THIS HOLIDAY SEASON I went off the grid. No email. No Twitter or Feedly. Notifications disabled. Nothing chirping for my attention except my kid, whose startup sequence deploys at 6:30 a.m.
This wasn’t something I planned, but after a few days I decided to stick with it. I expected to feel disconnected, but instead it felt cleans-ing, liberating…necessary. If you can manage to cut the cord, even for a few days, I recommend giving it a try. You may find yourself noticing things like the UPS man’s nifty gloves, the sound of snow crunching under your feet, or your own breathing.
During my time in the analog wild, I thought a lot about my avocation as a student of video and computer games. I made a point of discussing them with anyone willing to chat with me about them. My circumstances in recent weeks brought me into contact with students from all over the world, travelers, family members, and a broad assortment of friendly folks I met between Indianapolis and Los Angeles.
Recently I’ve begun to reflect on how we think and talk about games and the industry producing them. By “we” I mean developers, critics, enthusiasts.
My informal chats and my time off the grid led me to a few conclusions, and this one in particular: Lots of smart, open-minded people are genuinely worried about violence in games.
You and I can debate the question and exchange conflicting scholarly studies, but recent events have sensitized people to the issue of violence in games like never before. We (critics, press, designers) must address this now. Claiming a lack of conclusive data or citing studies that say violent crime has dropped in recent years won’t cut it.
Why not? Because those arguments fail the sniff test.
It no longer matters whether or not games contributed to the massacre at Newtown. What matters is that lots of reasonable people have come to believe we’re awash in depictions of bloody violence across media, and repeatedly exposing our kids to this stuff is just plain wrong.
In all my years of playing shooters and brawlers-type games, my mother never expressed a shred of concern. But this year at Christ-mas, she looked me in the eye and asked, “Do you worry that video games make killing seem like fun?”
And for the first time I answered, “Yes.”
Michael Abbott is professor of theater at Wabash and is the creator of the blog Brainy Gamer: Thoughtful Conversation About Video Games: www.brainygamer.com