When it comes to computer games (also known as video and arcade games), many experts believe interactive games that focus on violence and aggression have the potential to be much more harmful to children than movie and television violence.

There are a variety of reasons for this but even without viewing the research, commonsense tells us problems are likely to arise when young minds spend hours at a time playing virtual-reality games that ‘simulate’ repeated acts of violence and murder.
Would we be so accepting of this controversial genre of computer games if they involved themes like sex or rape? It’s hard to know since so many games already allow players to mimic crimes, like ‘cat-burglaries’ or stealing cars, running down pedestrians to score extra points.

Of course, many games on the market go much further, simulating murder sprees equivalent to a Port Arthur-style mass shooting each time they’re played, with some games going far beyond this in terms of body counts and accompanying points rewarded.

In some ways, trying to put the content of violent computer games into words just doesn’t do this technology justice. After all, verbal descriptions of bodies exploding or becoming dismembered, while our kids laugh and play along, may sound shocking but actually seeing these games in action really brings home the message.

But it wasn’t always this way.

In the early days of the computer revolution, no one could have predicted how invasive, violent and addictive this medium would become. In the late-70s, computer manufacturers began exploring the idea of creating games that could be played on computers to make home computers more user-friendly. Arcade games had already evolved from physical games, like table-top football, to virtual ones, with a ready audience of youngsters eager to spend twenty cents a time to play Space Invaders and Pong.

As computers became more sophisticated, so did the games, at first mimicking arcade games then surpassing them with highly-developed visuals and storylines. Violent arcade and video games soon followed and by 1989, Israelis could fight their own ‘bloodless’ wars against the Palestinians using the video game Intifadah. Two years later, the neo-Nazi game KZ Manager was making the rounds, in Germany, Austria and The Netherlands, allowing players to earn points gassing prisoners.

By 1992, Sega caught on that violent games were profitable games and released a number of new games, including Night Trap, Mortal Kombat, Lethal Enforcer and Splatterhouse 3. In doing so, Sega’s worldwide sales increased by 68.1 per cent that year. By comparison, Nintendo didn’t embrace the violent end of the market and experienced a 24 per cent slide in pre-tax profits in 1993. They soon changed their tune.

The stage was set for violent computer games to become a mainstay of the industry and the only thing that’s really changed since is that games have become more intense, more graphic and much more violent.

Then along came Columbine, the worst school shooting ever in the US, with 15 students killed and 23 more injured. Within days, it was revealed the two killers involved were avid violent computer game fanatics, who’d planned their attack more than 12 months in advance, practising it day after day on their home computers, using the game Doom.

It took an event of this magnitude to focus any real attention on where these violent interactive games might be leading us but it wasn’t enough to change the views of computer games manufacturers, mostly because this form of entertainment was so incredibly profitable.

In financial terms, computer games now bring in more revenue than Hollywood movies – they’re bigger than ‘Ben Hur’ and globally earn in excess of $40 billion a year, accounting for more than 30 per cent of the toy market in the US, with an average of two games in each home.

Computer games are the second most popular form of entertainment, after television, with the use of violent ones on the increase -- one 1990 study finding violent themes in 40 of the 47 top-rated Nintendo video games. A survey of popular Sega and Nintendo games taken five years later found violence or aggressiveness featured in 80 per cent of them.

This is concerning because the storylines conveyed by violent interactive games promote violence and aggression as the main problem-solving device within the game, not to mention the only way to increase your score. The basic premise is ‘kill’ and you win the game, with no incentives built into the programming providing players with any alternatives to blatant murder.

While interactive games differ in a number of ways from passive television watching, there are also similarities and one of the biggest is that both can be used to teach but, even in this arena, computer games are the superior learning tools.

According to recent studies, children who play computer games have better hand-eye co-ordination, as measured by physical aptitude tests, than children who don’t play these games. They also appear to improve manual dexterity and reaction times, as well as concentration and strategic thinking.

Physiological changes in the brain, associated with learning, also appear to take place when playing computer games so they clearly do teach something; most debate, however, concerns what they teach not whether they teach.

Computer games certainly utilise all the principles of social learning theory, along with models involving ‘priming’ and ‘scripts’. Specifically, computer games incorporate learning-identification, practice and repetition, reward and reinforcement, all in a fun, playful way that keeps kids interested.

How do computer games combine these learning principles?

First, a player must align himself, or herself, with a character in the game in order to play – this is known as ‘learning-identification’. In the case of a violent game, players must identify themselves with a violent persona, in a sense, playing the game as this character.

Second, as the game is played, the character (player) will participate in a series of events, practising and repeating activities in order to be more proficient at the game, advancing to higher levels of play in the process. Practise and repetition is undoubtedly the best way to increase skills.

Thirdly, the game itself rewards players when they get it right -- with extra points, increased playing time, added options or characters and new levels of play. These rewards reinforce the skills and activities being played. Again, in the case of violent games, rewards are gained through acts of aggression and violence, with greater points rewarded for greater body counts, which in turn lead to more gratuitous violence and greater killing power through increasingly potent weaponry made available as players advance through the game.

Couple these learning principles with the ability to engage people with various levels of knowledge and skills, through the games’ different stages of play, and you have a format that can teach each participant at a pace that suits their educational needs. Then, as players become more proficient, the game automatically increases the difficulty of play, keeping interest levels high.

In unison, these elements make all computer games, not just the violent ones, powerful learning tools that used to convey positive ideals can be of enormous benefit.

However, use these proven training methods to convey violence and aggression and these virtual-reality games may just be our worst nightmare, priming and preparing younger generations to act more aggressively than they would, had they not been exposed to these games in the first place.

Of course, there’s some contention regarding whether violent computer games influence behaviour, with some believing nothing is learned through virtual play. But, use slightly different terminology for what is essential just another computer game, by referring to it as, say, a flight simulator, and you get a very different response with almost everyone agreeing flight simulators are learning tools.

After all, flight simulators are used extensively by the aviation industry and there isn’t a pilot flying today who hasn’t used them to learn to fly. Flight simulators even teach pilots how to operate effectively in the most stressful of conditions, such as during a real life crash landing.

So effective are these simulators that the terrorists who attacked the US on September 11, 2001, used them extensively to learn how to fly and to learn to overcome the natural reflexes we all have to avoid destruction – the same self-preservation instincts that make us close our eyes when an object approaches or swerve our car when a crash seems imminent.

These are not easy reflexes to control, particularly when a visual realisation of impending doom puts the body into a physiological state of panic, making mental control of bodily functions even more difficult. When the goal is to create disaster, it’s even more important to practice controlling the body and mind in what would otherwise be an uncontrollable situation and it’s now clear the hijackers used flight simulators to do just that. It also illustrates how powerful these teaching tools are.

Of course, computer simulations are used outside the aviation industry too, in a range of E-learning platforms and even Grand Prix drivers use them regularly to practice different circuits prior to racing.

However, the most controversial use of computer simulators can be found in the training practises of the military and law enforcement communities, primarily in the US but also here in Australia. For more than a decade, computer simulations of enemy attacks and criminal shootouts have been used to train and prepare military and police personnel for the real thing, that is, dealing with similar attacks in the line of duty or in the field of combat.

Comprehensive information about these kinds of computer simulations comes primarily from the work of West Point psychology professor, retired Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman. As he explains in his books and website, humans, like other animals, are born with an innate aversion to killing their own kind; it’s Nature’s way of ensuring survival of the species.

While this aversion to killing is a good thing within society, it’s an understandable hindrance in warfare, as many soldiers find themselves unable to aim and shoot at the enemy, particularly when they’re close enough to see the faces of those they’re required to kill.

To overcome this aversion to killing and improve firing rates, the US military began using pop-up man-shaped shooting targets, instead of bull’s-eye targets that persuaded less than 20 per cent of WWII soldiers to fire at the enemy. The new training methods increased firing rates to around 95 per cent by the Vietnam War.

Then video games manufacturers started copying these military practices, designing games that allowed players to shoot at characters on a screen. Once the military realised this method of ‘virtual’ training was cheaper, and safer, than using real weapons, they began utilising the computer games and developing ever better simulators, in conjunction with civilian video games companies.

Games like MARKS Trainer and Marine Doom were the result and the games companies soon released similar version to the general public, like Duck Hunt and Doom. The main difference between the games were that the military versions deducted points when non-military targets were hit whereas the civilian games requires players to kill everything in sight.

Violent computer games are now commonplace and Doom in particular is one of the most well known because it was favoured by the Columbine killers, Harris and Klebold. They even had a personalised copy of Doom on their website, with their own neighbourhood and school scanned into the game’s background, enabling them to practise, in the most real of virtual settings, the mass shooting they would later commit in real life.

Grossman has since coined the phrase ‘murder-simulators’ to describe the ultra-violent civilian computer games now on the market, which he says really do teach users how to kill, particularly when those playing the games are impressionable children lacking life experience.

Even so, some people still have trouble believing violent computer games can be dangerous, after all, no-one appears to become physically hurt when playing them, no-one falls over, breaks a leg or sheds blood.

Aside from the lack of physical injury, another reason people are so trusting of computer games technology may be because they assume as ‘toys’, virtual games are subject to the same scrutiny given to other toys. Many parents rely on the government to ensure products marketed to children are safe and, when it comes to physical toys, they’re right.

However, computer games are not classed as toys in this country and therefore are not required to comply with the safety restrictions of actual toys. As electrical appliances, they do have to meet electrical safety standards but makers are not required to prove the games (or software) used are ‘safe’.

That’s not to say that computer games don’t receive any scrutiny at all, they are reviewed and classified by the Office for Film and Literature (OFLC). Best known as a censorship body, the OFLC classifies a range of media, like motion pictures, DVDs, publications and computer games, into categories suitable for different age groups, however, this is a far cry from suggesting these products are safe.

In fact, the OFLC makes no safety determinations what-so-ever and, even when considering potential harm, must rely solely on meeting pre-set guidelines for that medium.

The guidelines are primarily determined through community consultation, designed to gauge current community attitudes towards each specific medium, working within a legislative framework detailed in the Classification Act, and subsequent amendments.

So, while the OFLC does concern itself with ensuring minors are “protected from material likely to harm or disturb them”, it’s more accurate to say they protect minors from material the general public considers harmful or disturbing for them -- not material proven through scientific research to be of actual harm.

Consequently, it’s helpful to remember the OFLC is not a consumer watchdog nor a safety monitor – it’s merely a censorship body that makes age-related classification decisions based on their understanding of current community attitudes, and spends most of its time and resources focusing on sex, not violence, and on the adult entertainment industry rather than children’s entertainment.

And while many videos, movies and publications are regularly Refused Classification (banned), not one single violent computer game was banned (rated RC) between 1999 and 2001. That’s out of 1166 computer games submitted for classification!

To give you an idea of the kinds of computer games NOT banned, take a look at Kingpin: Life of Crime, a first-person shooter game where the player navigates through an urban environment trying to become the ‘kingpin’ of crime. This game has ‘high level violence and high level coarse language’, boasts an arsenal of lethal weapons, including lead pipes, pistols, shotguns, sub-machine guns, flame throwers and concussion rifles.

Needless to say, the goal of Kingpin is to kill as many people as possible, leading players into increasingly more violent levels, as they work their way through the arsenal of weapons. And Kingpin is old news in terms of violent computer games!

Surprisingly, while publications are banned from promoting any kind of criminal activity, under the current video/computer game guidelines, games that require players to act out mass murder scenarios are classified appropriate for adolescents. This is because the guidelines for each medium differ, with publications and films more heavily restricted than computer games, which don’t even have an ‘adults only’ classification.

The bottom line is that while Eros is an anti-censorship organisation, we do consider age-appropriate classification codes beneficial, particularly when dealing with content scientifically proven to be harmful to children, such as violence. In the area of computer games, we believe new codes should be introduced, specifically adult classifications like R- and X-ratings, with appropriate guidelines developed since current R- and X- guidelines for other media don’t allow the levels of violence regularly used in computer games.

New ratings would mean that adults who play violence computer games could still access them while parents, and carers, would be able to use the guidelines to effectively determine suitable games for those under their care. It would also mean the general community might come to understand that some games contain adult themes, including ‘adult’ levels of violence, and therefore the use of such games has to be more closely monitored.

This is important because there’s a big difference between an adult, with a fully formed brain, playing violent computer games and children doing the same thing. We’d like to see the classification system for computer games reflect this difference and for the OFLC to concern itself more with protecting kids from harmful children’s entertainment instead focusing on reducing the sexual content of ‘adult only’ entertainment not sold to or accessed by children.

< Back • Next >