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in even shorter spans of time, with three hours tending to be the maximum
length of most releases. Even television, enjoying a resurgence in popularity
with cutting edge series, tends to have shows with, at most, 22 episodes in a
standard season. That is drastically less story than a forty hour video game, or
even a thirty hour one. There are many video games “that recreate human
experiences normally reserved for stage, print, or cinema [and they] raise
questions about the relationship between videogames and traditional media”
(Bogost 66). That statement, when taken alongside Claude Bremond’s assertion
that narratives contain “events of human interest” (63), begs for the content of
video games — their myriad stories — to be carefully considered.
One of the major stumbling blocks preventing a more rational and
compelling analysis of the narratological elements of video games is the fixation
on violence in video games. This, especially in popular news media outlets, gets
immediately extrapolated into a cause/effect scenario wherein video games
cause violent behavior in gamers. This argument is old, tired and as of recent
research, has been debunked as a reasonable point of argument that seeks to
blame video games for what are otherwise very complex social problems
leading to violence. These studies tend to look for a very simple causal chain —
video game violence A causes violence in the real world B. They do not take
into account any other factors or any other causal chains in trying to make the
argument. One immediate flaw in such an argument presents itself in the form of
the hypothetical gamer who is also a clinical sociopath. This hypothetical gamer
enjoys and seeks out violent video games and also acts out violently in the
world. The knee-jerk reaction of many research studies looking for a simple
causal chain would declare that this gamer became violent as a result of violent
video games. Yet the diagnosis of sociopathy lends itself to the opposite
argument, that this gamer would seek out violent material as a result of an
already existing pathology. These arguments decrying video games due solely to
violence also fail to seek out any other violent influences in the lives of gamers.
For example, how would the causal chain be determined if a gamer plays a
violent video game, like any in the Call o f D uty series, then also watches a
number of violent films and violent television shows? What if that gamer
witnesses domestic violence in his or her home, or has been the victim of abuse
him or herself, or lives in a neighborhood where violence is commonplace? The
simple answer is that the web would be nearly impossible to entangle in terms of
what violent content caused what violent behavior.
Another major gap in the argument is simply one of numbers. The
video game industry brings in billions of dollars, and according to the industry’s
own reporting on sales figures and demographics, some 51% of American
households own at least one gaming console and the average gamer is not a
child, but an adult who has been playing, on average, for some fourteen years
(“Essential Facts” 2-3). Further still, a majority of the top selling titles of 2013
are rated M for Mature (the equivalent of the R rating for films) often due to
violent content, with the much reviled, and heavily violent. Grand Theft Auto V
at the top of the list (Ibid 11). Given those statistics and following an argument