Free Fun Inc. by Tom Chatfield Page A

refrain that comes up again and again within the industry: responsible design is about ensuring strict adherence to ratings guidelines, and about knowing your audience. But it’s also all about your audience knowing you. As Michael Rawlinson, general manager of the world’s longest-established trade association representing video games publishers (the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association), put it to me: ‘There does seem to be a point with video games that parents are seen as having no responsibility, and everything is up to the industry. That is ridiculous. We need to encourage parents, and everyone else, to learn more about gaming and play their part. And I think that is happening, as we see the notion of gaming as part of the family lifestyle becoming normalised.’ Some sectors of the games industry are extremely well designed for use by children; others cater for an ever-widening diversity of adult tastes. It’s just as misleading to think of all modern games as essentially children’s toys as it would be to think of all films as suitable for children.
    Despite the almost universal prevalence of age ratings, the relationship between violence in games and violence in life is one debate that’s unlikely to die down any time soon. And this is in part because it’s something that is only too easy to imagine in terms that go well beyond what we’re now used to in other media forms. Consider a game like those in the bestselling Medal of Honor series: first-person experiences in which absorbing, interactive environments, realised with ultra-realistic graphics and sounds, evoke warfare in such detail that it can virtually be smelt. The weapons on the screen look and sound exactly like the real things, and are seen as if through the eyes of the soldier a player controls, ducking and diving their way through the campaigns of the Second World War, slaughtering enemies as they go. It’s easy enough to understand why this kind of interactive pursuit is seen as a level beyond video-nasties in the corruption-of-youth stakes, and it generates a number of intransigent questions that mustn’t be brushed aside even by the most ardent defenders of gaming. What exactly is the relationship between game violence and real-world violence? And is the likelihood that a certain number of inappropriately young people will play certain games so awful that these games should not be allowed to exist?
    As far as the first of these questions is concerned, scientific studies can often seem confusing to the point of contradiction, which should come as no surprise to students of any of the media/violence controversies of the past half-century. In 2007, however, one unusually authoritative paper appeared in the peer-reviewed US journal Psychiatric Quarterly (entitled ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: A Meta-analytic Review of Positive and Negative Effects of Violent Video Games’) that provided hitherto unprecedented clarity on the issue. Its author, Dr Christopher John Ferguson, an assistant professor of psychology at Texas A&M International University, set out to compare every article published in a peer-reviewed journal between 1995 and April 2007 that in some way investigated the effect of playing violent video games on some measure of aggressive behaviour. A total of seventeen published studies matched these criteria – and Ferguson’s conclusions were unexpectedly unequivocal. ‘Once corrected for publication bias,’ he reported, ‘studies of video game violence provided no support for the hypothesis that violent video game-playing is associated with higher aggression.’ Moreover, he added, the question ‘do violent games cause violence?’ is itself flawed in that ‘it assumes that such games have only negative effects and ignores the possibility of positive effects’ such as the possibility that violent games allow ‘catharsis’ of a kind in their players.
    This, for many people, is sufficiently radical