Here are some of my thoughts on how I feel the gaming industry should be addressing these issues. I am in a bit of a hurry so there are probably all kinds of spelling errors.
first of all, what is going on here with all of these issues of violence and videogames is pure moral panic. Television, rap, rock and roll, and films have all been hit with similar claims in their early years. Even the popularization of the newspaper was met with fears by the cultural elite that it would lead to the masses wanting to particiapte in government. As such, I think we need to call people out on these tactics of trying to scare people. Say this is a moral panic and all you are doing is trying to scare people.
A related issue is who decides what is violent and why? There is far greater violence at a hockey game than there is in many videogames. People have died as a result of altercations that are directly related to sports. and yet I have not heard anyone say that perhaps the kinds of sports we encourage children to participate in could lead to violence. I have made this argument previously so I will not elaborate on it more here.
Another thing that needs to be done is to point out that these games are directly participatory in nature. While there is a kind of participatation that occurs in watching a film or reading, as we are all aware, what goes on while playing a game is on a whole other level of participartation. because of this, it is not possible to judge a videogame without playing it. One issue I constantly find myself returning to is that videogames have players not watchers. What people are talking about is what might happen to people who play these games. therefore showing a clip of a game, as donahue and most other shows do, simply cannot tell the watcher what it is like to play the game. Whenever we find someone talking out about these games, we need to ask them, "Have you ever played the game?"
Expecially since the St. Louis decision, it seems that a lot of videogame scholars have tried to defend videogames with the tactic that even though videogame x, y or z is really violent, if only people would look at game a, b or c they would see how great they can be, or have said, that videogames are a maturing industry and maybe someday they will grow beyond the need for violence in videogames. Not to step on anyone's toes, but I feel that statements like these are not only ineffectual, but are actually detrimental. We've heard of the phrase back-handed compliment, well, it seems to me that these kinds of staements are back-handed defences.
Statements like that seem to be an eleitist move where we say, "yes these games are trash but not all of them are." It serves to stratify and create a situation of "art" vs. "not-art" How is this a helpfull situation? If videogames are to every be accepted as 'art" (even though I fail to see why we should even care if they are or are not 'art") then we must argue that every game has elements of brilliance and beauty, that what is going on in these games is artistic communication in small groups. in this I agree with judge limbaugh who made the St. louis decission when he wrote that either all games are art or none of them are. By saying that maybe one day games will be more, all we are really saying is that today they aren't and this game they are attacking really is as bad as people says it is.
As others have said, we as academic-type people cannot do everything. The videogame industry really needs to step up and educate people. They need to educate retailers about the ratings and they also need to educate parents. Why can't they air a commercial in primetime explaining the ratings. Even if it doesn't do any good at raising parent's awareness, at least when they come under attack, they will be able to point at the commercial and say, "look, we are trying to educate the public!"
That paper was presented at the 2002 PCA under the title "More Than Moving Pictures:
Developing New Criteria For Designing and Critiquing Computer Games. The presentation version can
be found here. The handout I distributed can be found here.