Stephen King on videogame violence
Stephen King fights the censorship!
Of course, this is the same guy who wrote a short story about a man stranded on an island slowly eating himself because he had no other food. Classic last line, too: “Ladyfingers… they taste just like ladyfingers…”
Could Massachusetts legislators find better ways to watch out for the kiddies? Man, I sure hope so, because there’s a lot more to America’s culture of violence than Resident Evil 4.
What really makes me insane is how eager politicians are to use the pop culture — not just videogames but TV, movies, even Harry Potter — as a whipping boy. It’s easy for them, even sort of fun, because the pop-cult always hollers nice and loud. Also, it allows legislators to ignore the elephants in the living room. Elephant One is the ever-deepening divide between the haves and have-nots in this country, a situation guys like Fiddy and Snoop have been indirectly rapping about for years. Elephant Two is America’s almost pathological love of guns. It was too easy for critics to claim — falsely, it turned out — that Cho Seung-Hui (the Virginia Tech killer) was a fan of Counter-Strike; I just wish to God that legislators were as eager to point out that this nutball had no problem obtaining a 9mm semiautomatic handgun.
17 Responses to “Stephen King on videogame violence”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
I love Stephen King. I really do.
His books totally freak me out but his causes are near and dear to my heart.
Stephen King wrote:
Definitely a set-up for a sequel.
I’ve always really liked Stephen King. It doesn’t hurt that he paid for my first year of college (and would gladly have paid for the rest, had I done little things like attending and passing courses more regularly). But I always find myself drawn to his “rants.”
Of course, I’m a big believer of “games are art, free speech, QED.” I especially like how he’s highlighting the ludicrous singling-out of games without even spending much effort (half a sentence?) on free speech. We’re absolutely immersed in content of extreme violence. As one of my college professors liked to say: “If a man is sticking a long, skinny object into a woman on TV, it’d better be a knife.”
Well, if the “king of horror fiction” says there’s nothing to worry about, then “case closed” indeed.
Are you sure that story was by King? I thought it was Roald Dahl.
Stephen King.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_Type
Well, I certainly agree it’s too easy to just blame video games, movies, etc for the violence in our culture. On the other hand, Elephants #1 and #2 get a whole lot oversimplified blame themselves, Mr. King…
If there is a fault with the two issues King brings up as being bigger issues here, it is that they are hideously complex, and not that they’re not really the real issue at hand. No matter what we say about guns and whether the gun culture that we have in this country is *really* responsible for things, when you combine desperation, angst, or outrage with semi-automatic weapons BAD things happen, and the former problem is a hotbed for generating all of those. Solving the problem is even more of a complicated, sticky, issue, which is why people tend to ignore it in favor of the easy to point at media, but it’s still the bulk of the problem.
It’s really hard to kill 20 people with a knife in one suicidal outburst. Really hard.
Take away enough weapons such that knives are considered among the most dangerous, and it has the same pscyhological effect on a societal scale.
It’s really hard to kill 20 people with a knife in one suicidal outburst. Really hard.
Unfortunately not. In Korea pulling a knife is the same as pulling a gun and you can really get in trouble. Even criminals there find guns are incredibly hard to get, and yet still they have mass murder suicides there. There was one a couple years ago where 12 or so people died (but I can’t find it argh). In Germany guns are hard to get but they have mass murderers too. Every country has mass murderers, same as the US. And it’s the same lonely nutjobs.
Then there was the example in that church last year where someone wanted to shoot it up but was stopped by the ex-military woman who had a gun.
Of course, mass murderers are a special breed of crazy, and as you can imagine no laws or restrictions will keep them from killing. I am not sure how many deaths are caused by them but I imagine it’s lower than the deaths caused by common career criminals. So I am not sure we should make laws with mass murderers in mind.
oh that killing in Korea was with a knife, in case I wasn’t clear.
This might have been what I was remembering: June 8, 2001 ~ Ikeda, Osaka, Japan. 8 dead, 15 injured
http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/2008/02/asian-school-stabbings.html
Yes we can all google.
http://www.gun-control-network.org/GF01.htm – The metrics are what they are.
http://www.gun-control-network.org/GF02.htm – Massacres using guns in other countries.
The simple reality of the metrics is, if you can get your hand on a gun you will use it if you are crazed enough. If you can’t, ok you will use what is at hand, remembering the level of martial arts training and tradition in both Korea and Japan means blades are well understood, perhaps much better than the U.S. But you have to be crazed enough. Taking the “people kill people” stance, the numbers seem to show that other countries don’t make their people anywhere near as crazy.
American culture is not forgiving of being caught in the income disparity. Failure to achieve the fantasy held out of the American Dream we all grew up with is a big failure here, unlike other countries where it is not such an issue. Our love of Darwin in America has only extended as far as rationalizing why we personally fail to get the “American Bling”, not why we, in all our splendor, came to exist at all.
American culture is not forgiving in particular of males that fail to attain. We suffer that catch 22 not by finding ways to share burdons but by lonely simmering, because we are MEN, and are AMERICANS.
American culture celebrates the loner who solves problems by any means necessary rather than providing an acceptably supportive life view, like free health care or child care, or traditions of community that are greater than the individual. That’s socialism we are talking about!
More than enough Dirty Harry movies have been made (and perhaps movies are in fact even more compicit than games ever will be).
Games may offer sedation more than instigation in that the truly angry men are able to actually win at something, for a while. A war game will not give him permission or encourage him to share his burdons and find help, however. Perhaps it’s when winning in a game is no longer sedating enough that men strike out on their own to express rage using any means at hand.
What I’m concerned with here is the misdirection.
I don’t think too many people really believe that a murderer does it because he played violent games.
But does game violence cause social conflict of a much more mundane nature? Does it cause kids to get in fights, bully others? Most of the problems on this level (whether violent games caused them or not) can be dealt with by adults, and most kids will grow out of them on their own anyways. But do some get left behind as social misfits? Troublemakers? And even if not, does it affect their social circles and even the rest of their life?
These are still important questions to most parents. We need studies.
But I’ll tell you another concern. I don’t want to see our kids growing up to be flower children, en mass. Kids also need to learn to stand up for themselves, and defend their rights. Fighting for what’s right is a good thing. Not necessarily with weapons, but putting up “the good fight” in all things. Great nations/societies are built on this ideal. This is where violence in games can be used to a good affect, much like the cowboy movies of old. Bonanza! (And John Waine, who used to be admired around the world, is now mocked in many circles, and the term “cowboy” is often used in a derisive way. But it was that cowboy image that tamed a wild west and brought law, order, and justice to it.)
I’ve often said that the neo-cons in the US have a very bold, two-pronged plan for our future: to create a giant, disaffected underclass… and arm them.
I’m not quite sure what the purpose of the plan is. But it’s bold, I’ll give ’em that.
Hehe, as opposed to ultra-libs who want to create a giant socially dependent underclass and disarm them?
It’s a Tale of Two Cities, my friend.
(And why that thought came to mind I’m not sure, but now I’m going to have to delve into the back of my mind to cease the nagging. And the back of my mind is a treacherous place to explore.
Damn you sir, daaaaamn you! 😉 )
I didn’t say it was impossible, I said it was *hard*. It’s quite a bit easier to attempt to overpower someone with a knife than it is to overpower someone with a gun if you’re unarmed, and the person with the knife has to get to you, which limits options in terms of where they can start an attack like that. There’s also a higher survival rate on stabbing wounds iirc. There’s a reason we’ve moved to guns as the weapon of choice in wars, they’re just plain easier to cause large amounts of damage with.
Can someone provide statistics on the number of times that mass murder resulting in 5 or more deaths occured over a decently large interval? I’d like a comparison to gun related incidients with large numbers of casualties.