Asscroft

On Video Games, John Ashcroft and the Supposed "Culture of Violence"

by funtax

Fucking John Ashcroft. In the wake of a new round of school shootings, Ashcroft hopped into his Way Back Machine and dredged up the lamest rallying cry of the last 15 years - namely, that video games add to a "culture of violence." It’s not DOOM (which is, for some reason, always the game that’s blamed, despite the fact that poor little DOOM pales in comparison to its descendents in terms of gore and violence) or the WWF or action movies that’s making these kids go nuts and shoot people. Every time an idiot like Ashcroft tries to blame the problem on these sorts of things the American discourse takes a giant step away from resolving the sort of issues that are actually responsible.

I mention the following anecdote to help frame the rest of this piece and to prove I’m not just a left-wing nut job bent on belittling members of the Bush administration whenever possible (which I am, but that’s beside the point). I was visiting family a few weeks ago over the Mother’s Day weekend and was having a pretty good time. We were eating dinner when someone asked me if I’d heard about the recent shooting at Santana High School in California. I said that I had heard about another shooting, but that I didn’t really know the details. Well, long story short, it turns out that the kid that shot up the school was from my old hometown. And the idiot that emailed additional threats to the school later that week? He’s also from my town. To make matters worse, they don’t even know each other. That’s two, separate maniacs that were churned out by the excellent Frederick County Public School System in recent years.

I went through the same schools, saw the same places, learned the same stuff, dealt with the same IROC-driving, cheerleader-impregnating, cattle-raping troglodytes as those two kids. Additionally, I’m not so old that all of my experiences with public education have faded into murky, half-pleasant sludge in the recesses of my mind. As such, I feel as though a special authority on this issue has been granted to me - at least more than can be claimed by the media-retard pundits that scamper about and prattle on and on whenever a kid lugs a weapon to school. I understand these kids, because I was those kids.

I played a ton of video games when I was a teenager. I listened to punk rock. I played D&D. I wore a lot of black. I read Jolly Roger’s and blew stuff up in my friends’ yards. For class assignments, I wrote distressingly detailed and violent stories that certainly would have gotten me sent straight to the principal’s office in any of today’s witch-hunt school systems.

Every day, for the better part of the last seven years of my public education, my friends and I got harassed by other kids. We liked comic books, we got good grades, we sucked at football. So they targeted us. The administration was always oblivious or simply didn’t feel that what was going on was serious enough to get involved. After all, kids will be kids. I was a better example of a "potential threat" than any of the actual kids that wind up shooting people in school EVER are. But we never shot anyone.

Honestly, I think what kept that from happening was the simple fact that the thought never crossed our minds. Actual retaliation seemed like something that was outside of the realm of what "we" were allowed to do. The geeks don’t strike back. We get revenge by waiting 20 years and making more money than the football players. But something has happened in recent years that people seem afraid to recognize. The Columbines of the last few years HAVE shown the downtrodden and abused kids that they have a choice - albeit a terrifying and deadly one. Every time a school shooting occurs, it’s the number one thing on America’s mind. These kids, whose problems have always been ignored, are suddenly being looked at by everyone. I can’t honestly say that, had all of the people I hung out with in school had access to weapons, that one of us wouldn’t have done the same thing. My most vivid memories of pain and hatred come from those years of my life.

No kid has ever finished a round of Quake and then randomly decided to go shoot someone. All of the examples that people point to, which attempt to connect video games or anything similar to violence, are fundamentally flawed. They point out how the Columbine kids loved DOOM, but they seem to ignore the fact that they were also harassed continuously throughout their whole lives. What made them kill was an all-consuming hatred of their lives and of their peers. That sort of attitude can’t come from a game.

I work with a lot of teenagers. I also happen to work with video games. As such, I see a lot of teenagers play a lot of video games and none of them seem consumed by some sort of game-induced bloodlust. They’re all smart, quirky kids. Some of them tell stories similar to what I remember from my youth. But they seem grounded in reality. Many of them are nearly obsessed with computers and video games, but this seems to act more as an escape than a catalyst. They play because it’s an activity where who they are simply doesn’t matter. What you are judged by in a game is very basic - your score or performance. You aren’t judged on anything else. You can be short or weak or slow and you’re on equal footing with everyone else.

Which is probably the most important (and oft-ignored) facet of the whole world of video games. Kids today are forced to grow up extremely fast. I was speaking to a middle-school student, a friend of our family who was already thinking about college and the SAT. Modern life has all but destroyed the possibility of a carefree childhood. Young people simply don’t have the option of being kids for very long. But games can briefly reclaim their youth for them.

In a game, those sacred play spaces that have been essentially taken away from modern, urbanized youth are returned to them. Trapped in a world of concrete and urban sprawl, kids don’t often have places that are the domain, exclusively, of play and imagination. They don’t have a lot of fields or forests or streams to tromp around in, pretending to be whatever fantastic person or creature their mind desires. But they do have video games. Through the game, a child can enter increasingly immersive worlds and, in a matter of moments, actually be a child again. Video games facilitate a rapid entrance into fantasy, which is basically necessary for a child who may only have an hour a night to enjoy their life after homework, chores and whatever extra-curricular activities their parents feel are best suited to getting them into a good college.

I’ll finish on this point - if John Ashcroft REALLY wants to fix America’s schools so that kids stop killing other kids, he’d be well advised to do two things. First and foremost, break the protective bubble that has been built around popularity. Cruelty is cruelty and people that harass and belittle other people are the ones who should be subject to zero-tolerance policies. Simply put, if you abuse another person, in any way, you should lose the PRIVELEGE of public education. Second, work towards making kids into kids again. Let them play games, let them watch movies and, for the love of God, let them listen to the music they like. Facilitate creativity and escapism; they are the healthiest way to make a difficult and confusing time in our lives more tolerable.

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