Violence in Video Games, Scapegoating, and Accountability

With the upcoming release of Grand Theft Auto V, slated to hit shelves on September 17, 2013, it was inevitable that people from all walks of life would notice. Few games have been as successful and polarizing as the GTA series, which deals with pretty much every mature theme you can think of. Gameplay elements range from mass shooting sprees to quiet, introspective drives along the beachfront before picking up a prostitute to shake your (potentially stolen) car back and forth a few times. Whether these elements are done tastefully is a debate for another time, although I will say that The Ballad of Gay Tony was perhaps the best expansion to a console game I've ever played and one of the few that really made me feel like I got my money's worth.

I wasn't kidding about the title.

The notoriety of the series has reached such a peak that you can almost feel news outlets growing anxious in anticipation for the newest installment's release. After all, it seems that almost every time youth violence is reported nationwide it is with the explicit intent to scandalize video games and other forms of entertainment. Never mind the fact that the games have a rating of "M" for Mature, which means it would be completely illegal for a child under the age of adulthood to purchase it, meaning the parents of the child had to consent; beyond that debate, there seems to be an underlying acceptance that violence in video games is a legitimate means of scapegoating.

I don't see anyone blaming this for youth violence.

The violence in video games debate seems to work two ways: one, an important and widely-read media outlet asserts a connection between avid game-playing in a youth and a violent action that particular youth has taken recently. Two, alternative media outlets, including gaming websites and blogs like Kotaku and Joystiq, offer up studies that suggest the contrary. Usually these studies are accompanied by an authority figure that indicates the news story in question really didn't have that much to do with video games anyways. After this, the debate seems to just...stagnate. 

I understand that for this generation, timely news stories are even more important than they have ever been before. To dwell on a subject that is no longer a hot topic, or interesting to a specific section of the target audience, is to lose potentially thousands of pageviews and word-of-mouth advertising. However, it's curious that the news networks that report on these perceived links between violence and video games are never held accountable for errant reporting when an article, or multiple articles, surface that contradict or downright disprove the media outlet's original stance. If a news network erroneously reported that a Florida man ran screaming into the night about alien abductions while wearing a trash can on his head, when in fact he was wearing tin foil so the radio waves wouldn't get him, it would be fair to expect a correction. Sometimes, even an apology is warranted, like in the case of The Essex Chronicle, which ran an article dealing with a drug dealer's arrest using a picture of an entirely different person.

So why is the media not held accountable for their misconceptions about video game violence? Because that violence serves a purpose in media coverage that is a difficult niche to fill. It offers an easy go-to explanation about youth violence that avoids the bigger questions, like potential flaws in the way parents go about raising their children, or imperfections in society that would require serious work to fix. Mass media reporting isn't about exploring the darkest corners of the stories they're reporting, not when it touches on elements that make people uneasy. It is simple to point at the case of the 8 year old boy shooting his caretaker and say, "surely he did this because of his exposure to violence in his free time, something we could not have controlled". It is far harder to examine the case and state "perhaps his access to firearms in the presence of an elderly woman is troubling, or perhaps him needing a caretaker in the first place means he is neglected by his parents whether intentionally or unintentionally".

As uncomfortable as the topic seems to make people, violence in video games is a scapegoat to avoid further levels of discomfort. Until that changes, we'd better get used to the same cycle: mass controversy over a popular violent video game, backlash from the gamer community, and then silence until the next one.