Abstract— The topic of children and violent videogames has been on the news a great deal in the past few years. There are multiple ways to remove the pressure from the videogame creators and teach consumers about what they are purchasing before they finish the transaction. How ethically correct it is for a child to play a game depends on the individual child, and only a parent can decide when the child is ready for the material. There are ethically positive means to restrict the access to the material and make it so the parents are more involved in their child’s life. I. THE ISSUE AT HAND When videogames were first invented there was not much if any debate over the material in them. The low quality graphics and low level of technology only allowed so much. In the current age though, there has been a lot of heated argument over the material. The reason these debates have occurred is because of how children (those under the age of 18) play them. In Mature rated games, some of the best sellers, you can gun down innocents on the street, or punch an alien in the face and watch him bleed. This type of material makes some parents uncomfortable, especially if their child is playing the game. Sometimes groups of people have been so upset as to attack the game itself openly [1]. The issue is if it is ethically satisfactory to let children play these games, or if they should be removed from the market.
II. FACTS The facts around this issue are well documented by many sources. There have been countless studies into the effects of violent media and their effects on children. All forms of violent media increase the likelihood of a child exhibiting violent behavior in one form or another. Violent videogames are no exception to this [2]. It is also relevant to this topic that most parents do not question the games they purchase for their children. They are told what game to get and buy it, or are just there to pay for the game. One more relevant fact is that the media field that videogames fit in for the sake of restrictions is not decided on. Art has freedom of speech with it, along with music and writings. It is not yet decided if videogames fit for freedom of speech protections or if they should be a restricted media type. There is a rating system made by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) to judge the suitable age for a game depending on content, but the lines can be somewhat blurry. The only thing preventing a game from getting and making sales as an Adult Only game is the fact most retail stores will not stock it.
III. ETHICAL FRAMEWORKS This issue affects a much wider range of people than just the children or their parents. The videogame corporations are also affected, along with all the stores that sell videogames. This fact makes it necessary to assess the issue from multiple ethical standpoints.
A. Professional Ethical Viewpoint
Every videogame must be created, either by a single person or by a group of people. When it is being created by a single person, most of the time it is not a professional. Videogames that are created by a single developer are home-made games, and the creator’s personal ethical standing should be used to assess those because of the personal level of depth the one developer has. When a corporation creates a videogame it is done with a team of professionals.
A team of professionals can usually attain a level of technological usage that a single developer cannot do because of time. A group can have each person focused on one element, such as one artist for clothing textures and another for weapon models. Each one will have a high level of detail with the current technology. When a player shoots a zombie in a modern day videogame like Dead Rising there can be blood and body parts flying. In the same game it is possible to take nearly anything from the environment and kill zombies with it in bloody ways. This game is also Mature rated, meant for those who are seventeen and up in age.
The ones working on the game, as professionals, must do their best job. That means, if they are told to make it bloody, that they have to make it bloody. The game will be finished with a professional level of expertise and released to the public, where people can go to the store and purchase it. The development teams are usually small enough that one or two managers, who have been told in detail what the game’s concept was, can personally inspect each piece. Even if they could not, as professionals the development team must give a satisfactory item. When the item is sold, both the salesman and the creator of the product are not responsible for what the customer does with the item.
The employees of videogame corporations cover a wide spectrum. They contain artists, writers, management personnel, and programmers at the very least. Each one of these professionals has a different set of ethics they must adhere to. None of the ethical codes force them to consider children playing the videogame because of the ESRB rating that will be on the box. If a writer is writing what may be labeled for the ages of seventeen and above, then he would expect only those people to read it and cannot be blamed otherwise. This same idea can be applied to the rest of the employees of the corporation. The only one who could even remotely be blamed for the material is the top member of the development team, but even then he is making sure that the game that is made fits the criteria he was told to make. Once again, this falls back to the car salesman example above.
B. Common Ethical Viewpoint
It is impossible to use a completely universal form of ethics, but it can be assumed that the average person would have an ethical framework based around not doing evil or harm to the world, not stealing, and those general ideas. Everyone world-wide can agree that, while their ethics may disagree on some points because of religion, the general idea of “Do to someone what you want them to do to you” is a nearly universal good thing. The average person would also dislike something having a negative influence in the life of his or her child. Violence in a videogame would count, along with pornographic material and R rated movies. Most parents do not let their children watch R rated movies till they feel the child has matured enough mentally to watch things of that nature. The nature of most R rated movies does not attract as many children as the nature of most M rated video games, despite the fact the ratings for both are for those of the age seventeen and older.
There is also the fact that many parents used videogames as a cheap babysitter. They will purchase whatever game the child wants in a way to occupy the child’s time so the parent can do whatever he or she wanted. Many parents also have a habit of not looking at the rating on a videogame when they buy it for their child. Some of those that are told what the game contains say that their child can see worse or the same level of material on a standard cable package. None of those are an excuse for permitting the child to play a game of an M rating. Many children are able to mature enough to be able to play Mature rated games before they turn seventeen. These scenarios should be noticed by the parent, so they could then purchase the M rated videogames. If the child is still mentally immature, they should not be permitted access to the material. This is only discernable by the parents of the children, and the parent would have to use his or her own morals to determine when it is the right time.
Some parents say that the game companies should not make games that have violence in them because of the fact that children can purchase and play them. In this situation it would be easy to ask the parent why he or she did not confiscate the material if he or she disapproved of it, or if the parents think that R rated movies shouldn’t be made either. They blame the game companies in order to avoid having to take responsibility for the issue themselves.
C. Personal Ethical Viewpoint
Each and every person in the world has their own slightly different set of ethics. To this point the common set of ethics and professional ethics have been used, but a middle ground of personal ethics has not. The moral decision of what would be right or wrong in this scenario relies directly on the individual. Some people think it is fine, because of the fact that material similar to this can be accessed by other means, such as from a friend or watching the news. Others believe that these games should never even be made, because they promote violence. There are others who think that the games are fine for the age group designated on the ESRB label. For these people there is no problem, they would have raised their children according to these ethics and the children would be used to them. The only time that a problem would arise is when there is a violent situation at hand and either the parent or the press states that it was caused by a violent videogame. If the child had been properly taught ethics from the start there would be no such scenario unless the child had a mental issue, at which point the cause would be easily found.
Research points to an increase in negative behavior from children that play violent games. Without doing in depth research as to the nature of the tested children and their parent’s interaction with them, one would assume that it was a standard happy family and that the violent videogame made the child do bad things. The majority of parents that actively interact with children and the videogames they play are rarely ever seen complaining about violent games causing violent behavior, because they know that it can be counteracted by properly discussing the issue with the child every so often. Stated earlier was the issue of homemade videogames by single or small teams of creators. These games would fall under a personal ethical viewpoint. The few developers would have complete control over the game’s contents. These are the games that are most likely to contain materials that are socially disapproved of (such as Super Columbine RPG.) These games are almost never pay-to-play though, and are normally offered by download for free on the internet. That topic is of a different nature, concerning privacy and parental controls on the computer.
IV. SOLVING THE ISSUE There are multiple ways so assess and solve this situation. 1. Outlaw sale of mature rated games to minors. 2. Legally restrict the material in videogames. 3. Execute a marketing campaign to inform parents about mature rated games.
V. ASSESSING THE SOLUTIONS
Currently it is legal to sell mature rated games to minors, but many stores have a policy against it (see Fig. 1 for success percentages of bypassing store policies.) The rating system by the ESRB has no legal baring whatsoever. Children of all ages have friends and many also will be affected by the forbidden fruit effect, doing something because the parents say not to. If a parent tells the child “Do not play this game! It is bad for you!” the child can easily go to a friend’s house and play it, or more than likely see worse on cable TV. Many people stress the idea of keeping children away from violent video games but never seem to address the fact that the child can put the TV on Spike TV and watch graphic human-on-human fighting. The parents may not even notice this if the child has a TV in his or her bedroom.
Companies do get harassed when a child buys a Mature rated game and the parent then believes the child should not have been able to, or if there is a situation that is violent and the parent then blames the videogame’s influence. This poor excuse the parent uses would be moot if the parent had properly discussed the game with the child, or had at least read the ESRB tag at the bottom that most likely said ‘Strong Violence.’ These issues are only addressed if it is wide-spread and giving them negative press, which is rarely the case.
Shifting to the second solution, the content inside the game itself could be restricted. Manhunt 2 is a great example of this. In Manhunt 2 the player can execute people in the game with a huge number of objects in brutish and bloody ways. Originally the game was uncensored; the player could watch the character kill the other characters. The real release of the game skewed the camera during the executions and gave visual effect to lessen the graphicness of the maneuver. This was done by indirect force; the ESRB’s first rating for the game was Adult Only. Almost no stores sell AO games for consoles, and those that do have to keep them behind the counter. The censoring lowered it to Mature rating.
The choice of the stores to not shelve AO material is a decision they make. It is currently unknown as to what media a videogame fits under for the sake of Freedom of Speech. There is no documentation preventing a videogame from any type of content. There are games that have pornographic material, some that have extremely violent material, and games that are children’s games. Artists are free to express themselves, and so are writers. Does a videogame count as a story, and therefore would fit under literature, or is it more about the art? Children see violence on the TV all the time, especially the news. The news is journalism, which is protected by the Freedom of the Press. In order to restrict material in a videogame there must be laws pertaining that explain how a videogame fits into the legal system. Once that is done there will be very few grey lines for the videogame companies to walk, but if the law restricts the content of videogames there could be unrest in the population that enjoys the restricted material. See Table 1 that covers America’s top five videogames of November, three of which are rated Mature.
Moving on to the third solution, there is one major flaw about parent’s complaining about videogame material. Many parents shop blindly according to lists given by their children. They will notice if someone, such as a shop clerk, tells them what is in a game such as Manhunt 2 but most do not look themselves. Despite the ESRB ratings that are easily seen on the box and the details on the back of the box, parents blame the industry and not their own lack of awareness. This problem can easily be solved. Employees that deal with video game sales (such as GameStop) could be required to inform the customer of the M rated material in the game. It could be done by a law or just company policy, but doing this would decrease the number of children with M rated videogames because some parents would say they may not have it. It will not completely remove the material from them, but by restricting purchases it would force the parent into the transaction. This would hopefully fuel a discussion between the parent and child about the material, and would require the parent to make the decision him or herself as to if the child can have the videogame.
VI. IMPACT OF SOLUTIONS
These three solutions offer the most direct and straight forward solutions. The first solution would force parents to interact with their children more, along with giving them a chance to notice the material in the videogame that the child wants to play. It will hopefully force the parent to notice and make the choice him or herself. That way, the control over the material the child sees is directly in the hands of the parent.
The second solution would completely remove the issue from the hands of the general population. It would also restrict the industry and more than likely anger the general population that enjoys the Mature rated material. There are many popular and enjoyable games, but a large portion of them are rated Mature. There are many companies that make most of their profit from those games, such as RockStar and the Grand Theft Auto series. The third solution is much softer than the others. This simply informs the parent of the material at purchase, but children could still purchase them on their own because of the fact that no law is being changed in that regard. The positive press from this type of interaction with the parents would help counteract some of the negative press from the occasional scenarios, or it could cause more negative press because it is a law or policy passed in regards to children and violent video games that still allows the sale of them to minors. That just depends on the people, but this softer response is the least likely to cause friction between anyone.
VII. CONCLUSION
These simplified solutions do not offer the best course of action. In order to properly teach the children, there must be a mix of the first and third solutions. The outlawing of M rated videogame sales to minors would eliminate the material getting into their hands easily. They would be forced to use alternative means, and there are more than likely a large number who would not want to do the extra work for it. Once that has occurred, the clerks need to inform parents of the material in the game at purchase. This would make the transaction take roughly twenty seconds longer, but would make the parents feel that the company cares what their children see. It would be positive press for them. This, combined with a campaign to hopefully convince parents to discuss the material with their children, will help ease the issue of children and violent videogames. It will never be removed because of the fact that people blame others for problems, but this will hopefully decrease the pressure on corporations and on the material itself and focus it on the parent/child relationship. It is apparent at this point that much of what is ethical about controlling this issue lies with the ethics of each specific person. Overall, given how the situation has reached national news coverage only when an extremely drastic situation is linked to videogames (such as the Columbine incident,) the current material in videogames is fine. The issues arise when parents do not properly take responsibility of raising their children. It is the job of the parent to teach the child proper ethical behavior, not the job of the companies that create entertainment for those of the age seventeen and above. A parent complaining about the negative effect Doom has on his or her child is equivalent to a parent being upset at their child getting scared at an R rated movie. Violent media causes a negative influence on the child if the child has not been raised properly or is easily influenced. In both those cases, only the parent is in a position to assess and determine what is best for his or her child.
IX. REFERENCES
Lang, Derrick. "MADD attacks 'Grand Theft Auto IV'" Msnbc. 1 May 2008. Msn. 2 Dec. 2008 <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24405072/>
"Violent video games tied to teen aggression." Msnbc. 14 Nov. 08. Msn. 2 Dec. 2008 <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27722613>
Caron, Frank. "FTC report: retailers clamping down on M-rated game sales." Ars technia. 8 May 08. 2 Dec. 2008 <http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080508-ftc-report-retailers-clamping-down-on-m-rated-game-sales.html>
Jackson, Keith. "VGChartz.com." VGChartz. 22 Nov. 2008. 2 Dec. 2008 <http://vgchartz.com/>
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Written By: M. "Templar" Z.
