Banman Forever

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In 1985, Devin Moore was born in the U.S. State of Alabama. Eighteen years later on June 7th, he shot and killed Arnold Strickland, James Crump and Leslie Mealer in a Fayette police station, before escaping in a police cruiser. It is claimed that he was addicted to the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and that it influenced his actions in committing these murders. But can a cluster of pixels on a screen really make one human being kill another?
Well, according to fifty-six year old Jack Thompson, ‘yes’. He was one of the defence attorneys for Devin Moore, and said that GTA: VC trained his client to kill those three police officers. After Moore was apprehended, it is reported he said “life is like a video game – everyone’s gotta die sometime.”
Let’s backtrack a second. ‘What is Grand Theft Auto?’ I hear you cry – well, unless you’ve been living under a cultural rock for the past seven years, you might have heard of it. The series began back in 1997, and as of this month has spawned nine separate titles. The more recent games take the form of a third-person free-roam action/adventure, in which you play a lowly criminal in a fictional big city. The aim of the game’s story is to rise through the ranks of organised crime by completing ‘missions’, such as armed robberies, assassination, and as the title suggests, stealing cars.
Now we’ve all heard that playing video games turns your mind to mush, but can it mess with someone that much that it can influence them to commit felonies? Well, according to a number of studies…maybe. Whilst they stop short of claiming actual behavioural causation, they do flag ‘violence simulators’ as potentially dangerous - to developing minds.
Jack Thompson is a prominent opponent of computer games such as Grand Theft Auto, and has represented the many victims, and families of victims, whom he says were affected because of the violence promoted in such games. Thompson is a conservative Christian man, whose legal career has concentrated on cleansing the media of ‘morally irresponsible’ media. Many lawsuits have been filed under his guidance, most notably several against Rockstar North and Take-Two Interactive, the maker and publisher respectively of the GTA series. He claims they are, by creating such games, training people “how to point and shoot a gun in a fashion making [them] an extraordinarily effective killer without teaching [them] any of the constraints or responsibilities needed to inhibit such a killing capacity." In their defence, Rockstar and Take-Two cite their right to freedom of speech in the First Amendment, and that these games are designed for and marketed to adults only.
You see, as the previously mentioned studies have shown, it is only to minors that such simulations are damaging. David Walsh, of the National Institute on Media & the Family, has conducted several studies into discovering whether there is a link between violent video games and physical aggression. It has been shown that a teenager’s brain is not fully developed – the prefrontal cortex, which controls forward thinking, consequence assessment and impulses is not fully matured until the early twenties at least. Based upon the work of Walsh and many others, the American Psychological Association’s official standing on the matter is that violent games can increase children’s aggression, but that parents moderate the negative effects. Douglas Gentile, PhD and Craig Anderson, PhD have summarised that this is the case, more so than with movies/television because:
1) The games are highly engaging and interactive
2) The games reward violent behaviour, and
3) Children repeat these behaviours.
So it is down to the parents? Well, not entirely, but there is a certain amount of responsibility to be accepted by them. As Rockstar and its ilk have stressed, their games are not for minors. In 1994, the interactive entertainment industry in North America voluntarily submitted to be regulated by the ESRB (Entertainment Software Ratings Board), which to this date has rated over eight and a half thousand titles on their content and minimum age suitability. The voluntary PEGI (Pan-European Game Information) system is in use in Europe, developed by the Interactive Software Federation of Europe. These, and many other organisations, are there to inform parents what is suitable, both in terms of the minimum age their child should be to play a game, and what potentially harmful content is included.
The bottom line is that parents cannot claim ignorance when little Billy hits his friend in the playground because he has been given Tekken for Christmas. As it happens, Grand Theft Auto is a satire. It is not meant to be taken seriously. Young minds are infinitely impressionable, and as a result they should not be allowed to engage with media like Grand Theft Auto if they do not have the capacity to understand its context. Would you knowingly expose your child to pornography? Would you let them watch bloody films like Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill? With regulatory bodies such as the ESRB in place, is there really anything more that a responsible developer can do without stunting their vision? People produce such things in a creative context, and are well within their rights to under the laws of free speech and freedom of expression.
Jack Thompson doesn’t think so. His pursuit of Rockstar is tireless, to the point where he has been removed from cases for ‘unethical conduct’ – allegedly harassing and threatening opposing lawyers – and is currently facing disbarment. Obviously he means well, and is only acting upon his own set of values, but it would appear that he has lost the ability to be objective about the issue, and with the damage claims he has been involved with filing - $246 million here, $600 million there – it seems like he’s also being a bit greedy, or otherwise trying to just bankrupt the companies out of business – not exactly the model of a moral victory. He seems to attract attention to himself too. By being so obtuse in pursuing his activism against seemingly the whole industry, the gargantuan online community of gamers, cartoonists and modders (people who alter or expand upon a game’s original programming to create visual deviations and altogether new content) have targeted Thompson with the very satire so prevalent in the GTA series. One team of modders has placed a likeness of Thompson into Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The character has an alter ego called ‘Banman’, who takes on missions to destroy Rockstar game shipments whilst the ‘real’ Jack seeks to discredit pixellated versions of his real life targets. Whilst this seems unnecessarily inflammatory, many gamers believe he has brought it upon himself – and besides, all of this just appears to reinforce his firm belief in his cause.
Although I am not necessarily here to defend the violence in video games, it has been found that games such as Grand Theft Auto and Halo (a hugely popular first-person action game) are not entirely detrimental, and indeed can boost the brain’s processing power. People who play fast-paced action games like these, and many others, generally have the ability to process visual information quicker than those who do not. Experts from the University of Rochester, NY, believe that such games could be used to improve every day motor skills, rehabilitate stroke patients and even train soldiers for combat without having to waste expensive live ammunition. Professor Daphne Bavelier says “players can process visual information more quickly and can track thirty percent more objects than non-players.” A test was also set up in a mix of male and female ‘non-players’ to see if these processing skills could be built from scratch. Half played the first-person shooter ‘Medal of Honour’ for at least an hour every day over the span of two weeks, whilst the other half played Tetris. After this time, the first group performed much better on all the visual tests administered, while the Tetris players did not.
Naomi Alderman of The Guardian makes an interesting point about the bias against computer games: if you play a lot of video games, you’re addicted. If you read a lot, you’re just ‘academic’ and ‘engrossed’. She takes the defence of video games one step further, in fact. She believes that “if we deny children access to computer games, we deprive them of a rich and magical experience…the world of Grand Theft Auto does contain violence and misogyny; but then, so does The Godfather, or Goodfellas. So, for that matter, does The Iliad.”
Perhaps, then, Jack Thompson should take up a crusade against Homer? Doh…!