This blog comments on the issue of mass media influence using violence in video games as a case study. It also attempts to determine the communication models being used by the notable sides of the issue.
The amount of violence in the media has been a hot topic for many years and recently videogames has become the main focus of the issue. People have accused violent games of being murder simulators for children. Others say that their accusations are false and unconstitutional (violating the first amendment). But do violent video games incite violent behaviour in its audience? And what theories and models of communication are being used to formulate both sides of the argument?
The Hypodermic Needle (or Magic Bullet) Theory is a linear model of communication deeply rooted in behavioural ideologies of the 1930s. It is thought to have first been conceptualised by the Frankfurt School in Germany when they published a study of human behaviourism. The main concept of the theory is that the audience is a passive thing that is directly influenced by the message being sent by the mass media in its purest meaning. The idea of a bullet or a needle is that it gets placed right into the receiver by the sender without any sort of interaction between the two. The theory stresses that because this has such a powerful and immediate effect on the audience that the mass media can make people make uniform decisions because they are helpless to resist the impact of the message. This theory paints the mass media as a potentially dangerous weapon because it affects people so greatly.
The main problem with this theory is that it is so simple. There are no other factors that affect it; there is merely the sender, the message and the receiver.It is also flawed in the sense that the audience is in fact not a passive thing but something that thinks for itself; filters information presented to them and makes decisions influenced by other factors of the world besides the mass media.
The Reception Analysis Theory is a non-linear model of communication developed by British media theorist Stuart Hall. Different to the Hypodermic Needle model it factors in that the audience is an active receiver. Its main purpose was to identify why different receivers could get different meanings from one message.
According to Reception Analysis one message can be received differently depending on a number of important factors. Though it is encoded as one thing, because of cultural background, age, race, gender, economic position etc. someone can decode a message as something else, or not get the entire meaning.
Three things are made clear by this theory: the same message can be encoded in more than one way, the message contains more than one possible reading, and that decoding a message can be a difficult process.
The problem with this theory is that it does not take into account interruptions (noise) in the message’s travel between the sender and the receiver.
The amount of violence in the media has been a hot topic for many years and recently videogames has become the main focus of the issue. People have accused violent games of being murder simulators for children. Others say that their accusations are false and unconstitutional (violating the first amendment). But do violent video games incite violent behaviour in its audience? And what theories and models of communication are being used to formulate both sides of the argument?
Video games. They are the biggest entertainment industry in the world, worth about $54 billion dollars and expected to almost double by 2015.97% of adolescents play video games as of 2008 with 83% having a gaming console in their home. This is not just a children’s market however, the average gamer age has risen over time to around thirty years old. Many have grown up with games since the video game revolution began in the late 70s.
With such a massive, popular form of entertainment comes a price to pay, some think. Video games are thought to influence its audience in dangerous ways. This is because of the violence in the games, while no worse visually than a movie or television, can be done in an interactive way so the player is participating. It is also viewed as dangerous because these violent games can be bought by children and adolescents despite there being a ratings system (ESRB). These people concerned are making assumptions based on how they view the role of the audience, which is underpinned by a certain type of communication model. Likewise are the people defending video games.
For this report I will look at a certain attorney who has spent most of his career attempting to outlaw video games. His name is Jack Thompson.
Former Attorney Jack Thompson.
Jack Thompson is a now disbarred attorney from Florida who became a born-again Christian in 1976, shortly before he began his 33-year mission to ban illicit radio programs, rap music and most famously video games.
Thompson first began his campaign against video games in 1997 when he represented three parents whose children were killed by fourteen-year-old Michael Carnael (a violent video game player) in the Health High School shooting. The basis for Thompson’s argument (one that has stayed through out his career) is that these violent video games are “murder simulators” training children and adolescents to kill.
This murder simulator theory stems from Thompson’s ultra conservative belief that audiences are passive consumers and that they are prone to replicate the actions of these violent games that they play. Thompson makes assumptions that the audience of these games cannot distinguish the difference between reality and fantasy.
This theory is based on a linear model of communication, one that places the receiver as a passive, unthinking person who decodes the message in its most literal and pure form. Thompson’s case was dismissed by the court, deeming it had no legally recognisable claim.
Thompson continued on though where over the next 12 years he made numerous attacks on certain violent video games, most notably the Grand Theft Auto franchise and its creator Rockstar Games.
Science Fiction Horror game, Dead Space.
Over the next few years Thompson had numerous debates with media theorists and notable video game reviewers over this issue. His opponents all said the same thing. They said that there is no scientific evidence proving that violent video games cause aggression in its players. They also said that the audience does have enough common sense to distinguish between reality and fantasy and that anyone who can’t must have another problem underpinning this.
These opponents to Jack Thompson base their arguments on a non-linear communication model, one where the audience has an active role in how the message is received and that there are multiple ways in which the message can be decoded.
Thompson rebutted against his opponents claims that there is no evidence to support his claims with a 2005 study by psychologists showing a direct causal link between violent video games and aggression. It was soon discovered however that Thompson was lying about this study that in fact showed a correlative link between violent video games and aggression.
This change in the study was so important because correlative evidence is much weaker than causal evidence. Causal evidence is where one thing causes the other thing because one happened directly after the other. Correlative evidence is where two possibly related things happen at the same time, not actually proving one thing made the other happen.
Yet Thompson continued to use this piece of evidence as well as tampering with other pieces, threatening opponents and making false statements in a court of law. This led to his permanent disbarment from courts in Florida on September 25, 2008. Nevertheless Jack Thompson still managed to make his voice heard posting letters to numerous notable people such as the mother of the Chair of Take-Two Interactive (publisher of Rockstar Games) and President of the United States Barack Obama.
"Between 1997 and now over 89.5 MILLION Grand Theft Auto video games have sold world wide. Based on the number of Grand Theft Auto games that have sold, IF Jack Thompson can connect twenty school shootings to Grand Theft Auto that means we have a murder rate of umm... 0.00002%."
But even though Jack Thompson has been omitted from practicing law, the debate on violence in video games still rages on today. But people have asked the question whether it is merely just people scared of change attacking video games because they are the new technology. Fifty odd years ago people wanted comic books banned for fear that they were bad influences for its audience. Whether that is the case with video games is yet another debatable thing and will most likely never end, or at least until a new technology comes along.
