Time for gamers to get a bit of perspective (and no, that doesn’t mean buying a 3DTV)

This photo speaks for itself, really.

At the height of the riots last weekend, with tempers running high and flames even higher, wild rumours and speculative nonsense were zipping around like turbo-charged fleas as a confused, terrified public grappled with the incomprehensible question: why would anyone want to do this? As things wore on, the twittering masses argued tirelessly over what was most to blame: poor public-police relations, disenfranchised youth, unemployment, cuts, inherent psychopathy, lack of education, gangs, left-wingers being soft on crime, right-wingers oppressing the poor, and so on and so on until the sun runs out of hydrogen and we all collapse into the eternal dustless void.

In other words, there was a lot of speculatin’ going on, and a lot of it was a bit silly. On Sunday night, during what now seems to have been the worst of it (fingers crossed), an unnamed constable was reported in the Evening Standard as saying: “These are bad people who did this. Kids out of control. When I was young it was all Pacman and board games. Now they’re playing Grand Theft Auto and want to live it for themselves.”

The response from the videogaming community was as rapid as it was shrill. Here are a few excerpts taken from forums at The Escapist and PC Advisor:

•  My God, video games are turning into the type of scapegoat that communism was in the 50′s. Blame everything on them. Are games the only things that can be blamed for everything now?
•  I wouldn’t be surprised if all the cuts are just going towards paying off the media to make pitiful excuses.
•  This idiot believes that I’m merely on the brink of committing vicious crimes because it would be FUN!? If this theory were true, why aren’t the 100′s of MILLIONS of gamers out there committing such acts right now?
•  this kind of article story is an unoriginal, ignorant, scaremongering story written by people who know nothing about the subject they write about and are trying only to sell newspapers by any means necessary, adding 2 and 2 to get 78.

Now, I’m a gamer myself. I’ve written before about the effect games have on children, and ridiculed some of the outrageous attempts to blame them for completely unrelated problems. I think GTA is brilliant – while the latest one was dull and painfully unfunny, Vice City still stands out as glorious cartoon fun in a hilariously parodied 80’s Miami. So, you could expect me to fall in line with the anonymous tykes quoted above, viciously springing to the defence of the poor widdle multi-billion-pound industry.

However.

They’re wrong, in at least two important ways.

Firstly, the constable had a point – GTA and other games must have featured in the looters’ lives. From what little we know, they were mostly young males aged 12-22, from low-income areas with high unemployment: all of which are factors likely to make them videogamers, according to a 2005 survey by the BBC. Gaming might seem like an expensive hobby but it’s not really, thanks to the secondary market in knackered old Xboxes and cheap, scratched disks – a galaxy of C-grade items spiralling around the twin suns of CEX and Cash Converters. These kids certainly didn’t start calling police “feds” because they’ve been watching The Wire, as Zoe Williams joked in her intriguing piece for the Guardian – they picked it up from GTA (among other places).

By now, the research shows unambiguously that violent games can and do have a negative influence on teens. Yes, fans can point out that these titles all have eighteen certificates and shouldn’t be placed in younger hands at all – a fair point, but one which serves only to shift responsibility away from the producers. The fact is, these games do end up being played by underage kids – it’s inescapable. However, look a bit further into the research, and you’ll see something interesting. Games only have a negative effect when played alone, regularly, for long periods and without any parental discussion of what’s going on. Also, they don’t have anywhere near the same impact on young people that family violence does. The point, then, is that violent games can be bad for kids but the badness is completely mitigated by decent parenting.

Most gamers are perfectly able to spend their days helping old folk cross the street before settling down at home for a bit of wanton destruction. We can do this, and enjoy it healthily, because we recognise the difference between the consequence-free world inside the magic box, and the real community outside in which we have responsible roles to play. These kids, probably for a long list of reasons (a list which nevertheless has the words SHODDY PARENTS scrawled across the top with a fat red marker), felt like they had as much of a stake in the streets of London, and in the lives of its citizens, as they did in the virtual Liberty City. Real shopkeepers were given the same consideration as virtual automatons, the notion of consequences became laughable, and grotesque trophies were swapped and bragged about. Which is exactly what the officer said – he didn’t blame Rockstar for the violence or accuse them of actively melting down that vital reality/fiction distinction, he just said that the kids were living out GTA for themselves. And he was right.

Rather than insist on flatly denying everything, gamers ought to engage with the real problems associated with our hobby

But gamers weren’t just wrong to blindly say that games had absolutely nothing to do with it. They were wrong in the way they said it: it’s shameful how childish and overblown the response was. Yes, a lot of the time games don’t deserve the stick they get, but you’re not helping anyone by screaming and stamping your feet like a rabid teenager frothily bellowing “IT’S NOT FAIR!” We need to take a much more nuanced approach to our industry, recognising that it has its dangers but that they are manageable, and far outweighed by the benefits. What we definitely shouldn’t do is react to every criticism with an absolute shitstorm of temper tantrums. That poor constable had spent an entire night fending off gangs of people intent on smashing his face in, and was gearing up to do it all over again. Like everyone else, he was tired and shocked and struggling to find an explanation for the unthinkable, so he made one slightly daft throwaway comment – and all we can do is hide behind our keyboards and jeer at him?

Gamers: it’s time to calm down and grow up. Just think for a second about how all that savage viciousness makes us look, and how much better it would be to show a little restraint now and then. There are people out there who’ve died trying to protect their businesses, who’ve lost everything in one mindless evening – they are the victims here, not us.

Thanks to Nick Fox Moran for the tip about this one