Tom Bissell at Powell’s on Video Games and Violence, Among other Things

July 8, 2010

Few things piss me off more than righteous attitudes about violent video games and children.  Like many people my age, I and my friends grew up using cheat codes to do fatalities on Mortal Kombat and we all seem to have turned out okay. (Some of us also listened to a lot of gangsta rap and  metal and played Dungeons and Dragons and yet strangely, none of us has shot up a school or slaughtered his or her family. Shocking, I know.)

It’s not that I think kids SHOULD be playing violent video games or watching R-rated movies or whatever–I just think parents should make that decision, not Washington or some censor board or parental advisory committee. And I think blaming violence on video games and heavy metal is an easy, false, and sometimes dangerous answer (the very probably wrongful conviction and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham was in part based on the FACT THAT HE OWNED AN IRON MAIDEN POSTER AND NO I AM NOT KIDDING I WISH I WERE)  and that there are always, as Tom Bissell says, other places for the bad son to go:

The other day I finished Columbine, Dave Cullen’s unbelievably good and bulldozingly definitive account of the Columbine Massacre. The perpetrators of the massacre were both fans of a modded version of the classic shooter Doom. Much was made of that at the time. Less was made of the fact that one of the boys, Eric Harris, was also a classic-lit buff. Shortly before the massacre, he quoted a line from one of the most transcendent works of literature in the language, The Tempest: “Good wombs have borne bad sons.” For Eric Harris, the ecstasies of violent inspiration could be found everywhere. If we dutifully close off those forms of creative expression we find distasteful, the bad son will go elsewhere.

Read the whole, very good essay here.