Harm and entertainment

This chapter investigates attempts to indicate the direct impact of video games on how
gamers harm people. In my presentation, I would like to disprove this negative and
deliberately critical approach to video games. NEXT SLIDE

Straight out of Doom

This part of the chapter presents examples of the negative impact of video games, or more
precisely the aggression and violence committed by “gamers”. NEXT SLIDE

Columbine Shooters. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold

In 1999 near Littleton, Colorado, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold armed themselves
with shotguns, semi-automatic rifles and homemade bombs, and walked into
Columbine High School where they began shooting. Twelve students and one teacher
were killed before the two committed suicide. As would be discovered later, Harris
and Klebold were not only gamers, but had a compelling interest in the first-person shooter
Doom. NEXT SLIDE

Harris once said this phrase. You can read it by yourself ”It’s gonna be like fucking
Doom man – after the bombs explode. Tick, tick, tick, tick … Haa! That fucking shotgun is
straight out of Doom!” NEXT SLIDE

To be absolutely honest, I think that in position of this game's in this sentence could also be
the book titles, such as:
● "The Minds of Billy Milligan”, which tells us the story of a rapist with a multiple-
personality disorder. NEXT SLIDE
● "In Cold blood", which tells about the cold-blooded murder of four members of the
same family in a small provincial town. But for some reason, instead of condemnation
and censorship, this book was awarded the American version of "100 best detective
novels of all time.
● and so on...NEXT SLIDE

At the present time games have already become an integral part of culture, respectively,
Harris’s reference to the Doom, in my opinion, only indicates his awareness of this modern
culture. NEXT SLIDE

In December 1998, Harris and Klebold made Hitmen for Hire, a video for a school project in
which they swore, yelled at the camera, made violent statements, and acted out shooting and
killing students in the hallways of Columbine High School. Both also displayed themes of
violence in their creative writing projects; of a Doom-based story written by Harris on January 17,
1999, Harris's teacher said: "Yours is a unique approach and your writing works in a gruesome
way — good details and mood setting.
After seeing the teacher's reaction to his student's project, how can we talk about the harm from
games if the teacher encourages their work and isn't concerned about the mental state of his
students at all? In my opinion, there was also the teacher's fault, because instead of sending
children to the school psychologist, he evaluated their project well. NEXT SLIDE

For the purpose of interest, I studied the history of these two guys in detail. In the process of this
research, I found out that even before the terrorist act, they had been prosecuted for stealing
property and also visited groups for drug addicts. This is already an indicator that they were
mentally unstable and therefore the game cannot be called the root cause of such violent
thoughts, because such deviations are a set of problems in all parts of a teenager's life, both at
home in the family and in the school community. NEXT SLIDE

Heath high school shooting. Michael Carneal

The next case that I want to mention is the story of a 14-year-old guy named Michael Carneal.
Fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal steals a gun from a neighbor’s house, brings it to school, and
fires eight shots into a student prayer meeting that is breaking up. Prior to stealing the gun, he
had never shot a real handgun in his life. The FBI says that the average experienced law
enforcement officer, in the average shootout, and an average range of seven yards hits with
approximately one bullet in five. So how many hits did Michael Carneal make? He fired eight
shots; he got eight hits, on eight different kids. Five of them were headshots, and the other three
were in the upper torso. The result was three dead and one paralyzed for life … NEXT SLIDE

From this statement I want to point out the fact that in America it is very easy to buy different
types of weapons and every third has a weapon in the car or in the house. But with such a large
number of mentally unbalanced people and psychos easy access to weapons, leads to such
tragic consequences, and this cannot be avoided by simple censorship of certain games, as long
as the country will openly sell weapons. NEXT SLIDE

The moral concern with video games has frequently reached into politics. Hillary Clinton,
speaking to a child-care symposium in the lead up to her failed run for the Democratic
nomination for the 2008 presidential election, claimed that “Children are playing a game that
encourages them to have sex with prostitutes and then murder them …”. Clinton was referring to
Grand Theft Auto, a game notorious for its inclusion of virtual prostitutes.

I can speak for myself that I’ve been playing GTA since I was 13 and I’ve never killed a prostitute
after having sex with her.

And though in my opinion Clinton focused on games only for the sake of getting votes for her
election from parents who are concerned about their children's high interest in video games, she
also made a really good point promoting laws that would make selling mature- or adult only-rated
video games to children a federal crime. NEXT SLIDE

Experiments

The next chapter presented several experiments on children and adolescents that revealed that
children who observe violence in games continue to demonstrate it themselves. However, if from
childhood a person is in a happy, healthy family, has no problems with peers, and has good care
and a favorable environment, he or she will not become a criminal by playing shooters. NEXT
SLIDE

The proper focus of the ethics of video games

Unfortunately, the causationist science does not substantiate such concrete and individualistic
claims. Even in a case where a causal relationship is known with some certainty, such as the
relationship between smoking and lung cancer, statistical science does not “prove” of a smoker
who has contracted lung cancer that smoking was the cause of the disease. Thus, even if violent
video games were shown to have a discriminable effect on the aggressive traits seen in a
population, this gives us no firm guidance about whether a particular game is the cause of any
particular case of aggression, or how any particular player is affected by a game. This
undermines the attribution of moral responsibility – and perhaps often legal responsibility – in the
cases where crimes are blamed on specific games, which surely depends on concrete
statements about individual cases. But it also places severe limitations on the role that such
statistical studies can play in identifying moral patients, that is, people who have been harmed in
such cases. Hence, the statistical research on games and aggression does not seem to allow us
to say much about the ethics of the production of specific games or specific acts of playing.

The basic problem here is that statistical science and ethical judgment often involve different
ontologies, and statistics may not provide the necessary grain for the moral assessment of
particulars in the mode that the moral critics of video games desire. It does not allow us to say of
Doom that it is morally responsible for playing a causal role in the Columbine killings – or for any
other violent acts, for that matter. Correspondingly, if we want to condemn a particular game –
whether it is Doom, Manhunt, Call of Duty, or Battlefield – we need to develop an account that
has a concrete and individualist ontology. Only if we develop such an account could we justify
the moral intuitions that do exist concerning particular games and the harms they putative cause.
NEXT SLIDE

Cigarettes and video games

Throughout this chapter I have run into a comparison of the harm from smoking cigarettes with
the harm from video games. However, this is not a reasonable comparison, because the ethical
comparison of video games with smoking is not a fair one because of the extensive evidential
difference between the cases. Even if the formal comparison between the ethics of cigarette
production and violent video games production is apt, the substantive and evidential comparison
between smoking and video games is not strong. The risks posed by video games are simply
incomparable with those of smoking, passive or otherwise, and are so in a number of ways.

Carefully inspecting the level of societal harm associated with smoking shows how incomparable
the two cases genuinely are, and incidentally, what a real public health issue looks like. The
social costs of smoking are terrifying in their magnitude. NEXT SLIDE
According to the Centers for Disease Control Smoking and Tobacco Use Fact Sheet:

● Worldwide, tobacco use causes more than 5 million deaths per year, and current trends
show that tobacco use will cause more than 8 million deaths annually by 2030
● In the United States, tobacco use is responsible for about one in five deaths annually
(i.e., about 443,000 deaths per year, and an estimated 49,000 of these smoking-related
deaths are the result of second-hand smoke exposure)
● On average, smokers die 13 to 14 years earlier than non-smoker

Unlike the nebulous harms attributed to video games, these harms are easily quantified.
Given the gross disparity between the harms caused by smoking, second-hand
or otherwise, and video games, it is stunning that the ethical comparison of smoking
to video games is as common as it is. NEXT SLIDE

In reality, there is a singular lack of evidence that the growth in violent video games as a social
phenomenon has led to anything approaching this magnitude of social harm. In fact, in the
places where video games are the most popular, there often seems to have been a decrease in
the harms ostensibly associated with games. In his 2008 study of the relationship between game
violence and societal violence, Christopher Ferguson contrasts games sales data with youth
violence data, combining them in the following graph:

He concludes:
“The reality is that as violent video games have become more prevalent, violent crimes have
decreased dramatically. This is true both for police arrest data, as well as crime victimization
data. Similar statistics for reduced crime have been found in Canada, Australia, the European
Union, and the United Kingdom using both arrest and victimization data. This is certainly
not to say that violent video games are necessarily responsible for this decline, even partially.”

Finally, It is fairly clear that the science does not support the epidemiological comparison of
smoking and video games. The psychologists Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson do an
admirable job in showing how the statistical comparison between even passive smoking and
video games is inappropriate, and it is worthwhile repeating their specific criticisms. Amongst
their compelling points is that wherever it has been measured, as rates of smoking go up in a
group – be it with men, women, or an ethnic group – so rates of lung cancer increase within that
group. Second, the more one smokes, the more likely one is to get lung cancer. Third, lung
cancer is operationally well-defined as a disease, and its physiology is well-understood and
identifiable in sufferers. The corollaries of none of these facts have been established for video
games and aggression: rates of societal aggression do not correlate with the prevalence of
violent video game use; more play in an individual does not lead to more aggression, and in fact
the opposite may be the case; and video game aggression is not well-defined because it
manifests in heterogeneous actions and behaviors the aggressive nature of which is open to
interpretation. And only the most cynical of moralists would claim that producers of video games
knowingly and dangerously expose the consumers of their products to serious health risks.
Unlike tobacco cigarettes, the evidence for and predictability of the harmful effects of video
games is simply not compelling.