Cognition Dissemination: Fighting Violent Games with Peaceful Ones is Not the Answer

Following the most recent mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland,FL, there was an expected rush to discover who or what was to blame. From this, one scapegoat reemerged near the top of the pile that hadn’t been used in what feels like ages: video games. While students from the school want something meaningful done about the widespread availability of guns, the White House and others outside it decided to go all in on games. They went so far that President Trump had a meeting to discuss the issue in yet another roundtable which put one side against the other.

Unlike the sessions he held on immigration and gun control (where he went back on both the proposals he favored), this one wasn’t televised, nor was the press invited. Instead, we had to rely on testimonies from those who attended, and those on both sides defended the stances they held. Basically, not much substantial happened, and it was clearly a distraction.

The White House subsequently posted a montage of violent games on their YouTube channel, which contained footage from various Call of Duty games, Dead by Daylight, Fallout 4, Wolfenstein: The New Order, and Sniper Elite 4. If you’ve been following the flurry of headache-inducing news from this White House, you might have gotten a laugh from a scene from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s “No Russian” segment being used as footage, along with video from Wolfenstein that featured killing Nazis.

The footage featured several brutal game moments, though some games were notably absent — they should have used footage from the new Doom and Mortal Kombat games for old times’ sake. However, an organization known as “Games for Change” posted an alternate montage, a #GameOn reel, that featured several poignant and non-violent segments from several games. It includes footage from titles like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Horizon Zero Dawn, Overwatch, Life is Strange, and the recent Shadow of the Colossus remake. Games for Change has existed since 2004, but this particular response got more attention than usual thanks to who they retorted.

Games for Change’s video was a beautiful montage, but it’s a bad way to respond and plays right into the hands of critics.

The organization’s response was for those who don’t see many video games, to show skeptics that there’s more to games than grotesqueness, since most of the gaming audience is already well aware of them. But it actually plays into the narrative that something needs to be done about violence in other games, which can be interpreted as them agreeing with the assessments of those who think they influence younger people to commit violence.

This shouldn’t prevent arguments about whether video games are too violent from being made, since some titles can go a little far. I’ve played a lot of games in my time on planet Earth, but there were times where God of War 3 made me wince — another game surprisingly left out of the White House’s collection. But all that requires is constructive criticism, and the last thing anyone wants, or should want, is government intervention in this hobby regarding content — especially this government. The new God of War game promises to have moments similar to those offered in titles highlighted by Games for Change, but developer Sony Santa Monica is simply following market trends in this case.

Not to mention how this argument waters down what the two sides have to offer to simplicities. Games that contain violence can still offer poignant moments, like The Last of Us, Shin Megami Tensei games and spinoffs, or potentially the aforementioned new God of War. Meanwhile, there are several non-violent games that try to go for poignant moments whose overall experiences end up missing the mark.

Honestly, the fact that websites even talked about this means the White House’s distraction was successful, even though video game sites had no choice but to cover it. Their intention was to find a convenient-though-temporary scapegoat to take the intense heat off the National Rifle Association, who themselves has a long and storied history of blaming video games for problems they’ve caused. Fortunately, the students who started the moment aren’t letting up, and others sympathetic to their cause had another walkout to keep their desire to have something done about guns in the public’s consciousness. They’ll do it again with the March for Our Lives on March 24th, one week from Saturday.

Fortunately, even if the White House and Congress wanted to do something about video games, it’s been shown through several prior court cases that games themselves are protected by the First Amendment. The emergence of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’ Hot Coffee mod led to a movement from politicians to prevent minors from getting their hands on video games, even though that salacious mode wasn’t actually part of the game itself. But the effort was blocked by the Supreme Court, and that’s likely to happen again if they bother to retry this.

In the meantime, we should learn how to respond to this better, and not feed into the narratives that critics of the medium desire. That this reemerged as an issue shows that 90s nostalgia is getting out of hand, but the distraction worked well enough that it will be tried again. It will happen when, not if, the next mass shooting occurs, since nothing’s been done to stop the real problem.