Nothing inspires confidence like a politician making a declaration about the content of videogames.
It appears the latest reason to namedrop children’s most dangerous pastime is their incorrigible habit of containing knives, according to our Dear Leader. PM Gordon Brown has declared that as part of his total ban on carrying knives, he wants to see blades disappearing from games too. He explained to The Sun,
“I am very worried about video and computer games. No one wants censorship or an interfering State. But the industry has some responsibility to society and needs to exercise that.”
It’s an interesting logic. I’m fairly sure that bazookas, semi-automatic rifles and Land Shark Guns are all reasonably illegal in boring old real life, but they are being allowed to feature in games unhindered. However, the contents of everyone’s kitchen drawers have got to go.
It is of course a reaction to the tragic series of stabbings that featured heavily in the UK news over the last couple of months. Banning people from carrying knives around with them would seem, and maybe I’m overstepping my editorial privileges here, fairly reasonable. But just once, could someone citing videogames at least know one to reference in relation to their issue?
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Hrm..
So…
Knives in games – bad
Killing with knives in real life – good..way to get knives out of video those darned murder simulators?
So…
Ridiculous logic – Bad
Politicians – Good… at using ridiculous logic to achieve abstract objectives that leave them tons of real issues to never fix?
Politicians need job security too?
Last year I was prompted to write an article on this by the renewing tendency to blame games for all society’s ills. At the time there was debate in Germany about prison sentences for those that make games containing “cruel violence”.
What the government fails to look at is actual scientific research. I have consulted a friend of mine who is a prominent psychological researcher in the field of mental illness and he confirms that whilst violent games do raise adrenaline they do not casue violent behaviour.
They just don’t understand that a game that has an 18 certificate from the BBFC is NOT FOR KIDS.
Certain sectors of society are all to ready to point the finger in ignorance, happier to have a scapegoat than a workable solution. Banning video nasties in the eighties didn’t stop people being crap to each other then and doing the same to violent games won’t help now.
And that is what grinds my gears…
I really just fail to see why everyone blames video games. Are we so frail of a race that we allow media to change our perspectives on right vs wrong? Hrm I answer my own question.
Then again who wants the government telling parents what kinds of standards to use while raising their kids.
So it’s either blame whoever raised the person, or blame the next easiest target, media. Well, there are an awful lot of parents, and parents are scary .. so forget that.
Or we could just actually blame the person who did whatever they did and not anyone else. Whatever the motive or reasoning, they still did what they did. Why would media even be an issue here? You don’t blame someone else when you get a speeding ticket for driving too fast..
People need to just own up to what they do, it’s really that simple.
Seems a student can’t get away from politics in this day and age…though that may have something to do with me studying it at Uni…hmmm
Anyway blogged my brief thoughts here.
I think rather than age ratings we should have some kind of inteligence rating system. i’ve disliked the current system ever since i was stopped from buying the mighty boosh because i didnt have an ID card (we dont have fucking ID cards)
eskrima fighter…it’d be interesting. the winner goes to the hospital!
Then again who wants the government telling parents what kinds of standards to use while raising their kids.
naw, that’s not how it works. they want the government to tell other parents – the irresponsible ones – how to behave. besides if it weren’t for this stuff people would realize that politicians actually have a tremendous lack of control over daily life and would probably be busy stringing them up by their own guts.
anecdote: i did watch a woman in a game store buy gta: san andreas for her 10 year old son when that dropped. the game clerk said several times “uh this is really violent you know theft of autos and carjackings and whatnot” and she was “oh it’s what he wants.”
Jives: Passport? Driving Licence? Student Card? Just about anything else with your DOB and photo on it? Most people have something appropriate in their wallet.
How else are you supposed to certify someone’s age? The 16-21 age group is the most difficult to judge by eye. I’m 20 and get offered half-fares on buses, and my barely 18 year old brother is almost never asked for ID because he looks well over 21.
Sorry, Mr. Walker, but why are you linking to The Sun on this? Were other papers insufficiently alarmist?
I doubt anything will come of this. All he actually said was that he was worried about games and called for them to show responsibility. It’s cheap political point scoring and probably nothing more. Wake me when there’s actual legislation, or when the BBFC announce new policies or something.
If we’re going to take knives out of games, we should replace them with loaves of salami.
Actually, you might be surprised. I used to work at a club in Glasgow that catered to the metal/goth crowd. One night, a young guy in a black leather trenchcoat, after passing through security, turned back to one of the doormen and said, “Oh, I suppose you’ll want this, won’t you?” He then proceeded to pull a full size, double handed sword from beneath his coat.
I can only assume (hope) that he’d been involved in some kind of LARP or battle recreation….
Yeah.
Well.
Glasgow. :D
Being a yank from across the pond, I don’t understand all this talk of “Labour” vs. “Conservative”, however, I would like to suggest to all that felt enough motivation to post a comment to largely like minded people to actually write those in power that claim to represent you.
P.S. The guy that tried to mug me in Dublin used a broken bottle…how would banning knives have helped me? Although, now that I think about, he probably did play videogames, as he (fortunately) couldn’t throw a punch worth a damn…
Double Dragon didn’t cause gang wars in London.
The quote is entirely correct, though, the industry does have a responsibility to some extent. Whether it’s the one Gordon describes is another matter.
Not only is Mr. Brown’s idea completely fucktarded, but it is extremely bizarre. The questions I have for those of you living in the UK are:
How does such a person gain such prominence in one of the richest nations on earth?
Are the elections completely fixed like they are here in the US?
I know I know, look at our guy. I’m going to go stab somebody now to vent my frustrations…
By being in the party that was elected, then taking over the job of the previous guy whilst the party is still in power – changing the manifesto upon which they were elected and refusing to hold a new election because he knows he’d lose. Then claiming it’s because he’d win – great logic.
Ugh.
The Sun?
just for shits and giggles:
i’m fundamentally puzzled by the idea of game companies taking moral responsibility for making violent games. we would not expect the same of someone who writes nothing but murder mysteries (even those in which the evil killer escapes rather than facing punishment), and i was under the impression that “natural born killers = obscenity/incitement” died in the 90s.
(i don’t know if i’d call even your generic fps amoral but that’s another story for another day. crysis is most certainly about human relationships at its end, if during your relationship to most people is watching them being snatched and/or throwing them off of buildings/cliffs.)
Just to point out – German-style censorship results in the same games with slight reskinning, and/or removal or recoloring of visual effects. It does not promote creative development of less violent game designs.
Personally I feel that violence in media should be *more* graphic. If game/movie/tv violence showed the real consequences of, e.g., shooting someone in the face, I think some people would be significantly less likely to do it.
i think the presumption that people murder each other because of games – or any kind of entertainment – is deeply misguided. or rather, based on a hope that violence could be curbed via changing the entertainment landscape than something that runs far deeper and is based on basic human incentives – mates, status, reputation, revenge – that can’t be engineered out of the monkey, as it were.
Ok, I’m not from the UK so I probably missed what this is exactly about, but what I’m getting from this is:
1) Gangs are stabbing eachother to death.
2) Video games are popular.
3) Video games have knives.
4) Children play video games.
Now, if 1 is true, I doubt 4 is a directly related problem. If kids ARE stabbing eachother, a game sure as fuck isn’t prompting them all. People need to understand that playing a game about something isn’t going to force kids to do it. In fact, I’m sure the percentage is exactly spot on, if not lower, than kids who watch violent movies/read violent books/etc.
As to kids getting games they shouldn’t, that’s both the fault of morons selling games to kids that they shouldn’t, and moron parents buying games they shouldn’t because they’re too lazy to read the labels.
My girlfriend has four kids; one almost seven, triplet three year olds. I play games with the eldest all the time — attentive and watchful parenting is the key to making sure they arent seeing shit they shouldn’t. I even played Team Fortress 2 with him in the room, but i explained what was happening, and talked with him about how you can’t do that stuff in real life.
Kids aren’t stupid, they just need people to talk with them, to understand what they’re thinking, and what they see going on.
I’m not exactly happy about Brown’s comments here, but they’re still not as bad as the alarmist “games are responsible for all crime” stuff that Cameron trotted out on the issue last autumn.
slightly altered, but no less relevant, i quote Stuck Mojo on this: “A knife can not be held responsible for killing a person, no more than a shovel can be held responsible for digging a ditch. Both are only tools, and have no will of their own”. The point being, make a big fuss and ban knives, fine. Then a different weapon is selected, and the killing continues. How about the government has a crack at fixing the source of all the killing, which as we all know is not videogame culture, rock music, drugs, (insert scapegoat here), etc. but rather apathetic, frustrated, ignored, marginalised and ignorant generations that have been bred and brainwashed into believing the concept that killing each other over minor perceived insults, pride, frustration or just plain clan warfareis the right thing to do,when really it is no more civilised than it is in developing countries where it is called genocide, and yet still nothing is done about it. Why? Because there’s no profit in it.
Whew. Rant over. It just vexes me that yet again the powers that be completely miss the point and look for someone to blame, rather than looking for a solution.
so how does one blunt an honor culture?
(it just struck me the gta games, at least the 3d ones, have all been set within honor cultures. it makes for good drama.)
Even IF they could manage to stop the sale of these murder simulators…. theres always mods and other free sources of killing happy times. Hell, I’ve been killing stuff for sport for I cant remember how long, and I’m yet to murder someone (its too much trouble to deal with to be honest. hiding bodies, investigations and all that. geez.)
The Germans are gonna have a hell of a time in 20 years or so when every family has a robot, and their youth think its ok to blow up/dismember/fire plasma rifles at them….because they can do it in their games :)
@malkav11:
I tend to agree, but with a slight caveat. An “anything goes” approach can work (Scandinavia is a good example), but even then, some people are going to watch or play graphic media and think “Yeah, that’s cool, I should try that.” because that’s just the way some people are wired in the head. It’s a tiny minority of people, sure, but that doesn’t stop them from screwing up everything for everyone else…
Though to be honest, I think we’re a long way from having videogames truly represent violence and killing in an emotionally realistic way. Has there ever been a videogame where the game has tried to make you feel guilty or remorseful over killing someone? I’m struggling to find an example.
[HUUUGE SPOILER] Planescape is the closest I can come – I felt pretty guilty about spending all that time with your party, only to get them all killed at the end of the game. [/HUUUGE SPOILER]
But their deaths weren’t through an active choice of the player to kill them – it was an inadvertent consequence of those characters’ choice to accompany you, so I’m not sure it’s really comparable…
People who really deep down want to kill people are probably going to, whatever their media influences. But having realistically graphic violence might, for example, dissuade horsing around with dangerous items in ways that risk getting someone injured or killed by accident.
I dunno. I just find the reaction of making violence *less* consequential by removing the gore et al to be a little odd.
Mind if I ask what you mean by this Iain? I’m not doubting you, it’s just I never got that impression about their attitudes towards violence. More liberal towards nudity/sex perhaps, but violence? (Maybe I’m just used to my Norwegian mother complaining about violence on American TV. I suppose things may have changed..)
Ah, but they’ll have the upper hand during the zombie apocalypse.
@Pace:
If I recall correctly, Sweden was one of the first countries to pass Manhunt 2 for sale. Totally uncut, didn’t bat an eyelid. I think the rest of Scandinavia followed suit on that one, too.
Scandinavia has the reputation (at least in the UK) of being far more socially progressive than the rest of Europe – kind of veering a little off topic here, but it is illustrative of my point; I’ve seen documentaries about how they deal with violent crime in Sweden, the one I most remember being about child killers (that being children that kill other children, not adults that kill children). After the Jamie Bulger incident in the UK a few years ago, the two child killers were carefully hidden away and had their identities changed to protect them from being exposed by the tabloids and being torn apart by an angry mob – and they’ve got to live in fear of being exposed for the rest of their lives. The approach for similar crimes in Sweden? Don’t chuck them into a children’s institution – completely reintegrate them with society and make them face up to their crime and the effect it has had on the community. In the long run it does less damage, because everyone can see how this kind of tragedy can devastate communities. Seems like a much more sensible way of doing things to me.
There was also this story about a prison in Norway that does such a good job rehabilitating offenders that they don’t want to leave. The complete opposite of the UK’s “chuck away the key and let ‘em rot” mentality to criminal justice.
The problem with violent crime in the UK isn’t anything to do with the games we may or may not play – it’s about attitudes – about wanting to blame other people for bad things, instead of taking some responsibility for themselves.
This is why I want to move to Scandinavia. Even if the beer is nearly £7 a pint…
gordon brown, texture like sun
that is all
Indeed. Another fancy Scandinavian perk? Paternity leave! On the downside? Byzantine drunk driving laws. And, as you say, absurd alcohol tax. (And there is that odd obsession with trolls..)
Why does Mr. Brown look as if he’s cocking an ‘air shotgun’?