Drawing Our Lines:
We in the game industry have a tendency to draw lines. Pro-gaming. Anti-gaming. We draw our line in the sand, cross our arms, and define our friends and our enemies based on which side of the line they're standing on. We have little patience for what we hear from across the line. What we see when we look across are the stereotypes of our opposition: the politicians that speak without knowledge and the media that broadcasts without depth or perspective. But when we draw our lines between us and the most radical opposition, we often miss the much more reasonable people in the center, the ones that would stand on the middle ground if our line were wide enough to have one.It's understandable that members of the game industry might eye the National Summit on Video Games, Youth and Public Policy with some trepidation. Add that it is sponsored in part by the National Institute on Media and the Family, an organization that many gamers already associate with the far side of the line, and heels will start to dig in.
“Given NIMF's record,” writes one Slashdot user in the public forums following the summit, “the "summit" likely had nothing to do with exploring the true nature of mass media and its impact, and was just a... schmooze-fest for people bent on circumventing the First Amendment.”
No discussion aimed at the gaming audience can talk about the summit without first addressing that sentimentality, the belief that the summit's intentions were tainted from the onset. Yet what I found at the National Summit on Video Games, Youth and Public Policy was much more reasonable than that. The speakers were well informed, their approach careful to acknowledge the delicacy of the issue, and many of my personal concerns were echoed in the concerns of the researchers in attendance. The summit was never dominated by a single voice. While it was evident that most attendees shared common beliefs about what the research shows, there was still plenty of discourse about issues like free speech and the true implications of that research. Unlike many discussions about violence and video games, no one spoke out of ignorance or blind hostility. After two days, I saw no reason not to listen to what was said there. No reason to dismiss its recommendations out-of-hand. If the final report does a good job of expressing the multiple perspectives that surfaced at the summit, then there's no reason the game industry shouldn't read it very carefully when it's released. At the very least, it represents a very informed opinion, even if it's an opinion that we don't like to hear.
And trust me, anyone “bent on circumventing the First Amendment” certainly wouldn't have invited Dr. Catherine Ross to the summit to act as its defense.
Why You're Reading This Article:
You're not going to find details about what was said at the summit in this article; I intend to address the most interesting points individually in articles that follow this one. This article doesn't exist to talk about what was said at the summit. It exists to talk about how they said it.My intention at the summit was not specifically to cover what was said, or by who, on a word-for-word basis. I was there to judge mood. If the event was game hostile, I wanted to know that. If it were game friendly, I wanted to know that, too. I'll talk about many of the details from the summit later, including a very provocative statement by Congresswoman McCollum that equates Mature rated video games to pornography, and some extremely interesting debates about the First Amendment.
But that's not the point of this article. When the National Summit on Video Games, Youth and Public Policy releases their report about what happened there, it's going to have at least one unified statement: “Behavioral Science Research demonstrates that playing violent video games increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior in children and youth.”
That statement will not be liked by the game industry. It very clearly implies a causal relationship between game violence and aggressive behavior, not a correlational one. It was not a phrasing that was chosen lightly. The online forums will name call. People will accuse the summit of being narrow minded, of being hostile, ill-informed, and the enemies of free speech. Some people in the game industry will do that, because that's what we do when we're criticized from beyond our line.
One real value of my being there, of seeing the conference first hand, is simply to report that those accusations are off-base. They're not true. Hopefully the summary report released as part of the summit itself will do an apt job of reporting what the researchers in attendance thought about video games, youth, and public policy; this article is attempting to convince the game industry to read it before rejecting what it has to say. We have to resist the temptation to plug our ears.