VIDEO GAME MAYHEM

               In the first 24 hours of GRAND THEFT AUTO V’s release nearly twelve million of the games were sold. Like it or not ultra-violent video games are here to stay and the bloodier the better. While neither Wife nor Daughter (the gamers in the family) have yet to buy GTF they enjoy some violent games. But generally their games are set in post-apocalyptic worlds where they blast spidery/monster thingies into multi-colored goo. 

In any case a hue and cry has been raised concerning ultra-violent games’ possible influence on younger players. (Actually Daughter is the family expert on gaming, violent or otherwise. See http://www.gamesr4fite.com.) But meanwhile I find myself wondering if ultra violent games do influence impressionable players?

Pop quiz! What two things do Richard Speck, Charles Whitman and Charlie Starkweather have in common? Answer one: all three were young American males who felt no compunction about snuffing out the lives of fellow human beings. And two: none of them had ever played a video game, violent or otherwise, in their lives. In their time transistor radios were about as high tech as the average American got.

On the other hand Dr. Fredric Wertham, if he were here, would argue that video games do indeed influence America’s youth and not in a good way. There were no video games in his day either. But there were comic books. And crime and ghost story comics, insisted the good doctor, were a direct cause of young people committing violent crimes across the nation. Even Superman was suspect.

So in 1954 he wrote a book titled SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT. In period magazines and newspapers there are photographs of earnest adults burning stacks of comic books. Barely twenty years had passed since the Nazis had burned books they didn’t like either.

Yes, movies and television shows are becoming more gory, excessively and unnecessarily so. But that’s not new either. Take movie director Herschell Gordon Lewis (Please!). No, he is not studied at the University of Southern California’s film school. He made a few soft-porn movies (GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE BARES). They didn’t do all that well. Then he discovered gore.

Not just splattered blood gore. Slice and dice, rip and tear, dismember and disembowel gore. Movies so gory theater managers refused to show them because patrons vomited on the seats and floor. So throughout the 1960s and early 1970s Lewis showed them in drive-ins, movies like BLOOD FEAST, COLOR ME BLOOD RED and his magnum opus, GORE-GORE GIRLS made a fortune (all lost in bad investments). 
    

Have we become more violent as a society? Maybe not, maybe we just have better technology. In 1881 the infamous gunfight at Tombstone’s OK Corral claimed only three lives, nothing compared to today’s mass murderers. But then Wyatt Earp and his brothers only had primitive six-guns. Now if Doc Holiday, instead of a borrowed shotgun, had a modern AK47, well… (Incidentally Earp contemporary John Wesley Hardin murdered 44 men before he himself was gunned down. So serial killers aren’t new either.)

Maybe violent games are a bad influence. Do violent kids become violent adults? I don’t know but I offer this: Lincoln Park in West Seattle, Washington is haunted by the ghosts of numerous outlaws, enemy soldiers and even a few space aliens. I know because years ago I personally shot them with my cowboy cap pistol. And I don’t even step on bugs if I can avoid it.

Dad out.