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Children playing Grand Theft Auto: a study into violent gaming and child mentality
by Chris Hawke
5.2.11

Jack Thompson's argument has one vital flaw; it's hard to prove that violent video games 'damage' children, because you have to let them grow up. Finding out whether a childhood obsession with Grand Theft Auto leads to the cultivation of a hooker-beating, car-jacking, tracksuit-wearing 20-year-old maniac means that you have to both actively let a child play GTA, and then wait until he's a grown adult. It's time consuming, messy, morally objectionable and a bit weird.

However, there is still a way that we can find out what kids think of this super-violent alternate reality, and what their tiny innocent minds process while brutal imagery flashes through their tiny eyes. Unfortunately, I couldn't steal a child (not after last time, and I'd let a mate borrow the cage), so it was up to one brave writer: Matthew Orona of Bitmob. This is what happens when a kid plays GTA.

You can read Matthew's article on Bitmob.


"I egged him on to take the car in front of him which was waiting at the red light. He quickly looked up at me with disgust and refused, stating that the car was already owned by the person driving it."

First, a general observation: 4-year-olds are right little buggers. They dribble, shout, scream, punch, grab, bite, scratch, and spill everything everywhere. However, their favourite thing by far is to claim that every single object is theirs. See that vase your Mum gave you? Theirs. Your brand new Honda? Theirs. That chocolate bar you're eating? Definitely theirs. So, why is this child so terrified of taking someone's car? Either he's one of the kindest and most empathetic toddlers this side of young Gandhi, or it triggers the divide between action and principle. When in the home, it's easy for a child to say that 'everything belongs to them' in front of a parent, but actually physically taking something off a complete stranger is too much for most. As far as the child is concerned, the game is synonymous to real life, and the morals that they uphold in the real world translate directly to the virtual one. At least, for now...


"At one intersection he attempted to brake, but he was travelling too fast. Instead of ploughing into the rear of the car ahead of him, he swerved to the right and popped up onto to sidewalk. In doing so, he accidently ran over a woman walking towards his oncoming car. He was incredibly ashamed of himself and profusely apologised."

Again, just as a real life tragedy such as this would render a child horrified and ashamed, so does the video game. Children blur the lines between reality and the imaginary far more than most adult gamers, magnifying the whole experience and making it more involving, and either more joyful or terrifying, depending on the circumstances in the game.


"Only seconds later, he witnessed a policeman jump out of his patrol car to pursue a criminal of San Andreas. His eyes lit up as he asked if he could drive the police car. I reminded him that it was only a game, and it was fine to take the car. As he drove the squad car, I pressed L3 to turn on the lights and siren. He asked very excitedly if he could get the bad guys too. With a huge smile I pressed R3 to initiate the Vigilante Missions. It was as if his imagination had come to life. He was taking down delinquents left and right."

Remember that lesson in school where you were told how the police are your friends, and PC Nicey would give a little speech on how they catch the bad people? That was cool. What was even cooler were the cars. "Ha! Look at them lights! Looks at them hats they wear! They get GUNS! Kewl!". Being a policeman or policewoman is the height of awesome for all kids. Grand Theft Auto now becomes their way of living out this fantasy, drifting round corners and stopping the evil-doers in the name of the law. The interesting thing here is that while killing criminals in GTA is very violent, it's violence in a good cause; you're ridding the streets of evil. The child here displays no regrets or apologies, because he knows that the police are the 'good guys'. This is, presumably, before the inevitable time when the kid grows up and gets pulled over for doing 41 on a 40mph road, has to fork out a £300 fine and realises that the police are nothing but corrupt and sadistic creatures of pure evil who thrive off the salty tears of mere mortals by extracting every last penny from their battered wallets.

Because I'm not bitter at all.


"In all his time with Grand Theft Auto he never once encountered any of the controversy surrounding this notorious title. He didn’t beat any hookers with a baseball bat. He didn’t deal drugs. He didn’t go on a murderous rampage. He certainly never once had a cup of hot coffee. He didn't avoid these things because I told him he couldn't try them. It just never occurred to him to commit these acts."

After more ambulance and fire-fighting work, we get to the crux of the matter. The kid has killed a number of people, either by accident or through vigilante missions, but all his actions have been justified morally. He never stole a car from someone, because that's not the right thing to do. Sure, he took the police car and the ambulance, but only because no one was in them and he hasn't quite got the hang of property laws yet. He killed, but only for a good and righteous cause. And he never once did the sort of evil things that plague an adult's playthrough, simply because he never thought of it. Why, in this world, should he beat up a hooker? Yes, all the necessary tools are there - weapons, hookers, dark alleyways - but there's no reason to commit such a grievous act. If anything, Grand Theft Auto has enhanced the child's morality; unlike most players who kill and steal for the hell of it, the kid only does what he thinks it is right to do, even if it provides him with some escapist fun in the form of a police chase. Do you really see this player growing up to kill and drug deal in later life?

Dr. Hawke has reached his conclusion. The 18+ rating is there for a reason; games are much more involving for children than they are for adults and, obviously, that means they're more dangerous: I have no doubt the same experiment with Dead Space 2 would produce endless nightmares. But as for children immediately turning into bloodthirsty murderers: it's doubtful. As a general rule, children shouldn't be allowed to play videogames so violent or repugnant as GTA, but if this toddler is anything to go by, they don't look at games with the same cynical eyes we do. As soon as you booted up GTA IV, you wanted to run someone down, didn't you? But for this child at least, it's just a fun way to become a policeman, and not much else.

Please don't take this as proper medical advice, as my BSc in Medical Sciences is actually written in crayon on the back of some tissue paper, but feel free to have a discussion of the findings below, and follow our Twitter.


Disclaimer

Quotes in this article are taken from Matthew Orona's original article on Bitmob.

Use of these quotes is for illustrative purposes only, and the Gamer's Guide to Life Network does not claim to own, in any way, the quotes used here.

Quotes shown here may have been edited or abridged to better fit the context of this article.

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- Chris Hawke
Gamers are 'Don Quixote'... and they should be proud. Discuss.
by Greg Mengel
22.1.11

Cue theme music.

You are the hero.

You've beaten the final boss. You've saved the princess. With rifle in hand you've tamed the Old West, painted haunted space stations green with the blood of alien parasites, and beaten back the Third Reich. Your heroic ballads are sung at taverns throughout Azeroth, Cyrodiil, and Arcanum. Glories and honors are your bathwater, and countless masses laud you indefinitely.

But do they really?

No. Your praise and thanks - your heroics and gallantry - spur from two sources: your own imagination and the games that spark it. All that fame, all that fortune? It's all in your head.

You are Don Quixote, the man a la Mancha; destiny calls and you go. The wild winds of fortune will carry you onward. And onward, to glory, you go.

Let's discuss.

New theme music. [1]


You will never feel more than when you look at this picture.

Games are powerful. Perhaps more than any other medium, they can make us feel.

Nowhere else can you control a character and have your decisions determine the fate of both individuals and worlds. It's a living, breathing medium sewn together from the best parts of others - empathic art, striking cinematography, moving soundtracks - and has become a factory of innovation, oiled by creativity and fuelled with ambrosia.

Because of their heightened capacity to incite feeling in us, it should be no surprise that games - like novels, films, or psychedelic drugs - are addicting. Hopelessly addicting for some. Not only are their puzzles and challenges food for our minds, their stories and settings are a feast for our souls.

A game has the power to involve a person so completely that some of us substitute it for the world around them.

But is that a good thing?


Choose a race. Choose a class. Choose the right raiding party...

The great majority of gaming's opponents cite addiction and detachment from "the real world" as primary reasons why the medium is especially unhealthy[2]. They see it as a vortex, sucking in the time and attention of its followers to the point where they forget what is truly important:

"Reality."

But what is reality? Who determines what is real? Are there scientific units by which our perceptions are measured? This question - concerning what makes something real - is the key to understanding why gamers game, potentially segregating themselves from the outside, "normal", world.

Lucky for us, there are plenty of old, dead, bearded white people who have thought about it at length[3]. (Yes, I'm delving into philosophy. There's a picture of a scantily clad 8-bit Samus at the end of the article for you if you read all the way through).

Theme music three.

There are many philosophers and psychologists who address the mental ability that causes a person to actually believe he is a mythical Spanish Lord, or a level 85 tauren shaman, but one stands before the rest: Rene Descartes.


Rene Descartes, voted "Silkiest Hair," University of Poitiers, Class of 1616.

Descartes is famous for his dream argument, which has become a cornerstone of not only modern philosophy, but also of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Larry and Andy Wachowski's The Matrix, and Christopher Nolan's Inception. If you've spent hours in a movie theatre parking lot discussing any of these films, then you'll know that this Frenchman is deep.

The dream argument proposed by Descartes asks us a fundamental question: could it be possible that all this - everything you touch, feel, experience - is just a dream? Is it possible to tell whether or not you are actually real? Is everything we sense - from the grains of sand rubbed in between our toes to the universe we peer into on starry nights - nothing more than a well-crafted, believable lie?

Our thoughts, created by our own minds, are the only concepts that we can ever know for sure are real; the only concepts we create uniquely based on whatever we've seen in our crazy, messed-up lives. Even if they are inspired by "the dream," our independent thoughts prove that we actually exist. Without them, Descartes argues that there would be no concrete evidence proving that human beings, and the normal, humdrum lives they live, are real.


Congratulations! You made it through three paragraphs of philosophy. You've now had more liberal arts education than George W. Bush.

If Descartes is correct, then we can assume that...

a) Reality is a relative concept, and...

b) Our thoughts and perceptions, moulded by the experiences we have in all settings (both 'fake' and 'real'), are what make us ...us. They define us as unique people.

Which brings us back to how gamers relate to Don Quixote. If our thoughts truly are the only realities we can know in this world, then we have the power to create - to choose - the environments in which we live, even if they do not correspond with the norm. We can, to a point, forge our own unique realities that suit us.

Enter fourth, and final, theme music.


Take that, windmill! That's for killing my dad.

Enter The Ingenious Hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha, the hero to which all gamers should proudly relate.

Alonso Quixano is an aging farmer from Spain who has lived a simple, humble life. For decades, his existence was a quiet one consisting of farming and caring for his housekeeper and niece. As the years go on, Alonso begins reading books on chivalry and heroism. He takes them completely literally, actually believing that wizards, cyclops, and dragons exist. This becomes his reality. In such a world, wrought with danger and damsels in need of saving, Alonso does the only responsible thing - he dons a rusty suit of armor and sets off in search of adventure as a knight-errant.

Like a gamer may disregard a boring, dead-end job in favor of an exciting adventure in Hyrule, Azeroth, or the Mushroom Kingdom, Alonso redefined his own reality and existence so that it suited him. He effectively altered his reality. The power was in his mind: he had the ability to change his environment so it better suited his psychological needs. The so-called real world lacked fire, lacked passion, so what the hell - he upped and moved to another, as do millions of gamers every day.

When it comes to reality, my belief is that every person experiences a different world, unique to them. Even those who embrace the 'normal world' see it through a different lens than any other human being in history. That's how our minds work: we interpret "forms" (as Plato and Aristotle described them) and, using the power of our own past experiences, passions, and inherent logic and creativity, forge them into something completely unique - a reality that is completely our own.

The worlds and narratives offered by games often play a large role in what reality we create for ourselves, just as the world in which we walk, eat, and breathe does. Our physical bodies may be more attached to the environment that offers the food, water, and oxygen that it needs to survive, but our mind does not necessarily care - it can live anywhere.

At first glance, reality can be a tricky concept to grasp, due in part to humanity's persistent need to justify its actions by basing them on a universal truth. We want there to be just one reality; just one universe with laws to abide by, because having those parameters would be simpler than a world in which we are constantly forced to interact with billions of unique, often conflicting world views. Global mental solidarity is easy, but it is not human. What is human is to take the concepts presented before you - all of them - and mould that mental clay into something extraordinary.

Whether you're playing games, reading books, taking in a film, travelling, or even simply sitting at home watching your cat scratch paint off the living room walls, you are creating a unique set of experiences which, when combined, define who you are and how you think; a reality, unique to you, that nobody but you can ever understand. Embracing that - like Don Quixote did - may be the only way to truly live.


Footnotes


[1] Yep, that's right... Lady Gaga. I apologise for nothing. ^

[2] The others cite how idiotic we look playing DDRMAX. ^

[3] When they weren't experimenting with cocaine/heroin/psychedelic toad backs/cocaine. ^

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- Greg Mengel
GGTL Classics
Some of the very best articles dug out from deep in the GGTL archives, written by some of our past and present wordsmiths alike.
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