The Blame Game

In 1951, Little Brown and Company published a book about a foulmouthed loner of a boy who struggled to find his place in the world. The book was called Catcher in the Rye and was soon banned from several schools in the US. It was said it was a bad influence on the children. When the book later popped up in connection with the murders of John Lennon and Rebecca Schaeffer, and the attempted murder of Ronald Reagan, it was just fuel for an already well-stoked fire for the media and the general public.

In 1994, three West Memphis teens were given a life sentence for the murder of two local boys. A copy of Catcher in the Rye was not in their possession. However, they were all loners who listened to black metal, wore black clothes and had expressed interest in the occult. The evidence found on the crime scene was circumstantial at best, but the police and the neighbours felt that these gruesome acts were fully within the three teens' capability. It was therefore logical to assume that they had actually done it.

So what does any of this have to do with games? Let's fast-forward a few years. The year is 1999 and two boys plan and execute what is now known as the Columbine High School Massacre. The media point out that boys were goths, they listened to Marilyn Manson and were fans of Natural Born Killers. They also played games like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. This reignited the debate about the bad influence of music, movies and now violent video games.

In 2012 Sandy Hook, Connecticut, U.S., is the scene of a another massacre. The perpetrator, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, is portrayed in the media as a CoD-fanatic, and it is often pointed out that the weapon he used to slaughter the children of Sandy Hook closely resembles one of the weapons available in CoD. The fact that Adam preferred games like DDR and Super Mario Bros is never mentioned. The National Rifle Assocation tries desperately to avoid criticism by launching an all-out assault on the gaming industry, blaming games like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto and the lesser-known Kindergarden Killers for the massacre.

Rewind to yesterday. At Corpus Christi Catholic College in Leeds, a 15 year-old pupil stabs schoolteacher Ann Maguire to death. UK tabloid the Daily Mail runs a story of the attack concentrating its headline and copy on how the suspect played Dark Souls and Grand Theft Auto.

Now rewind nearly three years. Closer to home this time. Utøya, Norway, July 22, 2011. Anders Behring Breivik carries out the worst terrorist attack in Norwegian history. Aftenposten and The Telegraph focus on the fact that Breivik would play WoW and CoD up to 16 hours a day.

These are just a few examples of how the mass media have treated video games, the successor to books and music, after acts of violence of this magnitude. Even though no research has shown a direct and solid link between violent video games and violent people. What research has shown is that playing video games stimulates the brain's reward centre; it improves responsiveness, spatial awareness and strategic thinking. And even though gaming has become more social and more mainstream, even though a large portion of gamers now are women over 40, even though the male-to-female-ratio amongst gamers now is almost fifty-fifty and despite the fact that 6 out of 10 gamers prefer to play with friends, the media chooses to maintain the stereotype of the gamer as a male, antisocial deviant.

There is, as mentioned, nothing new about pointing out and placing blame on trivial details of the perpetrator's life. The older generation has always been sceptical of the younger generation, and its "weird" interests and hobbies. Even Plato, who lived several hundred years B.C, cautioned people against the written medium. He believed it would take ideas out of their context, and affect our ability to memorise information (smart phones and computers, anyone? When's the last time you memorised a phone number? Thought so). And now video games are the big bad wolf. The question is, why?

Experts seem to agree that it's the "unknown" factor that comes into play when video games are accused of being responsible for acts of violence. When asked, Anders Sundnes Løvlie, an associate professor at Gjøvik University College, had this to say about it:

"Human beings often experience that which is new and unfamiliar as threatening and dangerous. We are probably hardwired to feel this way, and is that so weird? In a big and dangerous world it is often wise to be careful around things with which you are not familiar, but this also makes us predisposed to exaggerate the dangers of something new. This may lead to us overreacting and ignoring the inherent positive possibilities of a new medium."

Most of the people who blame and fear the influence of video games are not gamers themselves. They don't know what gaming entails and they are ignorant to the fact that gaming is so much more than just shooting and violence. They have this idea of what sort of people gamers are, and what kind of games they play. This ignorance and prejudice makes it easy for them to demonize violent video games and the people who play the. To them, the perpetrators mentioned above and the average gamer are one and the same. This is obviously not the case.

In addition to the 'unknown' factor there is also the need to point an accusatory finger when something terrible and inexplicable happens. There has to be a reason that people choose to kill, and preferably not one that involves them doing it because they could, or because they wanted to, or because they had the opportunity. There has to be an underlying cause, an external motivator. This is something Kim Johansen Østby, phD candidate at the University of Oslo, has seen clear indications of:

"Games have often had to carry the brunt of that burden. The media has a strange influence on the way we think when something bad happens, but not really in our day-to-day life. The impression that games are bad is reinforced when the media are able to link them to more and more cases, which in turn creates a repeating thought pattern that the games really are to blame (because they are a common denominator in all the cases). And then the snowball starts rolling.

"This is of course very problematic because it draws focus away from factors that are most likely more relevant and interesting, like how it was growing up, their relationship with their family and friends, what the situation at school and work is like etc. It's a lot easier to blame an external factor than highlighting individual, internal factors. The latter demands more effort than the former. It's easier and cheaper to just blame a product."

Fortunately for video games it looks like their time as a media scape goat is coming to an end. More and more people play video games, and in the future more people will have grown up with video games compared to present-day generations.

Almost all of the major newspapers have their own video game sections, and more of the reporters who will cover tragedies like these in the future will be gamers themselves. They will have personal experience with video games as a medium, and they will hopefully have a more nuanced opinion of games and the influence they have.

In addition, games fall under the umbrella labelled "culture" in Norway and there are several stipends and funds dedicated to the development and support of video games. More and more teachers are also starting to see the value of video games and are integrating them into their lessons. Video games are becoming increasingly more mainstream, and the average gamer is becoming more 'normal' in the eyes of society.

Maren Agdestein, founder of gaming site Spillpikene.no, believes in a change in the attitude towards games in the near future, despite all the negativity still present in the media today:

"The factors the most commercialised and popularised media are citing as triggers for violent crimes, are not necessarily in accordance with what people actually think. A story in a tabloid is simplified because it's meant to sell both the newspaper and the story in a very short amount of time. Sometimes it's just that simple."

She is supported by Faltin Karlsen, Professor of Media Studies at The Norwegian School of Information Technology, who says violence in society has not increased as games have become more popular. Quite the contrary:

"Crime statistics in most western countries show that violent crimes are, in fact, decreasing. In the US the number of murders, rapes, robberies and assaults has been decreasing since 1994, Meanwhile, the number of sold video games has increased explosively. In the US, for example, an increase in violent crimes began in the 1960s, long before video games were even a factor."

This does not mean, however, that all criticism against video games should fall on deaf ears. Nor does it mean that video games are never an influencing factor, although a clear link is yet to be made. There are individuals who struggle with excessive gaming, problem gaming and gaming addictions, though the average gamer is not a gun-toting maniac. There are negative sides and positive sides to all things in life, and we, as gamers, have to be open to a more nuanced view of the world.

In the case of Breivik, experts were convinced he was barely able to take care of himself and was therefore unfit for prison. However, an investigation of his gaming activity, where his guild members in WoW gave testimony and described him as a talented, strategic and intelligent player, became pivotal for him being judged to be of a sound mind - i.e. criminally accountable.

Finally, we should perhaps ask ourselves what the mass media will do when they run out of things to blame. Maybe they should turn their scrutiny inwards and take on some of the responsibility? The media are great at vilifying anything that smacks of 'otherness', but they are even better at glorifying everything that increases their sales. Like Marilyn Manson says in his article Columbine: Whose Fault Is It (published My 28, 1999 in Rolling Stone):

"The name Marilyn Manson has never celebrated the sad fact that America puts killers on the cover of Time magazine, giving them as much notoriety as our favourite movie stars. From Jesse James to Charles Manson, the media, since their inception, have turned criminals into folk heroes. They just created two new ones when they plastered those dipshits Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris' pictures on the front of every newspaper. Don't be surprised if every kid who gets pushed around has two new idols."

The mass media does not only give deviating individuals heroes to look up to and copy, they also give them convenient scape goats to take the blame for their misdeeds. Games, movies, books and music do not make regular people violent, but they can give already violent people an excuse to act violently. The mass media and the general public perpetuate and justify these excuses by continuously focusing on hobbies as possible reasons for violent crimes. Catcher in the Rye was never the problem. Marilyn Manson was never the problem. Video games are not the problem now, but maybe it's time we ask ourselves: what is?