquely with video games - the studies simply don’t show that - but rather that mimesis is more obvious with video games, and we should be taking that obviousness and realizing that mimesis has always been at work. As Plato noted with disdain, it was at work as far back as Homeric poetry. It is at works in our books, and our news programs, and our friendships, and our sports, and yes, our video games. But the obviousness of mimesis in these video games should inspire us to turn our critical gaze and our behavioral studies not on video games, but on those other, more common interfaces. This, sadly, is not what’s going on, but it should be.
How else can we explain the lack of nuance in these studies, say between games that function via third person cameras and identification with a singular hero figure and those that place the player into the role of the game’s subject, as with first-person shooters? It isn’t just that moraThe problem isn’t just the moral outrage, and the bizarre effects that this outrage has on thinking through the reasons for these studies, but rather that the question of moral content has provided an alibi for a lack of the more complicated discussion of mechanism. Video games are, in effect, a scapegoat, something posited as a new force for the inducement of violence, when in reality video games concern themselves with the stuff of which society is already made. They are themselves already mimetic - they just get blamed more for it.