113. SIMULATED HORROR - Is It OK To Spend Your Free Time Plotting Imaginary Violence?
A student asked me my thoughts on children playing violent video games. My first response was to ask him why he thought it mattered that the players were children. Why not adults playing violent video games too?
The idea that violent video games, and before that violent movies, might make people more violent has always been something I have instinctively resisted. As a teenager growing up at the height of moral panic about slasher movies and heavy metal music, the idea that children - or anybody - couldn’t distinguish between fantasy violence and the real world, to me, was exposed as false the moment you considered how many people watched horror movies and listened to heavy metal and compared it with the number of people who ended up going out and committing violent crimes. Even if one person listened to a record or watched a movie and then went outside and stabbed somebody, that correlation proved nothing. After all, thousands of other people listened to the same music and watched the same movie and committed no violent acts. Some even listened and watched and did wonderful, loving things afterwards. Never forget that it was the music of the Beatles that supposedly led Charlie Manson to murder Sharon Tate. Other fans of the band, meanwhile, asked for love instead of war and gave peace a chance. Guns don’t kill people, people do. Or rather movies and music don’t kill people, people do. Strange how when they say it about guns I can see immediately how bad the argument is, but when they come for my violent movies and music they will have to pry them from my cold, dead hands!
But is playing a video game different? It is certainly far less passive than other violent forms of entertainment. When I listen to music or watch a movie, I basically let it all wash over me. I am exposed to the violence, for sure, but not an active participant in it. I am watching a story unfold or hearing an idea become lyrics. Violent video games are different. I am the one holding the weapon and taking a life. I am the one thinking about how to kill to succeed. I am the one strategising for battle. It is my violence, not merely witnessing the violence of somebody else.
I asked my student if they played such video games. The student said yes, and explained how they only played them at the weekend, and how they had spent the last weekend doing so. They had won and lost entire kingdoms in battles they had plotted and executed with much consideration. They don’t seem to be a particularly violent person, yet at the weekend they had led entire armies into conquest.
I posed the following question: if instead of doing all this virtually, through a video game, you had spent the whole weekend merely fantasising about causing all this death and destruction, perhaps writing out what you might imagine doing into a little notebook, do you think the reaction from people would be the same?
The question made him, and the others in the room, take pause.
A student telling me they spent the weekend playing a video game where they fought and killed a bunch of people is apparently nothing to write home about. A student reporting that they spent the weekend imagining slaughtering hundreds and writing down all the different scenarios in a notebook, however, would be a significant safeguarding concern. But what is the actual difference between the two scenarios?
In the ethics side of the current AQA A-level philosophy course there is the need to look at an application of ethical theories to the issue of simulated killing. But this thought experiment suggests that not all simulated killing is morally identical. Strangely, it seems our intuitions about actually simulating killing in a video game are that it is somehow more morally acceptable than the person who merely fantasises about killing without the simulation.
The song, the movie, the video game, where groups of people have worked tirelessly to create a visceral simulation or evocation of horror are socially acceptable pastimes. The lone individual, quietly thinking their own murderous thoughts and doing nothing more is something different. Something darker.
Darker still were my students’ reasons that this might be. The games, they suggested, like the movies and the music, are healthy ways of exercising and exorcising our most brutal thoughts. They would rather the human being, who they believe to be naturally aggressive, sit and play a first person shooter online then go out into the real world with an actual gun. Rather they watch a bloody and violent movie at home than create one in their street. The person ignoring the simulation and indulging their darkest thoughts is not letting out their darkness safely. For all we know they are plotting something awful that will cause people great harm. Rather they plot the fantastical destruction of the entire world in nuclear holocaust on some video game, than they plot the real-life destruction of real people.
The answer was unsatisfactory, because it implied an essentialism about human nature that was disturbing: an inherent Hobbesian urge to violence which needs to be tamed and distracted. I don’t like the idea of a world where, were it not for the violent games and movies, we would all be at each other’s throats.
But not liking an answer is not sufficient reason to reject it. I might not like it, but it might still be true.
A better response was a version of the same argument I’d used to support my own teenage habit of violent movies and music. The self-evident fact that not all humans enjoy such violent entertainment. Indeed, many actively avoid it. The philosopher John Locke once noted that if ideas were universal they would be known by all, even “children and idiots”. The same could be said for human nature. If it were our nature to be violent then we would all be violent. But clearly, despite some well publicised atrocities, we are not.
I had a similar argument with a colleague later in the week regarding the supposed “naturalness” of human laziness. “Humans are just lazy”, I was told, as a reason why certain students weren’t doing their homework. “Tell that to a gardener”, I replied. Or anyone with a hobby. Tell it to the same students who perhaps don’t do their homework, but who spend hours each day kicking a football around in the hope of getting better, or my neighbour who seems to spend every hour they have spare bouncing a basketball and practicing their shots, occasionally hitting my car. Humans aren’t naturally lazy, even though much of what we do is exhausting and lots of what we must do is undesirable. As long as we see the reason for doing something, and as long as we are motivated, we can literally kill ourselves working as hard as possible to achieve something we want to achieve. If students are lazy, I suggested, it isn’t because of human nature, it’s because they are not motivated sufficiently to do what they have been asked to. Maybe homework is the problem, not human nature?
The same must also hold for violence. If the only option we give someone for their entertainment is violence then, despite what I told myself as a teenager, perhaps violence becomes the only language you understand. And perhaps there is such a market for violence because our more violent tendencies are being stoked by the frustrations of the unjust world we live in. If so many people are spending their free time working out their aggression in pseudo-worlds of simulated killing, we must ask first what is making them so aggressive. If it is the games themselves then we might ask which came first, the chicken or the egg? When you ask an evolutionary biologist that question they give you a frustrating answer: it is the fertilised egg of whichever ancestors to the chicken just mutated sufficiently to, between them, make the first chicken. Maybe children, and adults, play so many violent video games today because we didn’t stop a previous generation watching violent movies and listening to violent music, and the world they created as a result was one of injustice and frustration, where violence became the norm?
A friend and I laughed the other day about people who want to smack their children, claiming “I was smacked as a child and it didn’t do me any harm.” You are a grown adult who now wants to hit a child - are you sure it didn’t do you any harm?
Boy I do love listening to violent music and watching violent movies. I even like playing the odd violent video game. My instincts are to say “it didn’t do me any harm”. But the world sure is pretty violent isn’t it?
Author: DaN McKee
My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE and from all good booksellers. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com