Lita Gemini

So as I wrote before, I spent my weekend at FuturePlay, the academic games conference at MSU. Overall it was a very positive experience which I enjoyed a lot. It's important to note that this is an academic conference so most people there were academics. So it was hard to make any "industry" connections there, which was a bit of a shame. Today in particular I tried to get face time in with anyone that I could. As a result I'm included in an interview on a podcast... more on that later.

I'm going to include a wordy write-up about the polictics and censorship panel, because I think it was interesting and because I also promised to take some notes for gamepolitics. Because I'm not a journalist I may swap tenses a few times in this writeup, but I'll try to report without bias at first just so you can see what-all was said during the debate.

The moderator of the panel was Steve Wildman from MSU. He opened up by saying a few words in discussion of the social and historical context of this dialogue. Every new media has basically been challenged in one way or another--print, movies, television--and this debate on interactive entertainment shows similarities to that debate. The debate in today's society is the regulation of video games: should games be more strictly content-regulated, and should there be laws written to govern this? He introduced the panelists, and the order in which they were going to speak.

Professor Henry Jenkins of MIT spoke first, and addressed the difficulty of that position: he had to rebut a proposal that the other speakers had not yet actually presented. He also explained that this debate, he felt, was unnessicarily polarizing. Games and their place in society are a complex issue, and it's not actually true that there are "two sides" to the games and censorship debate. It's better seen, he says, as a nuanced debate there should be more open dialogues about.

Gaps in the research exist often, because different methods of studying game impact on players result in different findings. However, the claims made by activists who advocate the censorship of games almost always exceeds the claims made by the research. There is what he calls a "moral panic" about games and their role in society; adults are easily confused by new media that they don't understand, feel "disarmed" by it, and want to regulate it because of that.

He went on to comment about Rockstar games, and how he is very troubled by their tactics. Rockstar, in his words, is "fragging its own," by creating controversy in order to stir up publicity, which sells games. This is not to say that Grand Theft Auto is not an important game, but it is damaging to those who advocate games to have to stand up and defend Rockstar in specific. He also mentions, that, with great regret, he actually agrees with Jack Thompson on one point: this is the wrong time to release a game that would use school bullying as a central theme. He finds this as a transparent effort to create more controversy and, really, free advertising for Rockstar. On the other hand, he thinks the controversy over Hot Coffee (what he calls the "Hot Cocoa Incident") is overblown, though Rockstar's tactics in lying in response to the initial allegations against them were despicable.

He thinks the current ratings system is not enough to decide which games children should access. A "letter grade" can't distill the complexity of content and the issues this brings about. More disclosure, and more parental involvement, is a better solution than a basing lawmaking around a ratings system which, since it is based on other types of media which are very different from games, is not sufficient. He belives that children should not play Grand Theft Auto. Coming to the subject of teenagers this is more difficult: some teens can play it, some can't, and the parents of those teens are better judges than the flat policy dictated by law.

He believes that many games today trivialize violence. But he also believes that the video game as a medium is still new, and if we want games to have a better, stronger, more mature depiction of violence as they mature as a medium, it would be very wrong now to censor them so they should not contain violence at all.

The second speaker was another free speech advocate, Dr. Clay Calvert from the Penn State Center for the First Amendment. He discussed once again the history of the media "blame game," putting a historical context on the debate being held today. He then explained the situation surrounding the law just passed in California, and the political spectacle around it. "To much fanfare," the law was discussed and shown a display of bipartisan support, and he feels that it's a terrible move for Governer Swartzenegger to jump on a "liberal bandwagon" and police content and promote censorship, just because the games industry is such a soft target. He tells a story: the Girl Scouts were stood behind Governer Swartzenegger when he stood up to discuss the bill, as a demonstration perhaps of the children he was protecting from this violent media. The Scouts were ushered out of the room at one point, and then a reel of clips of the violent content in these games was shown, perhaps to horrify the audience. Then, after the showing of the damning footage, the young girls were ushered back in.

He discusses the vaugeness in the language of these policies. He mentions that the main reason they are shot down by the First Amendment is they are very hard to explain or back up. What is "violence"? The laws try to define it, but they do a poor job. For example, the California law says that an act is considered more violent if the victim is "unconscious," but, is a computer game character anyone "conscious" at all? Some courts have gotten around this by trying to equate violence with obscenity. Others believe that the depicted violence may be an incitement to violence, would would qualify it as "fighting words" which do not have constitutional protection. In order to use this defense, it has to be proven in some way that depicting violence incites violence, and this has not been proved satisfactory.

The first speaker to speak in favor of the law was Keven Saunders, a law professor from MSU. When he took the podium, he admitted that he knew this would be a tough crowd, and he knew he was here, in a sense, to "rain on our parade" in discussion of the topic. He states that it is not his intent to prevent adults from accessing adult media, nor to prevent adults from designing that media. Nothing in the law prevents the sale of games to adults. He himself plays games, but he believes in "good games" like SimCity that don't do harm to children.

He discusses something the last speaker mentioned, which is the arguments that anti-game activists use to claim that games are not protected by the First Amendment. The first such argument, that games are not "speech" at all, was dismissed in court: games are an art form and art forms constitute free speech. But is gameplay itself protected--is the act of playing a game to be considered speech? That in and of itself is still unclear. He touches on the "violence equates to obscenity" arguement, but then says that has also been dismissed in court. The third argument, the most persuasive and the one he stands by, is that violent games actually do harm to children. Since nueroscientists can mark how games actually effect the brain, that effect to the brain consitutes a "harm" being done, and if harm is done by a form of speech, that form of speech is not protected.

Dr. Craig Anderson from Iowa State researches the effects of violent games on children, and was the next speaker. He begins by saying that he has no opinion that he will take sides on about the law itself. His preferred solution to all problems is education, and not nessicarily law.

Nonetheless, he argues that violent games harm youth, and the results are very clear in his research. Self-regulation, by the industry, hasn't worked in keeping these games out of the hands of children, so it may be time to consider some sort of public policy solution. Science only constitutes one aspect of public policy, and public policy is also determined by social morals and political backgrounds. But the science itself shows that in modeling aggressive behavior in games, aggressive behavior in young subjects is, overall, increased. He feels there is a very strong correltation between this; stronger than the correlation between other known risk factors and their associated results (such as asbestos exposure and cancer).

He says that all six major health organizations back this claim: violence in games leads to aggressive behavior in children. In order for this correlation to be casually dismissed, one would have to believe that all of those organizations are wrong, and that many known standard methods of research that made these findings, are also wrong. He doesn't think science should be the only factor (he emphasizes this) but he feels that the science is strong enough to back some kind of public policy.

The next speaker was Jason Della Rocca, from the Independant Game Designers Association. He starts his speech by presenting statistics (most of which gamers have all seen before). Only 12% of games are M-rated (compared to 55% of movies being R-rated). 90% of game purchases occur with an adult present or are made by an adult. The average age of a gamer today is age 29. And, the crime rate among youth is dropping considerably, with 2003 being the lowest recorded youth crime rate of all time in this country. All of these serve his argument that the problem just isn't as big as the activists say it must be.

The game industry, he claims, is challenged on all fronts for many reasons. Games are not seen as art. Games are also seen as "for kids" despite the fact that many intelligent adults are players. The policy-makers are not gamers, and they are fairly clueless sometimes as to what games actually contain. It's hard for the gaming industry to put across a perception that they are doing good, since the media seems to only want to cover what is bad about games, and not what might be good about them. The game industry is very bad at doing its own PR.

He believes the "medium is the message," and there is no real objective way to just consider games to be good or bad without looking at what kinds of things we think are good, or bad. Are they too violent, too isolationist, or do they "rot your brain"? It's a spectrum that's too complex to cover with one over-arching policy.

The final commentator was John Lazlet, the Chief of Staff to the Michigan senator who proposed the Michigan gaming law. He discusses, first of all, how political pressure operates. Politics is very reactive, and waits for some kind of pressure from society before acting on an issue. This bill, he says, had been in draft for a long time, but until the more recent controversies over game content there was no pressure to approve it. Now that it has been approved, it was totally bi-partisan; there were no "politics" involved since all parties agreed upon it. He thinks that games are dangerous because they have a tendancy to "stick" in the mind. He mentions that he's played games himself. A game like virtual pinball can get sort of stuck in your brain, such that when you go to sleep, you are still thinking a lot about the images in that game. He feels the same way about games that include violence.

He uses the rest of his time to show photographs of an automobile accident in Michigan that was caused, intentionally, by players of a particular game (In this case, True Crime: Streets of LA). Over a slide show of images of destroyed cars, he mentions the case itself: the perpetrator was paid an amount of money, on a dare from his friend, to steal his sister's car and use it to hit and destroy another car in imitation of actions in the game. He says that if games effect even a small amount of people in such devistating ways, it is sickening, and it is the job of the government to regulate such things so that no more people are victimized in this manner. He doesn't think this is too much to ask: if he is right, and games do harm children and their minds, then lives would be saved, and if he is wrong, then the children will just "go play baseball."

There was time thereafter for general panel argument, and questions from the audience. The first question came from a panelist about another topic, Brenda Brathwaite, the games and sex guru who was very informed on this subject and had a specific barrage of questions. Has there been studies done about how many gaming kids go to Harvard? Or is Michigan only tracking how many gaming kids get in car accidents instead? She believes the gaming law in Michigan is profoundly flawed, since it uses "human on human" violence as its basis for what is unacceptable (meaning, for example, that robot on human violence would be perfectly fine according to the law, no matter how gruesomely depicted). She emphasizes again that parents are usually present when games are bought, so the law is attacking the wrong problem.

Professor Jenkins agrees with her also commenting that studies show that most perpetrators of violent crimes do not consume a lot of media. There are other, stronger correlations with crime; they are just harder to regulate. Lazlet believes that may be true, but argues that if the government can regulate something with any correlation, then it should do that. Anderson speaks out again in defense of his science, and there is some open argument with the panelists and the audience that discusses other things that correlate with violent crime. Anderson doesn't believe that a game can turn a normal person into a "maniac." He is only suggesting that it is one factor, and that there is a correlation.

Unfortunately the panel ran quite long, so there wasn't a lot of time for open discussion. (And it was difficult to take notes during the open discussion when it got more heated.) I had the opportunity today to discuss this slightly with Professor Jenkins, Ms. Brathwaite, designer and keynote speaker Ernest Adams, and a few others during a podcast recorded by ThunderbirdSix. No idea when it will go up but you might check it out when it does. A recording of the panel conversation, also, will eventually be available on the Futureplay web site at Futureplay.org.


Okay, so, what do I think?

First of all I think that showing graphic footage of a single automobile accident, and using it to try and make a point that because this one incident happened therefore all of a certain type of media should be regulated, is a really fantastically bullshit way to make your argument. Sure it's sad, and it tugs at my heart strings, and some people died, but come on, man, this was not "caused" by people playing True Crime. These kids may have been emulating a game, but they were messed up in the head to begin with. It was also fantastically bullshit that this was the last person to talk in the panel, since you're in a room full of human beings who are all good people, and who are all thinking "well, that's bullshit, but I don't want to be the first person to stand up and yell that, in difference to the fact that I've just seen heartwrenching photos of crime victims."

Moving on: I thought that Dr. Anderson was an interesting speaker in many ways. This is just my opinion, but he seemed to be exhausted with having to defend his experimental data on this topic. I got the feeling from him that he sincerely regretted even doing this study, with all the irritations it's caused him having to go and present it to people who are in no way inclined to want to defend or believe it. Of course, I'm sure he doesn't regret the exposure (and, you know, the free conference invites and hotel fares and wine and cheese), but he seems weary with people trying to discredit his methods. During the back-and-forth, Dr. Calvert in fact went so far as to say that an experimentor could "manipulate data" to make any point he wanted: a comment that drew honest boos from the crowd since he seems to have forgotten almost everyone there was an academic who does research. I think it's fine: so, Dr. Anderson finds a correlation between playing violent games and aggression factors, but I still see that all of these studies are done on short term correlations, and not based on long term correlations. That's what we need to focus on. This may be harder to study in a single experiment, but long-term studies are what's more important in determining if violence depicted leads to violence done. Dr. Anderson doesn't really seem to be in favor of the Michigan law. He was just there to discuss his findings.

Now that I've heard the Chief of Staff explain in this panel what the law in this state actually is: I think it sucks. I'm outraged indeed. You see, the law has to redefine what kinds of games "harm" children. It can't use the ESRB ratings, because the ESRB is a voluntary institution. However, the ESRB ratings are the only benchmark that retail has in determining what they can and can't sell. So the retailers have a choice... either look at the law, figure out what games are and are not legal to sell to minors according to this law, and then either pull those games or card for only those games... or, well, they can just use 'M' as the benchmark, regardless of whether or not the M-rated game falls under the law. Naturally, most don't. I can only think of a small handful of games that would fall under one of the required benchmarks here in Michigan to test a game for harm, which is, "unceasing human on human violence." Think about that one for a second. Street Fighter II. T-rated. May depict "unceasing human on human violence." Silent Hill II. M-rated. Depicts unceasing human on 4-legged mannequin-zombie violence. But that's perfectly OKAY TO SELL TO THE KIDDIES by the rule of the law. Will the retailers do that? No, it's rated M so they would guess it would be on the banned list, even though it isn't, because it doesn't fit the requirement. Plus, what the hell is "unceasing"... do I stop qualifying according to the law if I have the occasional load screen? Good-bye GTA; I can play that game for hours and not do violence to one human being if I so choose. Sucktitude via ignorance, way to go Michigan. I have no doubt this law is going to get shot down.

Yeah, I don't think kids should play games made for adults. The inherent problem with this law however is that it confuses the retailers who sell games. Prof. Jenkins mentions this: major retailers (like Walmart) can't be certain what games to pull, so if regulation gets too strict, they may just pull down all M-rated games, restricting access to adults as well as children. This causes a backlash where even less M-rated games are made, because the game publishers need the major retailers in order to drive sales. And THAT in turn hurts the industry growth big time when their content is so restricted that less cool games are going to be made. I have to admit, of the games I think are really cool: they've got an M, in many cases. I think the Silent Hill series is really cool. Not because I'm smashing zombie heads and there's a lot of blood, but because it's got an engaging horror ATMOSPHERE that's creepy and compelling. It's not for kids; kids would be terrified, but when I bought SH4 I bought it at the Meyer down the street. Games can be just as cool without the M. Kingdom Hearts is cool and it's great for kids. But I want my right to choose. Even if the law doesn't intend to keep adult games out of the hands of adults, that may VERY WELL be its result anyway.

Finally, I think it's damn problematic to use MRI readings as evidence that gaming of any kind causes "harm." Just because we have this technology now, doesn't mean it suddenly applies in policy decision, when in previous times it may have mysteriously not. Heavy Rock-N-Roll beats might cause some kind of fluctuation in brain patterns, but does that mean we should regulate what rhythms are and are not legal? It sure sounds convincing to stand up in front of a group of people and say "these brain-wave readings show that harm is being done to the brain during this activity," and that is nice and scary. But joke's on you since I'm learning how to read these MRI readouts, and it isn't quite so cut and dry as that if you know the tech. "Oh my god, there is a slight increase in activity in the center of the brain that causes aggressive behavior when they are fragging the virtual dudes" is not strictly "harm."

More chatter on my weekend later, if I feel up to writing it.