After the recent spree shootings that have tragically cut short so many wonderful and promising lives, the government yet again is pointing the finger of blame at violent video games. Previous studies have shown no real negative effects of violent video games, and seem to indicate that most players find them more cathartic than pernicious, actually lowering violent crimes. But government must be seen to be doing something, so like the PMRC hearings and their repression of John Denver, they must find someone to blame. Never mind that the government sends our young men and women around the world to kill in country after country, and brings them home shattered with PTSD and not enough aid in coping: it’s the video games that are to blame! (I wonder if anyone ever gets PTSD playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare? There should be an easter egg for a PTSD counselor and group therapy session just in case. Or maybe just a new game: Call of Duty: PTSD Therapy. Maybe it could be a band aid for our military’s lacking psychological treatment accessibility in the real world.)
So, how about this for an idea, just to placate the government about video games? Guns are all to blame (according to them), so why not remove guns from video games completely, just to see what happens? But since everyone is so used to the first-person shooter game play, some games can still have that type of play, but with other things standing in for the guns. For example, there could be a game called Famine Relief, where hungry people are all around, clamoring for food, and you have to shoot Campbell’s Chunky soup into everyone’s mouth until they are all full. Also, there could be a firefighter video game where players save lives from burning buildings and shoot at fires with a fire hose. Or how about a game about watering a garden full of lots of dying rare plants in hard-to-reach places? You get the idea.
But the best thing I think video games could do would be to eliminate the first-person shooter game play, and instead make brutally violent games of death, but without guns or conventional weapons. One of them could be Death by Chocolate, where everyone kills using all kinds of chocolate as weapons: drown your adversaries in chocolate milk or syrup, force-feed them chocolate mousse, beat them over the head with giant blocks of chocolate, etc. Kids would never replicate this type of violence because they all love chocolate so much, they will always eat it, rather than use it as a weapon.
And the best idea I think I have for a game of this type would be called Kill Them With Kindness. In this game, you shower people with gifts until they are crushed to death, give poor people so much money that they get killed being robbed for it, literally smother people with hugs and kisses, open the door for others so they can get attacked by zombies, baby sit for someone’s kids so the parents can go get killed by a drunk driver, feed the hungry until they burst, compliment martial artists on their abilities until they have the confidence to go start fights which get them killed, etc. You get the picture. (Video games are so often about killing, so why not at least encourage good etiquette and charity into the game play?)
And after a while of playing games like this, surely if video games are indeed to blame for inspiring these heinous acts, pretty soon spree killers will snap and kill with chocolate, kindness, etc. And if not, then the knee-jerk finger-pointing is probably meaningless (again).
