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Crime And Self-Punishment In The Video-Game World

A week earlier, a South Korean man collapsed and died after playing the online game Starcraft for 50 straight hours. This after he was fired for missing work too often to satisfy his gaming cravings. And this week, we got a reminder that violence in video games may trigger violent behavior among boys when research from Saint Leo University in Florida found that the aggregate of evidence from 20 years of video-game studies suggests as much.

So what do we do with this information? For one, we certainly shouldn't overreact. Studies only tell us so much--and they can be quite biased, often providing only a short-term view of how players are impacted by what they see. Some even suggest that off-screen violence may actually be reduced by playing violent games. In a recent interview with the Ottawa Citizen, Steven Johnson, best-selling author of Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, said that the violence in video games merely lets youth work out their aggressions in front of a computer screen.

Then again, when gaming starts leading to death and mugging (albeit virtually), maybe underreacting isn't such a great idea, either. Maybe the nonstop flow of video-game violence is killing our kids' motivation, as well as their academics, family relationships, and appreciation for the outdoors. Maybe parents aren't being aggressive enough to make sure that the games their kids are playing aren't inciting them to karate chop the nearest person as soon as the game ends or to brazenly point toy guns at people despite repeated requests not to. I've seen these behaviors firsthand. Whether they're actually a direct result of video games or they'd be occurring regardless is unclear, but it would be responsible not to take the potential connection seriously.

As a nongamer, I have to confess, I'm biased toward overreacting, with good reason. I'm the father of an 8-year-old boy and stepfather to two grown kids, and all three have caused me to blow a gasket on more than one occasion because of their obsessive addictions to video games. The oldest, my stepdaughter, once was depressed for two weeks--in reality--when the "man" she was supposed to marry in the online game Everquest left her for another woman. Never mind that her fiancé may have been a 9-year-old boy, a prison inmate, or a chronic shut-in. She acted as if her real life was actually shattered by this virtual development. My stepson, who's about to be 21, has proven to be a habitual addict who's willing to lie, cheat, and steal to feed his habit, which he openly admits is the only time he's really happy. A few times during his adolescence, he punched holes in his bedroom walls when his mother and I suggested--forcefully--that he stop gaming and start looking for a job. Then there's my little one, who has taken to the Nintendo Gamecube he got last Christmas like a hyena takes to fresh meat. I'm trying to stay on top of things by monitoring the content of the games he plays and watching the amount of time he gets to race, blast, and fight his day away.

My approach represents the bare minimum that any parent should do to keep video gaming under control. Like any indulgent habit, if it goes unchecked, gaming can turn into big problems. As parents, and as a society, we owe it to ourselves to keep that problem from getting any bigger. And while we're at it, we better start taking some virtual self-defense classes and avoiding those dark alleys in the online world, because as security guru Bruce Schneier told New Scientist in its report about the online mugging, "every form of theft and fraud in the real world will eventually be duplicated in cyberspace."

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