Final Essay

1.     With reference to specific examples, and notions of morals and ethics, consider the role of censorship in relation to a specified area of Digital practice.

By: Kinga Makowka

In this essay I will be discussing what effect do Games have on people. Whether it’s good, bad or just no effect at all. Many people think that games make people violent, and actually make them go on a killing spree. Just because something has a bit of violence in it doesn’t mean you need to act the same way, there is a reason why there is a thing such as censorship, it’s to decide whether a content of the game or movie is appropriate for the certain audience. Violent games usually get a +18 rating. Some may imagine that people that are 18 or over are smart enough to know that running around and smacking people with a hammer isn’t a good idea.

But let’s start with understanding what censorship is. The word comes from, Latin, censere which means asses. An official Oxford Dictionary definition says: ‘Censor (noun) an official who examines books, films, news etc. that are about to be published and suppresses any parts that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.’

There is a company called BBFC - British Board of Film Classification. And their job is to make sure that the games we see on the shelves are classified well, and all the content is appropriate for the target audience. There are seven classifications: U - suitable for all, PG - parental guidance, 12A - cinema release suitable for 12 years and over, 12 - video release suitable for 12 years and over, 15 - suitable only for 15 years and older, 18 - suitable only for adults and R18 - Adult works for licensed premises only. The way this works is, there is a person either watching or playing it, and considering factors like discrimination, drugs, horror, imitable behaviours, language, nudity, sex, sexual violence, theme and violence when making decisions. On top of that they also consider context, the tone and impact, how it makes the audience feel etc. If the person reviewing isn’t sure about their decision they ask someone else to also review it and so on, till they all come to a decision, the movie or a game will not be classified until they all agree.

Digitalspy.co.uk did a survey on whether people follow the age restrictions on games or not and ‘71% of gaming consumers ignore video game ratings’ this is due to some people’s age and lack of dependants, some readers said they wouldn’t want their children playing content sensitive material and others said that ‘age ratings are pointless without parental education’. A lot of individuals agree with the last statement because in the known cases of teens being violent it always seems to shine through that it was the parents who lacked the time to spend with their children, and to explained what’s right or wrong.

But what about what’s politically acceptable or a threat to security. It seems to be acceptable for a young person to decide if they want to go and risk their life at actual war, but it is illegal for that person to play a war game, drive or even have an alcoholic drink. Apparently it isn’t in any way harmful to go and see the image that no person should ever have to see, people actually dying, actual violence and the worst of all actually killing someone yourself... at the age of 16. A lot of people come back from the war addicted to warfare and become a threat to security. But it is harmful to fictionally do it with no further warfare addiction. Many people do not see the logic in this.

The question that should be asked right now, is why do people blame the violence on games, not religion or culture for example? Many many serial killers, when asked what drove them to kill so many women and children in such a painful way, they answer with ‘God told me to do it’. Donald Henry Gaskins Jr, killed between 8 and 200 men and women, the actual number isn’t known. One of the quotes is ‘ I have walked the same path as God; by taking lives and making others afraid, I became God’s equal.’ Another example is Peter William Sutcliffe, known as The Yorkshire Ripper. Convicted of killing 13 women and attempting to murder seven others. Claimed he was being guided by the voice of God. Richard Ramirez known as the Night Stalker, known to kill between thirteen and sixteen people but the real number is believed to be a lot higher than this. He worships Satan and longs to sit next to him in Hell. His crimes meant to show Satan that he is just as evil as Jack the Ripper. Anatoly Onoprienko, ranks as one of Europe’s worst murderers with over 52 victims, claims he was commanded by God. Why don’t people try to blame the church? Why don’t we send it to a company that decides what content should be viewed by children or not, because ideas like those don’t just come to people overnight. But most of those killings happened a long before gaming was popular, so people actually tried to find out what drove them to do such things. They decided that they actually talk to God which is a ridiculous idea so there must be something else. From there they figured out that there is so many logical explanations to these killings, like this persons mental health, maybe they suffered from schizophrenia or a multiple personality disorder or other illness which could perfectly explain why they did this. In almost all cases, the reason behind the serial killers motives is due to them suffering abuse as a child.. this can be mental, physical or sexual. Which then leads to misplaced morals.

When people suffer a loss of a close person it helps them deal with it if they have someone or something to blame. And the problem is that instead of searching for what actually caused people to do such horrible things, they blame it on the first thing they can think of and that is usually the games, because most of them do have a little violence in them. But let’s not fool ourselves even the news has negativity, to be honest that’s all the news is about... showing people how bad and violent this world has become, so we might as well blame the news for making people being violent.

A lot of arguments and unexplained accusations is going on around the ‘Manhunt’ video game. Manhunt is a stealth- based psychological horror video game released in 2003. Rated at 18 because of it’s violence. It caused a lot of controversy around it because of one teenager who happened to like the game. Yes, a seventeen year old Warren Leblanc pleaded guilty to the murder of a fourteen year old Stefan Pakeerah in February 2004. Immediately after the murder parents of both children blamed the game for what just happened and did everything in their power to take the games off the shelves. Giselle Pakeerah, Stefan’s mother ‘Let’s get the things off the shelves’. Looks to me like the parents are denying that they were at fault, why did he have the game in the first place? The game has a rating of 18 for a reason, it means not to be played by anyone under that age, the only way to obtain the game would be for the parents to get it for him. Reason being because the store can be fined £5000 as well as a 6 months prison sentence (for the employee) for selling such a game to underage kids.

‘Rockstar Games is a leading publisher of interactive entertainment geared towards mature audiences and markets its games responsibly, targeting advertising and marketing only to adult consumers ages 18 and older.’ A spokesperson for the BBFC also said that the game had been given an 18 certificate which proves that the game should not have been played by Warren in first place therefore you cannot blame the game for the crime. It was also the boards opinion that ‘ there were no issues of harm attached to the game and there was no evidence directly linking the playing of games with violent behaviour.

There is another case, this one from 2007 that caused a lot of accusations and arguments. It was a case of a 16 year old Danny Petric. Danny’s parents forbid him from playing the “Halo 3” game and after finding out he was sneaking out to play it locked it up in a lockbox. The family got into a big argument over it, and later that night Danny used his own dad’s handgun to shoot both of his parents. It was the attorney who came up with this line of defence and gave this statement: "We have a young man who's normal, a normal young man until he starts viewing video games," along with finding a doctor Phil Chalmers who also claims that video games is one of the 10 reasons that make young people kill. Some may say it’s pretty weird that there is so many scientists doing years of research on hundreds of people proving that games don’t make people violent, but there is one doctor who says otherwise and everyone will believe him over all those years of research. The articles about this case caused a lot of arguments in the comment section and it was many people’s opinion that the dad, Mark Petric, who is also blaming everything on the video games... was actually the one to blame. "I'm gonna fight them. They put weapons in the hands of our children that teaches them to murder, and that killing is okay," said Petric. Many people find it ironic since the weapon his son used to shoot them both was his own! He was the one who left the weapon as well as the ammunition unattended around his child. It can also be argued he made a mistake raising his son around guns because usually parents would not only keep it locked up so no accidents can possibly occur but also explain to their children that it’s wrong to use the guns. But again if he would think it’s wrong to harm anyone why would he have a gun at first place. To sum up this is just a perfect example of people blaming others for their mistakes.

A lot of people are actually against gaming because ‘Videogames change your brain!’.

But a very interesting point was made on this very topic from the University of Wisconsin psychologist C. Shawn Green. He studies how electronic games affect abilities. Video games do change your brain, but so does learning to read, riding a bike or playing a piano, which all have been proven to change your brain's physical structure. This is an example where people hear something, take it out of context and use it to ruin something good with it.’  

Yes, something good. As it turns out many scientists who study how games affect us and they all come to one conclusion - that in fact people generally gain certain skills from gaming, more than you might think. They compared gamers to people who have never played to see how different those people were, not in how aggressive or violent they are but how the games improve your decision making skills, gamers make decisions 25% faster without sacrificing accuracy. Other study shows that the most advanced gamers can make choices and act on them up to six times a second - four times faster than those who generally do not play games. University of Rochester’s researchers say that ‘practiced game players can pay attention to more than six things at once without getting confused, compared with the four that someone can normally keep in mind’. There is a three- year study of 491 middle school students that found that the more children played computer games the higher their scores on a standardized test of creativity - regardless of race, gender, or the kind of game they played. The list of positives skills gaming gives you greatly out matches the negatives towards gaming.  

There is a cognitive neuroscientist Daphne Bavelier at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, who has been studying the effect of action video games on brain’s plasticity and learning.

Professor Bavelier’s lab has produced seminar papers showing that playing first person point action games improves things like perception, attention, cognition and to our surprise, vision. A lot of her work includes describing violent action games; she claims that they are actually very beneficial! ‘These are not the games you would think are mind- enhancing’, it turns out that the violent action games, which are the type of games that worry people the most, have the strongest beneficial effect on the brain. Dr. Bavelier also said that ‘It happens that all the games that have the good learning effect happen to be violent. We don’t know whether the violence is important or not’

There is a very interesting interview for Medgadget, where professor Bavelier is explaining how all of this actually works. They turned their study to very low- level vision, like acuity and contrast sensitivity, and the effect that action video games had on them. They found that people that actually played action games had much better vision. Also interestingly, even those with normal visual acuity could improve their ability to detect contrast and make sense of visual clutter by playing those kinds of games. Medgadget said that ‘Many action video games are very violent... Do you think the type of video game matters for the learning benefit?’ To which professor Bavelier answered that the type of game certainly matters. She says that in simple games like Tetris we don’t get the same enhancement in attentional skills. Apparently there are a number of game components that are specific to first and third person shooter games that seem to be key in improving perception and attention, but whether violence is a key ingredient remains unknown. But because action games don’t actually have to be violent, because most action games emphasize precise aiming, control over where you go, and need for divided attention, professor Bavelier claims it is doable to achieve the same goals in a nonviolent games. She came up with this scenario: ‘ You are on another planet, with the mission of rescuing all sick animals. You need to shoot medicine at them in order to save them. Different diseases require different medicine, so this emphasizes problem solving and control. Furthermore, if sick animals touch you, you would lose health.’ By this she is planning on recreating the same action game dynamics in a non-violent context and to achieve this is working with a team of game designers.

The fact that people are accusing gaming for the violent crimes the people who play commit has never been backed up with actual evidence its all just theories and wild accusations. Due to the way that the human brain works people will look for something to blame when anything as bad as a shooting in a local school happens it just so happened that they decided to blame games.

"This is not rocket science. When a kid who has never killed anyone in his life goes on a rampage and looks like the Terminator, he's a video gamer.” - Jack Thompson.

On the other hand the statement games do not make violent killers but in fact they improve certain brain functions in people this, has been proven by Daphne Bavelier she has done may test which have concluded that the brain functions such as creativity, decision making and perception increased as well as the ability to make decisions increasing by 25% without sacrificing accuracy. There are obviously downsides to gaming such as depression in young men and obesity in some gamers. However thanks to testing proof has been given that advantages of gaming greatly outweigh the disadvantages.  

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