In early day motion 2427 Keith Vaz, chair of the home affairs select committee, calls for Call of Duty 3 to be banned and criticises the game for “the harrowing scenes in which a London Underground train is bombed by terrorists” and, without presenting any actual evidence, says there is “increasing evidence of a link between perpetrators of violent crime and violent video games users”
Call of Duty 3 is, of course, a World War II era first person shooter which takes place in France, Germany and Poland. I think Vaz might have meant the much more recent Modern Warfare 3 game, which grossed some £400min its first week, is set in the near future, not 70 years ago, and which actually has a level in London, although no trains are bombed in that production.
Of course I’m sure Vaz has actually played the game and this is an innocent mistake and not some badly researched, knee-jerk, attention-seeking stunt.
I happen to be a big fan of computer games and I have to admit it does alter my behaviour. Every time I play Mario I have an irrational hunger for mushrooms, every time I play Homeworld I find myself leading a civilisation through space, defeating an evil empire with ion cannons and every time I play Hitman I shave off my hair, tattoo a barcode on the back of my head and sneak around with a silenced silverballer handgun. It’s a tragic life.
Computer games are a form of entertainment media. Like movies, like books, they offer a release from the trivialities of life. People go to the cinema to watch James Bond because it is an exciting fiction. People read Alice in Wonderland because its fiction that lets their mind wander and people play games for the same reason: to immerse themselves in a fiction which lets them pass the time between work and rest.
The key word, however, is 'fiction'.
Politicians like Keith Vaz seem to be under the misguided impression that people can’t separate the real world from fantasy and therefore need protection from such mediums by arbitrarily banning anything he finds morally offensive. If this was The Matrix, he'd be Agent Smith.
I can understand why a simulation of an attack on a mass transit system might evoke memories of the 7 July 2005 bombings but then The British Board of Film Classification noted that `the game neither draws upon nor resembles real terrorist attacks on the underground'.
Of course there’s plenty of real world media that does draw from real life attacks. The Film D.C. Sniper tells the actual story of the Beltway sniper attacks of 2002. That hasn’t meant we’ve seen dozens of people running around London trying to emulate that attack for the simple reason that the vast majority of people know right from wrong.
There is no evidence to link games like Modern Warfare 3, or Grand Theft Auto to perpetrators of violent crime in the same way that there’s no link to Goldfinger and random acts of violence aided and abetted by razor sharp hats. The media is enjoyable to watch and play but once the controller is down people know they are back in the real world.
Vaz needs to get his facts straight and stop grandstanding. Computer games didn’t invent violent crime and they don’t cause it. The Kray twins were beating people up in the east end long before Lord Sugar got the first Amstrad computer running Asteroids.
There’s a case for age classification but as long as the media causes no real life harm, and pretending to be an SAS soldier fighting terrorists in London has no real life harm, adults should be allowed to make their own choices about what media they consume and what games they enjoy. It’s as simple as that.
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