The recent release of Grand Theft Auto V made a billion dollars in three days. Assuming that the copies sold for an average of $60 a piece, which ignores special editions, about 16.7 million copies of the game found their way into the hands and homes of consumers. Other violent titles have also seen billion dollar sales days, like the Call of Duty series, and chances are that even if you don't own some violent games, you know someone who does. It could be a friend, it could be a coworker, it could be the person who is typing these very words. So can we stop painting out games to be the source of all the wrongs in the world already?
It's still a recurring theme. A recent profile of the man behind the Washington Navy Yard shooting painted a portrait of an individual who had legitimate and severe mental illness. It also had a line about how he really liked Call of Duty. The problem with that line is that Call of Duty is an incredibly popular title, and the vast majority of people who love it don't shoot any real people. As the games make increasingly giant amounts of money, and find their ways into more and more homes, it has become clear that it's not quite appropriate to make them a scapegoat anymore. The majority of players only shoot virtual people.
Then again, it's to be expected that a new medium is going to trigger a kind of panic about their lasting effects. Movies had the Hayes Code, comic books the Comics Code Authority, all put together to ensure that they did not corrupt the youth and lead them down a path of moral decay. All of those measures were eventually challenged and dropped, as it was realized that adults can handle watching a movie in which a member of the clergy is ridiculed, or read a comic where law enforcement dies as a result of a criminal's activities, both things restricted under those mediums' specific censorship codes. We moved on from those panics, and now we are faced with a fresh one.
It's brought up continually because it's a medium some people don't understand, and it often involves actions that would be morally repugnant in the real world. However, even if I would personally like to see more non-violent titles - variety is the spice of life, after all - it's clear that the violence in these virtual worlds tends to be restricted to those virtual worlds. If they were not, the past week would have been a spree of death and destruction stemming from all of those poor souls blasting through Grand Theft Auto, rather than a week that was relatively sane and quiet.
I can understand the fear of a new medium, new entertainment, and new experiences. It's something different, and on the surface it can look quite scary, and depict violent acts in a manner that was not possible before. But, let's be honest, murder rates are on a downward trend after peaking in the '70s, violent crime is also on a downward slope. As a whole, even as entertainment has reached its violent peak, we have seen a general decline in the amount of actual, real world violence. While such violence is still shocking and unacceptable, it's clear that at this point we need to realize that there's a much different cause behind it. Instead of using violent entertainment as a scapegoat, let's find the real cause.
