The recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in striking down California's law prohibiting children under the age of 18 from purchasing violent video games is a travesty. It perpetuates harm on the most vulnerable members of society by means of a complete misunderstanding and ignorance of child development. It is based on a profound misunderstanding of fairy tales.
In equating the violence in the Grimm fairy tales with that of video games, the Court committed a grievous error in arguing that free speech protected the producers of violent video games. In short, the Court's argument is that if we shouldn't ban fairytales because they contain violence, then we shouldn't ban video games, as well.
The argument is false, because neither the violence nor the purpose of the two is even remotely the same. Adults generally read fairy tales to young children so that adults both mediate and interpret the violence. Most important of all, unlike in video games, children do not cause the violence themselves.
The Grimm brothers did not invent, but brought together and embellished the fairy tales that had already existed in European culture for hundreds of years. In other words, fairy tales were spontaneous creations of the human psyche. They were not created for the "marketplace."
A number of prominent psychiatrists and psychoanalysts -- among them Bruno Bettelheim, Marie von Franz and Melanie Klein -- have pointed out that fairy tales serve the psychosocial development of children in crucial ways. In particular, Melanie Klein identified a primary psychological mechanism -- Splitting -- which very young children used to cope with the world.
Up to around the age of five, children regularly split the image of their primary caregiver -- typically the mother -- into two distinct images: the Good Mother and the Bad Mother. The Good Mother is instantly available to tend to the infant and young child's every need. In contrast, the Bad Mother is not instantly and always available to meet the child's needs and wishes. The Bad Mother is also responsible for dispensing punishment for unacceptable behavior.
Fairy tales not only represent, but deal with the psychic conflict that children experience in terms of the Fairy Godmother (the Good Mother) and the Evil Witch (the Bad Mother). Thus, the child rejoices when the Bad Mother is killed, for the child is figuratively killing off a part of him or herself that he or she is not yet mature enough to accept and incorporate into the psyche. That is, the child is not yet ready, psychologically, to accept that the Good and the Bad Mother are two aspects of the same person.
Unless there has been severe trauma that impedes normal development, eventually children do come to accept that the Good and the Bad mother are one. Indeed, this generally happens around the same time that children normally "grow out of " fairy tales. Nonetheless, the propensity for Splitting remains throughout all of our lives. For instance, we regularly split the world into "good and bad guys."
To equate fairy tales to video games is akin to equating world literature to comic books. Fairy tales engage the imagination of young children in helping them surmount a psychological hurdle at the times when they desperately need it. They imagine violence through reading about it, but they do not actively choose to cause it, even if it's virtual. Furthermore, while gruesome at times, the violence is not that of raping women or committing horrific acts on them.
There may not be the over 30 years of impressive, massive and longitudinal research on video games that there is on media violence, but the research shows unequivocally that prolonged exposure to media violence has harmful and long-lasting effects, especially on those from the most at-risk households.
All arguments rest on a bed of basic assumptions and distinctions. If they are wrong, then so are the final conclusions. In the case at hand, the basic assumptions and distinctions are so flawed that the final conclusion is not just "wrong," but harmful to all of us.
Ian Mitroff is an Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley. His most recent book with Abe Silvers is Dirty Rotten Strategies: How We Trick Ourselves and Others into Solving the Wrong Problems Precisely, Stanford University Press, 2009.
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My high school offered fencing as a sport. That's right: we impressionable teens were given modified swords and taught the basics of how to kill somebody with the blessings of our parents and the administration. Where's the equivalent outrage given over Wii-style video games that somehow "teach" just that?
Fairy tales were not invented for children. The versions we have today were based on stories adults told _to each other_ (although, given living conditions, children listened to them as well). They were teaching/cautionary tales about how society works, should work, what the pitfalls are, how to protect yourself from certain types of behavior, and so on, as well as providing the evening entertainment.
It is only over the last 300 years (or less) that we rewrote them, relegated them to the nursery and then grafted our own navel-gazing preoccupations onto them.
But it is true: they were not created to sell ever-more-expensive game consoles, and they had complex structures and life-lessons contained within them, and cannot be in any way compared with Duke Nukem or Grand Theft Auto.
What I find most distasteful about the decision is, however, the religiously based, puritanical mindset that finds that sex is damaging and shameful, unless accompanied by violence, in which case the _violence_ redeems it, and makes it suitable for children.
For those of you who still think _that_ won't affect a child, given prolonged exposure....just how do you think fetishism and profound sexual deviancy start?
I cannot imagine the effect of playing some of the ultra-violent games available today, such as Jon Stewart showed last night, might have on some of our young people.
The reason that telling/reading a story to someone is not as terrifying is that your own brain can edit and frame your internal visual illustrations. But you can't do that with the primarily visual experience of 2-D illustrations, a movie, or a console game: it feeds you the image. You're stuck with it.
A child listening to Snow White can imagine the bad stuff in ways they can manage, to at least some extent. But confronted by a CGI depiction of blood, guts and annihilation - that image is in their brain unfiltered. It is not at all the same thing.
I wonder if there is any scientific basis for my notion that video games involve other portions of the mind than those stimulated also by movies and pictures.
Here is a fun fact: None of these games would be effected by the California law simply because they were never actually sold in any retail establishment in the US -- yet people (including this writer) use these games as examples as games that the evil mutibillion-dollar game publishers are pushing on our kids.
The object of the game was to run down pedestrians, at which point a cross would pop up and a funeral dirge would play.
Guess what there weren't many-if any-reports of at that time?
That's right, people, including teen drivers with their first licenses and still-developing brain synaptic connections, didn't go out and run down pedestrians in real life after playing the Death Race video game.
This screeching and caterwauling about how the next generation is becoming more coarse, vulgar and violent due to new forms of media has been going on since before Guttenberg developed the printing press, and its always easily-debunked rhetoric.
I'm a hard-left liberal, I favor a strong social safety net for the most powerless among us, but kids playing video games is a decision best left to the parents alone, so if parents don't want their kids playing certain video games, then they, not the government, have to lay down the law with that whole "under my roof" set of rules.
BTW-good comments, facts are often absent in these kinds of "think of the children" screeds.