MEDIA

EDUCATION
FOUNDATION Challenging
media

T R AN SC R I
PT

GAME OVER
GENDER, RACE & VIOLENCE IN VIDEO GAMES
 GAME OVER
Gender, Race & Violence in Video Games

Producer and Director: Nina Huntemann

Editor: Jeremy Smith
Executive Producer: Sut Jhally

Narrated by Andrea Hairston, Smith College, Chrysalis Theatre

Featuring interviews with:

Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman, U.S. Army, West Point (Retired)
Michael Morgan, University of Massachusetts,
Amherst Erica Scharrer, University of Massachusetts,
Amherst Eugene Provenzo, University of Miami
Nina Huntemann, Westfield State College

Media Education Foundation © MEF 2000

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INTRODUCTION
[News voiceover] The question across America: Do violent video games
promote violent behavior in young people?

[Montage of video game clips]

[ABC News] Do violent video games make for violent kids?

[Gamer in Arcade]… it’s cool to kill them and stuff…

[Montage of video game clips]

[Voiceover montage]
-- We look for the roots of the senseless violence …
-- The music in Dreamcast is the real Led Zeppelin…
-- Because of a video game, or because of a movie, or because of music, people
are gonna use guns because they really feel like they just can’t handle life.

LT. COL. DAVID GROSSMAN: Video games give you the skill and the will
to kill. They teach you to associate pleasure from human death and
suffering, they reward you for killing people. They take healthy play
and turn it on its head.

MICHAEL MORGAN: Success in a video game is defined by mastering

violence at heretofore-unimagined levels.

ERICA SCHARRER: I think that media violence and video game

violence play a very important role, and in combination with a number
of psychological and societal factors, can be very damaging.

EUGENE PROVENZO: I think the real challenge for the video game
industry is to develop new scenarios, new games. And I think that
this preoccupation with ultra violence is something that they really
ought to work away from.

NINA HUNTEMANN: The problems that we’re seeing in representations

and violence in video game has nothing to do with the technology, it
has everything to do with how we’ve chosen to use the technology.

NARRATOR: Most of the discussions people have about media issues,

whether the subject is violence or sex, tend to focus on television and
movies. And while these are still the dominant media in many people’s
lives, an important new technology, video games, has been introduced
into the media landscape without much discussion. For young people
especially, video games are perhaps the media technology they are
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most familiar with and enthusiastic about. Surveys have found that
90% of households with children have purchased or rented video
games. And its been estimated that kids in those homes play an
average of an
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hour and a half a day. Sales figures are another indication of the
popularity of video games. When Saga introduced the Dreamcast
console, it sold a half a million units in the first two weeks. In fact, in
1999, 215 million games were purchased, generating over seven
billion dollars for the video game industry which is more than
Americans spent on going to the movies. Given how prominent video
games seem to be, the lack of attention paid to them is surprising. In
this program we’re going to take a close look at the role they play
today.
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VIDEO GAMES, THE NEW MEDIA

ERICA SCHARRER: One way that video game violence is actually very
different from other types of media violence has to do with how users
interact with the technology. I think there are two important ways that
video game violence is distinct. One is the level of activity involved. In
fact, to the point of interactivity, obviously players interact with the
technology so that their motions, their movements, control the
characters that they are playing. Meaning that they are very involved
with what’s going on, they’re very sort of into the actions. They can
get upset, they can yell, they can scream.

[TV ad] Who’s your daddy? Who – is – your – daddy?

NINA HUNTEMANN: You know what’s really exciting about video games
is you don’t just interact with the game physically – you’re not just
moving your hand on a joystick, but you’re asked to interact with the
game psychologically and emotionally as well. You’re not just
watching the characters on the screen; you’re becoming those
characters.

[Interview: Russel Kelban, Disney Interactive]

It really gives everyone chance to sort of extend their relationship with these
characters – after you see the film, you can actually become Tarzan.

[Interview: Shellie Sanders, Nintendo of America]

It’s actually the game based on the pod race that’s in the movie, and Anakin
Skywalker’s voice is in the game, so as you’re racing with his pod, you actually
are him, just like in the movie.

NINA HUNTEMANN: One of the ways in which video games engage

players as participants, emotionally and psychologically, is through
realism and a heightened sense of realism. You could say that realism
is the Holy Grail of the video game industry.

[Interview: David Karakka, SEGA]

The key to Saga Dreamcast is the realism, the fact that in a football game, if it
starts to rain, the crowd will put on ponchos. In a basketball game, all the faces
of the players are actually modeled after the real players.

NINA HUNTEMANN: So for example we see a new level of realism in

video sports games where they use live motion capture to capture the
movements of real players, and this is important because in order for a
video sports game to be popular, it has to give the player of the game
a sense that they’re really on the court, that they’re really on the field.
And also give them a sense that they’re actually playing their favorite
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sports hero.
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This use of live motion capture and 3-D modeling, we just don’t see it
in sports games, we see it in a lot of other video games as well. So for
example Mortal Kombat has traditionally used live motion capture in
each release of its game. The industry has hooked on to something.
Realistic games sell, they’re seductive, so we should expect to see
increased use of technologies of realism, in the video games, and we
should expect that the experience of playing video games will also
become more and more realistic.

ERICA SCHARRER: The use of realistic graphics, and realistic animation

is sort of a bragging rights of sorts for industry, organizations, so that
they can say our game is most realistic.

[Interview: David Karakka, SEGA] And then by Christmas we’ll have thirty new
games for the system, that are so real you won’t be able to tell if you’re watching
a movie or actually playing a game.

ERICA SCHARRER: So we’ve come a long way since Pong, where there
were just rectangular shapes and a bouncing ball. Now we have whole
worlds and very realistic three-dimensional types of approaches to
violence.

[TV ad] Rainbow Six, so true to life, even the experts can’t tell the difference.

MICHAEL MORGAN: Its very easy for people to say, “well, c’mon, what
you see in a video game, you know that’s not real, kids know its not
real” or what goes on in a cartoon whether it’s a roadrunner, or some
superhero saving the universe, people in the industry, and people who
want to defend this will say, this is just make believe, its healthy, its
fun, nobody takes it seriously, nobody believes it.
Well its not as if we walk around with a little switch in our heads that
we can turn off and say fiction – reality – fiction – reality. Over time the
distinction between these two things is irrelevant. When it comes to
media images, its all representations. It’s all manufactured mediated
imagery. It all goes into the constant nonstop stream of experiences
we store up about the world around us.

NARRATOR: When we look at the large amount of money spent, the

amount of time kids play them, and the incredible level of realism
they’ve been able to reach – realism that movies and TV can’t even
come close to competing with – its important for us to understand this
new technology. And although the question of violence is extremely
important, we shouldn’t let that limit how we understand video games.
Because the stories of violence are always told in conjunction with
other stories about gender, sexuality, and race. So we have to
understand how all these things work together.
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PLAY LIKE A MAN – Video Games & Masculinity

MICHAEL MORGAN: One of the especially intriguing aspects of looking
at video games is that they are such vivid illustrations of so many
cultural messages that sometimes are difficult to discern. That
permeate other media, but are often more subtle. Video games have
the quality of being so explicit and so blatant in their representations
of men, of women, of power, of control. That they lay out some of the
key ideologies of the culture in an absolutely unmistakable vivid way.

EUGENE PROVENZO: I think video games are also important because

we can see the construction of our culture in the content of the games.
And in point of fact, video games to a large degree reflect what’s going
on in the culture of society. So they can be used as means by which to
read the culture. And how gender, race, ethnicity is portrayed in these
games I think can be very revealing.

ERICA SCHARRER: A very common image in video game

representations is a very hyper masculine male character. Someone
who has an extremely imposing physical body, someone who is very
muscular, someone who is certainly very aggressive, an affect of this
hyper masculine characterization can also be to link being male with
being violent. So male players particularly who may be trying to live
up to and may be trying to understand what society is saying about
what it is to be male, may very well link being masculine with being
violent – with using physical force as a way to get what you want.

EUGENE PROVENZO: I think power can be a good thing. You know

we’re very uncomfortable in the culture talking about power, but in
point of fact, we want to empower people, we want to give them a
sense that they can do things, that they can act and be understood
and listened to, that they can change the world in good ways. But the
vehicles for power that we give to children in these games frequently
is one of an aggressive masculinity.

NINA HUNTEMANN: This aggressive masculinity that’s prevalent in

video games, you can see very particularly in wrestling games, where
not only do you have the signature moves of the wrestler, but also
what is incorporated is their taunts and their bullying as well.

[TV ad] WWF Superstars, all their signature moves and taunts.

NINA HUNTEMANN: I think that wrestling, both on television and in

video games, sends the message to mostly young boys, that control
and violence is the way to get what you want, and you do that through
physical and verbal intimidation.
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[TV ad] The Rock is gonna take that little green bag of all those little video
games and stick ‘em straight up your candy ass!
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0

NINA HUNTEMANN: I think one of the reasons why masculine images

are so prevalent in video games is because if you look at who
produces video games, the game designers, they’re mostly men. So
the images and the representations that come out of video games are
coming out of a very male culture.

There’s a really good example of this in an ad I saw for a game

company, and in the front of the ad were the game designers, and all
the game designers were men. But in the background there were
women but all these women were wearing bikinis and they were faced
away from the camera. Their presence is sort of as a backdrop as men
who are actually producing the game.

EUGENE PROVENZO: So for example in a game like Duke Nukem, we

have a character who is there as the primary character with females
surrounding him for his edification, to sort of show off his masculinity,
his power, and so forth.

[Video Game: Duke Nukem] Shake it baby.

NINA HUNTEMANN: I think one of the most traditional roles for female
characters for video games is the damsel in distress. Female
characters often need to be rescued. And you see this in games
featuring Duke Nukem for example. In fact, women needing to be
rescued is the premise of many of the Duke Nukem games. One of the
latest games, called, aptly Planet of the Babes, begins with the premise
that all the men on Earth have been killed except for Duke, and he
needs to come and rescue all of the women from these aliens. So here
you have the entire role of all of the women on this planet is to be
rescued.

[TV ad: Duke Nukem] One man. One mission. One million babes. Duke
Nukem. The king of hard-core action is back. Cocked, loaded, and ready for his
hottest adventure yet.

NINA HUNTEMANN: I think what this says, what it tells us, is the
premise of Duke Nukem, rescuing these women, you know, allows him
to be powerful, allows him to be the hero. And it reflects the fantasies
of the male producers of this game. Through Duke they have the
opportunity to be powerful and to be wanted and in these games the
women are very grateful to Duke Nukem for rescuing them.

[Video Game: Duke Nukem] Oh, Duke, I knew you’d … come.

NINA HUNTEMANN: One of the other roles for female characters in

Duke Nukem games in particular is that of the porn star. In Duke
Nukem’s Zero Hour, it takes place in a red light district where the
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streets are filled with strip clubs and porn theaters, and this looks
completely normal, this is Duke’s world, this is the world, the fantasy
world, that he inhabits.
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2

What I think is important to think about in terms of Duke Nukem, is

that his world, this pornographic landscape is not presented as
extreme, its presented as very normal. His environment and his values
that he embodies are presented as absolutely normal.

[Interview: Rich Raymo, GT Interactive] Duke’s kind of an every man

American hero. He’s a Bond for the 1990s and beyond.
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BUXOM BABES – The Female Heroine

NARRATOR: While males are still the predominant characters in video
games, recently the industry introduced a number of female
characters as well. Lara Croft is the most famous of these but there
are others such as Rin and Joanna Dark. While more girls and women
are playing video games, these new female characters were introduced
to appeal to the main consumers, boys and men.
And just as a very particular story about masculinity is told, characters
such as Lara Croft, also help to define femininity in a very specific way.

EUGENE PROVENZO: I think there’s some really interesting

contradictions operating in terms of how women are depicted in some
of the most recent games. These contradictions have to do with the
seeming empowerment of women, while at the same time, we have a
situation in which I think women are really being exploited in terms of
how they’re being shown, graphically. You can see this for example
with Lara Croft in Tomb Raider where she is this highly energetic
muscular character, highly aggressive, and yet the video game
presents her as this extremely, I would describe her as pneumatic,
very busty, over-exaggerated sexual object.

NINA HUNTEMANN: I think that Lara Croft does challenge traditional

roles of female game characters, she doesn’t need rescue for
example, in her games. But she also is judged by the beauty standard,
the same standard by which women and female game characters in
video games have always been judged.

For example, we can look at most female game characters’ body

proportions, they’re grossly unnatural. Lara Croft has a large bust size
and a very small waist, and she weighs practically nothing, and yet
these characters can flip and jump and run in ways that anyone with
that body proportion wouldn’t be able to maneuver. And this body
type doesn’t even exist in the real world. We know this is true because
the company that makes Lara Croft hires models to represent them at
promotional events and they have yet to be able to find a model that
has Lara Croft’s same body proportions.

Not only do we have a beauty standard of the ideal female body that
is impossible to achieve, there’s also the sexualization of young
women occurring in video games. And Lara Croft provides yet
another example. In a recent release of Tomb Raider: The Last
Revelation, game players can play Lara Croft as a sixteen year old, and
yet her body proportions, the way that her body looks is still that of a
very developed adult woman.
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The connection between male fantasy in a video game and male

fantasy in the real world becomes really apparent through the models
that are hired to play Lara Croft at promotional events. At these
events, male fans of the video game Tomb Raider, and many other
video games, have the opportunity to have their picture taken with
the real life model who plays Lara Croft. So the fantasy of
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being with someone like Lara Croft becomes reality at least for a brief
moment, at these conferences, at these promotional events. And this
is really disturbing, I think, because one of the models who was hired to
play Lara Croft most recently is sixteen years old. So the sexualization
of a young female is happening in real life to a sixteen-year old model
who will be at these promotional events and have men putting their
arms around her to have their pictures taken.

EUGENE PROVENZO: You know, a lot of what these games are about is
sexual titillation for young boys. If you look at a game like Gauntlet,
we have portrayed an Amazon goddess type, maybe a Valkyrie, very
explicit in terms of her figure sexually and with suggestions showing
up in the advertisements for the games, you know, take her home,
have her as your own, possess her, things like that.

NINA HUNTEMANN: We’re not just seeing male fantasy and the
sexualization of female characters in the video games, we’re seeing it
perhaps even more so in the advertising and the marketing for games
and on the packaging for video games. Even if it’s a game that doesn’t
have any female characters in it.
There’s an ad for a racing car game called Destruction. Destruction
doesn’t have any female characters in it, but the ad for the game
shows a woman leaning over the hood of a car. Another example is for
Virtual Pool. Again, no female characters are in Virtual Pool, but we see
in the ad that there is a woman leaning over a pool table, showing us
her cleavage. And this is a game that is a billiards simulation. There is
an extreme example of this in an ad for Game Boy. In this Game Boy
ad you see a woman tied to a bed, and she’s wearing lingerie.

When we see female characters most of those female characters are

white. There are black characters in video games but they play
particular roles. So for example in King Pin, we see an unusually high
amount of black female characters but these characters are
prostitutes, they’re vagrants.
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NARROW VISION – Race in Video Games

NARRATOR: In the debates around stereotyping in the media, many
people of color feel that they’re experiences are not being
represented. That someone from outside the community is telling their
stories. So in the case of movies for example, it’s felt that the stories
of the Black and Latino experience are being told by white
scriptwriters. To the extent that Black and Latino video game producers
are few and far between, the same thing is happening, but perhaps at
an even more extreme and disturbing level.

NINA HUNTEMANN: You know there’s an interesting irony about color

and video games. Hardware manufacturers and video game designers
pride themselves on the rich textural display but what I find so ironic
about this is that the range of colors that may be available in the
technology aren’t used very much by the game designers and by this I
mean that most video games feature white characters.

Of the top selling action genre video games, eight out of ten of those
games featured white characters. So we’re not only seeing the video
game world through male eyes, we’re seeing it through white male
eyes.

EUGENE PROVENZO: I think its very interesting for example if you look
at most of the first person shooters which only show you the hand on
the gun, or the weapon, its generally white rather than brown or black.

NINA HUNTEMANN: When we do see race we see it in a very particular

moment. Racial stereotypes are evoked to show non-whiteness and
that’s when race becomes visible. Otherwise its invisible, its normal,
but when racialized characters are introduced it becomes quite
significant and quite poignant that they’re there.

[Video Game: Turok] I am Turok!

An example of this is in the game Turok, the main character, Turok is

Native American, and the way that you sort of know that he’s Native
American is that he wears feathers in his hair, he carries a bow and
arrow and he shoots at deer.
Throughout the game his adventures are serenaded by tribal
drumbeats. So his Native American-ness is made quite obvious
through these sort of tried stereotypically notions of what it means to
be Native American.

I think an even more blatant example of stereotypical representations

of people of color we can see with black characters. In the game King
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Pin, we see a lot of black characters which is unusual compared to

most games overall, most games have white characters
overwhelmingly. But King Pin, it takes place in an environment full of
black characters. But there’s a particular reason why there are a lot of
black characters. King Pin takes place in an inner city urban ghetto.
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Violence and crime is the way in which you get ahead in this
environment. You steal, you mug, you’re part of a gang, so there’s
nothing about the environment of the inner city that really challenges
the stereotypical notion of the inner city already. Violence and crime
goes right along with that. What’s ironic about this, is that even
though you’re in a mostly black-charactered environment, you as the
main character are a white guy. So what this conveys beyond just the
stereotypes of the inner city being full of black criminals, is that this is
abnormal, this is something that needs to be contained, that you as
the protagonist and the lead character, need to somehow beat this
back into some sort of normalcy. And what you do in this game as the
main white character is you try to get to the leadership position of the
gang, you try to become the kingpin.

This idea that whiteness is normal and that blackness is exotic,

foreign, bizarre, we can see particularly in games like Akuji and
Shadow Man.

[Video Game: Shadow Man]I had a dream, Shadow Man, a real bad dream. A
dead-side dream. The five are here – the heralds of the apocalypse.

NINA HUNTEMANN: In these games we see the representation of

Haitian culture, which equates blackness with the supernatural. The
character Akuji is different than most male characters. He has a cat-
like physique. He moves in animal movements, he’s painted in tiger
stripes. He looks unusual to most male white characters in video
games. And again this becomes significant because the game is
saying something different about this black racialized character than
other white characters in most other games.

We see the same thing occurring with Mike Leroy in Shadow Man, also
another game connected with Haitian culture. Mike Leroy uses voodoo
as does Akuji, so again this just sort of emphasizes the difference
between the non-white characters and the white characters in video
games. And it re-inscribes certain ideas about Haitian culture, about
voodoo, about the super natural.

NARRATOR: Video games sell themselves as being able to take us to

fantastic worlds beyond our mundane everyday lives. Places where we
can have extreme experiences, and there’s no doubt that there’s a
tremendous potential to expand our consciousness. But many people
have suggested that we keep a number of questions foremost in our
minds as we journey to these new worlds. Who will be our guides,
who’s eyes will we see the world through? Whose fears and
nightmares will we experience? Whose imaginations will we be
trapped inside?
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VIDEO GAME VIOLENCE

MICHAEL MORGAN: Most of the time in public debate or when people
are concerned about the role of violence in the media, or video
games or anything else, the natural thing is to think only in terms of
people becoming more violent as a result of seeing these images or
playing these games.

[ABC News] In the wake of all the violence perpetrated by young people lately,
there is an important question on the table. Do violent video games make for
violent kids?

MICHAEL MORGAN: But there are some more, perhaps significant, and
more subtle consequences on people that has to do with the way they
think about the world. When you spend a great deal of time being
exposed to violent video games and playing them hour after hour over
long periods of time, you begin gradually to think of the world as a
much more violent place and to have the images and the concepts of
violence permeate the way you think about things on an every day
basis.

ERICA SCHARRER: There are a number of elements of video game

violence that make it most likely to lead to a negative or anti-social
effect. Video game violence tends to be consequence-less. There are
often no types of portrayals of grief, of sorrow, of regret or remorse,
that may very well characterize real life violence, which a lot of social
scientific research suggests is the one that’s most likely to be
emulated.

[TV ad]
Stop! Don’t shoot! Do you have something less painful maybe?
-- Uh, a crossbow?
Uh, too messy.
-- A grenade launcher?
Uh, ouch.
-- How about the Taser?
Yeah, a Taser wouldn’t be bad, it might leave a little rash ma…

MICHAEL MORGAN: In playing video games, the violence is not only the
whole purpose of the game in most cases, but the rewards one gets for
it are very gratifying. They let you play longer, they let you go to new
levels, they let you explore new dimensions, new territories, new
worlds – the only way to advance and to achieve the goals of the game
is to kill ever increasingly larger numbers of people.

When you reach the end of every level one of the main things it tells
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you is how many of these people you’ve killed, how many of those
you’ve injured. So at every stage in the game, you have a continual
reporting, you have a continual reinforcement – doing great, you’re
killing more, keep going, here’s how many
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you killed this time, you ready to go to the next level and kill some
more? So there’s never any compunction against using violence,
there’s every stimulation, everything is conducive to using it, the more
its used, the more effectively its used, and the more competently its
used, the better you’re doing.

[Video Game]
You win!
--Yeah!
Impressive.

ERICA SCHARRER: Another reward associated with doing well in terms

of actually executing violent assaults on characters in video games
has to do with the weapons you use. Low-level weapons, things like
pistols, arrows, swords, etc, are used on the first sorts of levels of
video games. But the more adept you get, the more sorts of,
successful, you are with those low level weapons, the more you get to
increase and have escalated and more high tech weapons, larger
weapons as well. So you go for instance from a pistol to a machine
gun to maybe having grenades or bombs that you can throw. And so
again, the reward is sort of giving you other toys, so to speak, with
which you can execute your assault.

Video game violence is also very graphic in general. The types of

portrayals that occur in video game violence are maybe unparalleled
in other types of media violence. Scenarios like decapitation, severed
limbs, spurting and splattering blood.

[Video Game] (Groaning)

ERICA SCHARRER: That level of extensiveness and graphic-ness is

very troubling for desensitization type purposes. Again, if we are
exposed to these sorts of very high level and intense, and very
graphic violent representations, it may take more of the same in
order for us to have the same sort of response. We become
accustomed and maybe even sometimes bored with merely shooting
people, we have to blow them up next. We have to, you know, cut off
limbs next. So its sort of a one-up-man-ship that the video game
industry feeds on.

MICHAEL MORGAN: With the images of violence that pervade most

other popular media, one of the main consequences is just to make
violence seem normal, make violence seem everyday so that we don’t
notice it – its not simply desensitization to violence, its where violence
becomes assumed to be part of the everyday fabric of life, its how we
think about ways of solving problems.
Where its difficult to conceive of everyday reality in a way that is not
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permeated by floods of violence.

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SIM VIOLENCE – Teaching Kids to Kill

[News Interview: Doug Lowenstein, Industry Spokesman] There is nothing in
the academic research that supports the conclusion that violent video games
lead to aggressive behavior, period.

NARRATOR: Is it true that there’s no evidence linking video games

with violent behavior? Luckily we don’t have to speculate about this
because over the last thirty years the US military has undertaken
perhaps the most elaborate study ever conducted on video games and
violent behavior.

LT. COL. DAVID GROSSMAN: It is extraordinarily difficult for a human

being to kill a member of their own species. They have to be
manipulated into it. And when you look deeper into the battle you’ll
see that the history of warfare has ever more successful mechanisms
to manipulate people into killing. We studied in World War II, the
individual riflemen for the first time in history, and we found out that
only fifteen to 20% of the individual riflemen when left to their own
devices would fire their weapon at an exposed enemy soldier. This is
not a good thing. A 15% firing rate among your riflemen is like a 15%
literacy rate among your librarians.

So what we did was we went about the process of making killing a

conditioned response. In World War II we taught our soldier to fire at
bulls-eye targets. And that training was tragically flawed because no
bulls-eyes appeared on the battlefield. And what we converted to
were pop-up man shaped silhouettes. If you want a person to be able
to kill a human being, they have to practice shooting at human beings.
A few hundred repetitions of that, and now on the battlefield when an
enemy soldier pops up in front of us, boom, a soldier kills and he kills
reflexively. It is an extraordinarily effective mechanism. It is basic
operant conditioning.

Now we use large screen TVs and soldiers stand with plastic M-16s that
fire laser beams that when you hit the target on the screen, the target
drops. The law enforcement community extensively uses a device
known as the FATS trainer: Fire Arms Training Simulator. You hold the
gun in your hand, you pull the trigger, the slide slams back, you feel
the recoil, you hit the target, the target drops, you miss the target, the
target shoots you. It is a very effective law enforcement training
device.

But if you go to the local video arcade, you’ll find an almost identical
device. A game such as Time Crisis for example, in which you’ll find
that the pistol, the slide slams back, it recoils in your hand, if you hit
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the target the target drops, if you miss the target the target shoots
you. The only difference is in the FATS trainer, if you shoot the wrong
target, you’ll be reprimanded, ultimately even fired. But when the kids
are playing the game there is no adult supervision, there is no
standard, there is no control.
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The Marine Corps uses the game Doom as a training device. It is such
an effective and efficient tactical trainer, there’s limited skill involved
with this game. There’s a great deal of rehearsal and will processes
involved here.

A lot of people when we talk about Doom or Quake or the first person
shooter games, they say, well all you’re doing is playing with the
mouse or with the keyboard, how can that be teaching your killing
skills. Well understand that Doom all by itself, even used with a
keyboard is good enough that the Marine Corps uses it to script killing
in their soldiers. It provides the script, the rehearsal, the act of killing.

We have to understand that the military around the world, and law
enforcement organizations around the world do not use these killing
simulators and spend billions of dollars on these simulators for fun.
They do it because it works. It is their job to condition and enable
people to kill. They know what they’re doing. They are the
professionals. They have had experiment after experiment to show
the value of these simulators, but the greatest experiments are things
like World War II where only 15% to 20% of the riflemen fired, and
Vietnam where 95% of the riflemen fired. It is a revolution on the
battlefield and we know it works, and those whose job it is to enable
people to kill use it extensively and they do it for a reason. Because if
they didn’t, their soldiers would die in combat.

One of the questions that arises very commonly is how do soldiers take
what they’re given and distinguish from killing in combat to killing in
the civilian community? When we provide the soldiers with the ability
to kill, we also provide them with a powerful set of rules that are
ground into them. And so the soldiers and law enforcement officers
are taught only to fire at the appropriate targets at the appropriate
times, under orders, under the right circumstances. The soldiers go
out in the field and we carry our weapons around with a blank loaded
in that weapon, in our exercises, and we’ll go for days on end and
never fire our weapon. And that’s part of that discipline. Carrying that
weapon for days and months and years on end and only firing it under
the exact precise situation that you’re given. But as soon as you put a
quarter in that video game – you never, never put a quarter in that
video game and don’t shoot. And the very first thing you shoot at is
the first human being that pops up on your screen. And you shoot and
you shoot and you shoot. So the safeguards are completely absent
and all of the enabling that the military that the law enforcement gets
are provided, plus the rewards, the pleasures, the cheers, the laughter,
the learning to associate it with pleasure is also there. And so we must
think very, very carefully about who we provide this operant
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conditioning, this training to. And if we provide it indiscriminately to

children, it is the moral equivalent of putting a military weapon in the
hand of every child in America.
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CONCLUSION – Virtual Violence

NARRATOR: As we’ve seen, the experience of playing a video game is
already quite realistic. Force feedback technology for example gives
players a real sense of touch as well as the visual realism of the
screen. Game pads vibrate in the players’ hands, steering wheels
gives players resistance as they turn corners, and joysticks shake. But
we’ve only scratched the surface so far on simulating reality.

MICHAEL MORGAN: These technologies of virtual reality, and other

things we can’t even imagine now, can take us to amazing places that
we’ve never imagined going before. But, what are we going to find
there? What’s at those places?

LT. COL. DAVID GROSSMAN: The screen today seems like reality to
you, you become sucked into that screen, and the large screens you
become sucked in more. But what if it was complete? What if you
turned and moved and shifted and wherever you turned there was
your enemy and you would kill? What if we made killing not some two
dimensional process, but a three dimensional process in which you
were constantly involved?

ERICA SCHARRER: So virtual reality may well have very important

implications for media violence and its effects. Certainly more of a
heightened type of interaction effect with the technology and
absolutely identification with the character that really has not yet been
paralleled in any other sort of media scenario.

EUGENE PROVENZO: Now again, that can often be very beneficial. I

get to fly an airplane, that’s kind of neat. I get to fly a jet fighter in the
appropriate video game. That’s kind of neat. I get to murder
somebody. Is that very neat?

NINA HUNTEMANN: I think at the moment video games are advancing

very limited notions of masculinity and femininity. They’re reinforcing
the sexual objectification of women. They’re reproducing the same
racial stereotypes. They’re teaching young boys that violence is an
appropriate response to any situation. And its my hope that that’s
going to change, that video games will challenge our stereotypes and
really push us ahead in terms of how we think about each other and
ourselves.

NARRATOR: Like all media the question of whether they’re good or

bad, whether they have positive or negative consequences, can’t be
answered by looking at the technology itself. There’s nothing inherent
about video games that makes them violent, sexist, or racist. What’s
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holding us back is not the technology but the values we’ve privileged
as we’ve designed, produced, and sold it. So if we want video games
that are truly cutting edge, that really give us
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new experiences, we have to privilege alternative values that will

genuinely liberate the technology and possibly ourselves.