Violence in Video Games: The Core Argument

For years now, a debate has continued over the relationship between violent media and violent human behavior. The current form this takes is an argument over the role that violent video games may or may not play in well-published school shootings. Before this, our society contended over whether or not violent movies resulted in a violent culture. This was seen in the considerable backlash against the slasher flicks of the 1980’s. The video game argument is only the most recent form of the same debate. In truth, however, this argument goes back much further. The point of this article is specifically to identify what this argument is actually about and to point out the history of the argument, of which most people seem rather unaware.

For many of my readers, this article will appear to be “off topic,” and have nothing to do with violent video games. In truth, my point here is to cut through the fog surrounding this debate, to reveal that both sides have missed the point. The final section of this article will deal with discoveries in psychology that impact this argument but which never seem to enter the debate. I will try to use references that are easily found on the internet, to provide easy access due to this article’s publication there. For the sake of making everything cross-referenced, most of the references will be to wikipedia entries.

It all started in Ancient Greece. It did not start with the Virginia Tech shooting, it did not start with Columbine, it did not start with Postal workers, and it did not start with the UT sniper in 1966. This debate is not actually even about guns. It’s really not even about violence. As it turns out, this debate, which has been going on for over two thousand years now, is about the nature of human emotions.

The two culprits were Plato and Aristotle. For those unfamiliar with the two, I’ll give a very brief, very watered down and imprecise summary of the two philosophers. Plato came second, but is much easier to describe because much of Western civilization draws on his ideas more directly.

Plato draws a strict distinction between body and soul, physical and mental, carnal and spiritual. He declares things that are more abstract to be “more real,” than physical things. Thus he talks about moving beyond the material so that we can grasp the forms of Justice or Beauty or what-have-you. He is a champion of reason above all else. The impact on later Western and Christian ideas is obvious. For those of you wanting a more complete description of Plato, wikipedia has a decent summary: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Republic_%28Plato%29).

Aristotle, in contrast, focused on the natural world, and spent much of his time observing the way that the world is. Thus he makes statements regarding a natural order (one of his famous quotes is “babies have a tendency to grow into humans”). He talks about cultivating virtues in ourselves, in working our entire lives to become a Just person, or a Wise person This means that he was more interested in the quality of the person over time, rather than the quality of the action this instant. Just as becoming a skilled flute player can only come through years of effort, failure, and success, so too becoming a Just person requires a lifetime of effort, failure, and success. He also spent a great deal of time cataloguing things in the natural world, which in current times would be considered Biology (specifically Taxonomy and Anatomy). Anyone wanting a more detailed summary on Aristotle should check out this site: ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle ). But back to this particular debate.

Aristotle claimed that as living beings, we have passions that build up inside us, like a steam engine (he didn’t talk about steam engines for an obvious reason). These passions had to be released, lest they build up and explode out of us. He called this release Catharsis. This idea is where we get the idea of “blowing off some steam.” The basic idea is that if you don’t have a proper “outlet” for anger, lust, hunger, or whatever, then eventually it will become unmanageable. Again, wikipedia does a nice job summarizing this for us: ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharsis ). Plato, in contrast, noted that human behavior runs almost entirely on Mimesis. This is the word from which we get the English word “mimic,” as in “copy.” There are two components to this idea. The first is the easy one, that we will dupilicate behavior that is modeled before us. As we say in current times, “monkey see, monkey do.” Essentially, this observation states that our culture teaches us how to act, think, and feel. There is another component to this, that our behavior, thoughts, and passions recreate themselves. We mimic ourselves. This basically argues that if we get in a fight everyday for awhile, we’ll have a difficult time not getting in a fight later on. Wikipedia to the rescue: ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis ).

This argument has never been settled, at least not in popular opinion. Plato and Aristotle argued this point more directly in the point of censorship. That’s right, even back then the issue was one of whether or not the government (in their case, the city-state) should ban certain forms of art because of the way in which art affected the populace. Plato argued that the city-state must ban plays and some painted art. His reason, while not one that is very useful to us directly, was that plays involve real people playing as fake people, and that the audience temporarily accepts these fake representations as real. Thus it was bad for the soul, because it is focused on an illusion (the material world)

creating another illusion (the events in the play). Therefore, plays draw the audience farther away from what is real. Even when they play is about one of the forms, like Justice, it is still a lie telling a lie to make a point about the truth, and therefore does not teach us about the form. Much painted art he said was unacceptable for a similar reason, that because many paintings are made of things which are not even there (painting a landscape out of your head), that they are an imperfect reflection of a thing which is false, and therefore leads us very far from the truth. A painting of a real object was acceptable, but only insofar as it represents the object as it really is. Still, he argued, the painting was an illusion of the real object, and was thus not a great idea.

Plato went further than this, though. Remember that he equates emotion with the material world and logic with the spiritual world. Plays make us feel things (and, as stated earlier, false things). Remember Mimesis? We see the things portrayed in the play, we see the actors expressing emotion, and we mimic those feelings in ourselves. Since logic is so much better than feeling, then obviously going to a play that makes you feel very strong emotions is a bad idea, particularly since you’ll be feeling these things about a lie. For Plato, it’s just bad news all around.Aritstotle took the opposite approach regarding plays. He argued that seeing a play was good, specifically because it causes us to feel so strongly about false events. Remember that he believed Catharsis to be a good and healthy way of preventing bad behavior. If we go to a play, and see everyone being sad and angry on stage, we can release the sadness and anger from ourselves by feeling it as if we were the actors, and thus avoid collapsing in depression or blowing up at our neighbors. Plays are especially good due to their “controlled environment” type of an atmosphere, both in that no danger actually comes upon the audience, and also in the fact that the playwrite and director create a specific resolution to the play. In other words, plays are good for Catharsis specifically because we always get the right ending, and therefore they reinforce proper virtues within us, while also allowing us to release our daily quota of our emotions.Since those two philosophers wrote their arguments down, no one has come up with an original argument on the subject. Not one. Everything said since then on the matter has either boiled down to Catharsis or Mimesis. Let’s try a few examples. Here are some brief summaries of various arguments that are commonly made, along with some commentary on my part. My point here is not so much to critique the various arguments as it is to point out that none of them have anything new to offer. Do we learn by mimicking, or are we pressure cookers that must have a safety valve in order to avoid blowing up?“The shooter at UT in 1966 didn’t have any violent video games to play, but he still killed people. I do play violent video games, and I haven’t killed anyone ever.” This argument is essentially saying, “Mimesis is not true, because we can point to cases of individuals either being violent without these video games, and to people being peaceful despite their presence.” It seems simple enough—the person making an argument like this one is attacking Mimesis on the grounds of specific examples of it not working as one might expect. Some would argue that this statement supports Catharsis, since one playing the violent games (or watching the slasher flicks) is the one who doesn’t kill people. This logic is a bit fragile, however, as too little information is given: the person could indeed be learning violence from the games, and yet learning more non-violence elsewhere. While that would appear to make the games ok at first, it solidly labels the videogames (or flicks, or plays, or whatever) as something that does, in fact, promote and support the behaviors and emotions within. “All the people involved in school shootings played violent video games like Counter-Strike or Grand Theft Auto.” This would be an example of some one attempting to argue that Mimesis appears to be working. The shooters mimicked the emotions and behaviors of their games. There is a secondary implication here, however, one which proponents of video game freedom usually miss. The above argument also contains a rather potent argument against Catharsis. If these kids were constantly playing video games in which they take out their aggression on imaginary people, and yet they still went out and blew up a school, then obviously playing these games did not, in fact, release their pent up aggression. Either no release occurred, or there was just so much doom in these kids that no amount of release could help, or playing these games actually increased their aggression levels.Let’s try another: “Our military uses simulators to train fighter pilots. This wouldn’t work as a teaching tool if people’s brains weren’t capable of accepting the simulated reality as real for awhile. Therefore, when people play games of killing people face to face, their brain on some level knows that it is killing people and will, by definition, learn how to be a person that kills people.” If the connection isn’t obvious, go read Plato’s attack on plays. This is a Mimesis argument that might as well have come out of the mouth of Plato himself.“I play Counter-Strike as a way of cooling down after a stressful day of work, it helps me wind down.” This, again, is a perfect illustration of Catharsis in action. It would appear, based on this argument alone, that indulging in fake, safe violence can result in a decrease in violent behavior and aggression. Here’s one that gets voiced way too often: “For 99% of the population, violent gaming isn’t a problem, it’s just those weird sickos who can’t handle a freaking game, and have to go be evil and bad by continuing on a downward spiral of nasty stuff. Don’t penalize the rest of us just because those freaks can’t handle the real world.” Ironically enough, this argument supports a Mimesis model of emotion, as it is essentially saying that these bad people are unable to perpetuate anything but deviant behavior. As convenient as it is to label these people as “just totally bad on their own,” thus distancing ourselves from them, the end result is a validation of the very argument that leads to censorship. Everyone perpetuates the behavior and emotion they see and do, and these deficient people can’t stop themselves from mimicking what the rest of us can. The rest of us have the spiritual fortitude to avoid going down the same slippery slope. Do you really want to argue that you are indeed placing yourself on a slippery slope, even if you also claim to be able to “handle it?”
I have a problem with this argument for another reason. I reject these attempts to label some people as just naturally bad or inferior. I do this for ethical reasons. Aside from the manner in which it further alienates them from the rest of the populace, it also avoids having to deal with the reality that there are people in our society who do the same things we do, and yet turn out differently. By labeling them as broken people who aren’t acting like normal people, we’re taking them out of the equation to make for a neat, seemless system. That’s just sloppy. A real argument, a valid argument, is one that takes all the information into account.Now, current society increasingly values emotion over logic. This makes it easier to hold a Cathartic view of emotion. Feeling things is good. Thinking too much, and being a cold, heartless brain is bad. The reason for this is actually hidden in the argument. Current American society values the individual over the community. The only way to solidify the value of the individual is to value subjectivity over objectivity, which inherently means devaluing logic and holding up passion as the most real, the most important, the most ME. Logic is objective, Feeling is subjective. Our valuing of emotion is completely tangled up in our valuing of the individual. Our culture tells us to make a choice of feeling over thought so that we can be individuals. It is for this reason that so many proponents of gaming and media freedom feel as though they are being robbed of their right to be an individual when others tell them that violent media should be censored. My point here is simply to say that the reason Americans (generally) believe in a Cathartic model of emotion is because they believe in themselves as individuals. I would argue that BOTH sides of the argument need to learn how to separate the two issues. Gaming freedom supporters need to learn to separate emotion from individuality and civil liberties, and gaming censorship supporters need to learn to separate them as well.
So then, now that I’ve belabored this point, the next step is obvious: If the debate is really about whether our emotions release themselves or perpetuate themselves, then what does psychology have to say about emotions? That is, after all, the question. Most of the arguments from both sides center around trying to prove or disprove either Catharsis or Mimesis, as discussed earlier. Rather than trying to argue this philosophically, or with anecdotes about this shooting, that shooting, or the fact that I haven’t killed anyone, it would be more productive to see whether or not science can add some real evidence to the matter. So let’s turn to the science of emotions.
We’ll start with Sigmund Freud, who is often misunderstood as being all about sex. His research was actually quite different than modern day pop culture portrays. I will only deal with the areas of his thought which pertain to the subject at hand, so you won’t find anything about the Id, Ego, or Super Ego here, and you won’t here about infant sexuality either. The majority of Freud’s research has since been disproven, but remains very important because it got psychology moving in a direction that allowed it to uncover this, that and the other, and then later turned out to be “more correct” than we had thought, just in a backwards sort of way. As an example, his discovery of childhood sexuality, while disproven in its specific form (the famous Oedipus Complex), has allowed researchers to better investigate the nature of infant-parent relationships and the workings of pleasure principles in people of all ages. Here’s a nice tall glass of wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud). One of Freud’s brilliant ideas was specifically that we all consisted of various instincts which usually worked together. Problems occurred only when those instincts came into conflict with each other. When this happens, the result is imbalanced people (can you see the Catharsis coming?). As an example, humans contain both the pleasure principle (eat, mate, etc.) and the death principle (kill, destroy, etc.). When we eat, we destroy something by pulverizing it with our teeth, while gaining pleasure from tasting and digesting the food. Thus the two instincts work together very well. Get these things out of balance, and suddenly you’re raping rather than making love, and you’re eating a baby instead of a steak.Freud argued that the best way to keep these instincts in balance was to constantly release them, an act which he called Catharsis. Yes, he took it straight out of Greek Philosophy. By expressing these instincts in a healthy way, a person could become balanced, healthy, and whole. One may notice the connection between this idea and modern American culture. Our society tells us that it is good to take time off for yourself, but also good to work hard, that it is better to express anger than hold it in, that not having enough sex will make you unhappy, that having too much will also make you unhappy, that we should not be controlling of others, but that we should be self-motivated and driven, that it is good to have enough pain in life to appreciate the good times… Following all this advice is often called “Living a full life.” Whether or not our culture agrees with Freud’s stages of development, it would appear that we have bought his brand of Catharsis. This summary of Freudian theory includes a little one-liner definition of Catharsis towards the end: (http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/freud.html). Another brief mention of it can be found with wikipedia, again a little one-liner: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathexis). That particular blurb is about Cathexes, which are basically dream symbols which satisfy a desire without directly addressing it, so that you don’t wake up. An example would be a baby dreaming of two giant mountains because it is hungry and wants to feed, so a symbol for breasts shows up which satisfies the need partially, while not being so exciting as to make the baby more hungry. That part isn’t necessary for the subject at hand, but it’s one of the only pages on Freud and Catharsis I could find.Unfortunately, psychological experiments since then have ended up debunking Catharsis for the most part. None of these studies are conclusive, but they all have some strong implications.
In the Bobo-doll experiment (1961), children were put in a room with an adult and a doll. In half of the instances, the children observed the adult behaving aggressively toward the doll, while in the other half, the children observed the adult behaving non-aggressively toward the doll. The children were then left alone with the doll and videotaped. As it turns out, the children mimicked the behavior they observed for the most part, though male children were far more likely to imitate aggressive behavior than female children. This Mimesis took place within minutes, not years of exposure. You can read about it here: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobo_doll_experiment). The validity of this study has been questioned, as it was using Bobo-dolls. They are designed to bounce back up after hitting them, leading detractors to point out that if the toy’s function is that of taking a beating, it makes sense for children to beat on them… However, I would also like to call attention to the fact that the research team conducted so many different variations on the experiment, each with interesting results. In otherwords, I wouldn’t recommend discounting the experiment entirely, nor would I recommend buying it hook, line, and sinker. It’s a complex study, and we should allow it to be complex in its findings.
In 1974, Stanley Milgram did a study in an attempt to investigate the relationship between authority and conscience. You know the question, “will normal people do horrible things when ordered to by authority figures?” Here’s a brief summary of the experiment. Participants were told they were part of a study on human learning, and were told to give the other participant electric shocks every time they answered a question incorrectly. Each successive shock got bigger and bigger. This other participant wasn’t really being shocked, and would simply scream and beg behind a wall. Eventually, the shocks reached levels marked as very dangerous, and finally potentially fatal. So the experimenters were really measuring whether or not the participants would go all the way, or if they would eventually refuse to participate anymore. If they protested, the chief experimenter would say things like, “the study must continue,” or whatever, but would never actually force the participant to do anything. You can read all about it here: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment).Everyone assumed that less than 1% of the participants would “go all the way.” As it turned out, a whopping 65% of them went all the way to the maximum shock levels (450 volts, by which time the “victim” had become completely and terrifyingly silent). Now, what does this have to do with the nature of emotion? I mean, this study is about obedience, not EMOTION. Well, here’s the deal. If these participants were going all the way, then they were clearly not evacuating all of their aggression through Catharsis. Acts of aggression allowed for greater aggression, rather than diminishing their capacity for aggression. If Catharsis had been operating here, we would expect to see a sharp drop off in compliance once they had hurt the victim “enough.” The “foot-in-the-door” effect was clearly operating, in which people judge their next action based on their previous action, rather than on an objective note. So the participants were able to give fatal shocks because they had just given a shock that was 10 volts less. Looked at in this light, there is a clear Mimetic system at work here, in which the participants actions recreate themselves. The only way to support a Cathartic model here is to claim that participants were indeed Catharting, but that there was so much aggression stored up that 65% of them had to murder in order to be fully purged. I wouldn’t recommend going there, as it will naturally end up arguing that violent video games are Cathartic, and that such Cathartsis has a high risk of leading to murder. That would be one step forward, nine steps back.
Another study, called the Stanford Prison Experiment (1971), involved taking a group of university students, all of whom were selected for their stability and solid character, were given the jobs of prison guards and inmates. The official site for the experiment is located here: (http://www.prisonexp.org/). The experiment was designed to go on for 2 weeks, but was canceled after only 6 days because the guards began heaping more abuse on the prisoners than anyone had anticipated. To summarize briefly, it got bad… really, really bad. Within six days, the guards had begun treating the prisoners horribly and sadistically, and the prisoners had completely given in to their role as prisoner. Keep in mind that all of the participants were selected for their “not-evil-ness.” In this study as in the one previously mentioned, acts of violence and aggression did not decrease the likelihood of later acts. Instead, each sadistic feat only amplified itself and paved the way for more hostility. In other words, these normal, good, intelligent students were clearly demonstrating a Mimetic pattern of emotion and behavior.I won’t be so presumptuous as to claim that the debate is over, or that this article concludes the matter, or solidly proves anything. I will however, reiterate that the argument must be about emotion in order to be an honest argument. The question is not civil liberties or an individual’s right to play certain games and watch certain movies. It is simply a question of whether we are capable of “blowing off steam,” or whether such endeavors end up recreating themselves. Popular opinion has yet to conclude one way or the other. Philosophy also has yet to decide. Experimental Psychology, however, has collected a wealth of evidence on the matter. One can’t really say that Catharsis has been “disproven,” but it is certainly true that there is evidence which supports Mimesis, and that there is not evidence that supports Catharsis.