With its rejection of a law prohibiting the sale of violent video games to anyone under 18 without parental consent, the Supreme Court last week gave California kids the right to exercise that inalienable joy of childhood: imaginary destruction. Long may this virtual pleasure continue.
For years, I simply ignored video games because life was too full; but then, out of curiosity, I tried the original Halo — the revolutionary first-person shooter, as such games are known, which had debuted in 2001. It was weirdly compelling, which was a deeply embarrassing thing to admit because it was also, by 2010, the equivalent of touting a brick-sized mobile phone.
Advancement proved tricky. Trying to play the infinitely more sophisticated Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on an underpowered laptop — especially after the ritual downloading of a gazillion patches to make the game play nice with Windows — was its own ironic and joyless form of modern warfare. A tragically misguided attempt to repeat the process on a machine running Windows Vista was a bit like trying to waterboard yourself — and succeeding.
So, at the tender age of 41, I broke down and bought an Xbox 360, and armed myself for long winter nights with Bad Company 2, Halo Reach, Mass Effect 2 — and many others, typically sequels, as I wanted to experience the most sophisticated game in any given series. As someone who was advised by a professor to read Proust by starting with the final part of the three- volume “In Search of Lost Time” and working backward, I had no problem ignoring chronology. And while this turned out to be a terrible strategy for reading Proust, I was merely in search of things I could shoot.
And a lot of shooting I did. Still, compared with the average teenager, I am a pathetic gamer: I am easily pleased; I don’t mind dodgy artificial intelligence — coding glitches that cause your computer-generated enemies to walk into walls — because it evens the odds of my survival; and I do only solo campaigns, instead of the more popular teaming up with fellow warriors online because I suspect I might end up melding with my couch.
I have three observations about my journey. The first is that I’ve gone straight back to the past. Violent video games are not that much different from what my cousin and I did in the late 1970s with thousands of tiny, inch-high soldiers. We created worlds and characters, built tanks and aircraft, and committed mass slaughter week in and week out. Occasionally, plastic dinosaurs would suddenly appear and decimate our imaginary, cardboard- box cities; sometimes, a plague would turn most of the soldiers into zombies requiring our band of heroes to use extreme violence to survive.
My cousin and I weren’t alone, and my neighborhood was anything but extraordinary. We pitied the kids whose parents banned them from playing with “war toys” in the misguided belief that exposure to anything militaristic was a gateway to belligerence and fascism. Didn’t they know it was just pretend violence? In fact, the most dangerous kid on my street was pacified by military model-building, mesmerizing us all with his fabulously airbrushed miniature warplanes instead of his fists.
That is, perhaps, one deficit of video gaming — you don’t have to learn how to make stuff to have the coolest stuff on the street. (Although I suspect that today, the nanny-state brigade would be horrified at the idea of children using craft knives and glue and “chemical” paints.)
The second point that struck me was that video gaming seemed like a mass initiation rite. Instead of joining a gang and beating up other gangs, or going off to war and winning honor, or undergoing potentially deadly trials to prove one can transition from childhood to adulthood, you can advance through a virtual world that rewards increasing courage, skill and tenacity. The games industry has become, in effect, a tribal elder for the world’s teenagers, pushing them through ever more complex feats of prestidigitation.
In defending violent video games on the grounds of free speech, Justice Antonin Scalia couldn’t help but apologize for the implication that the court was allowing bad art a license: “Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat,” he wrote. “But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional.”
I happened to read Dante’s Inferno at 13, as the thrill of toy soldiers and war games was passing into the fixed memory of childhood, with a sense that it could never be felt again. Girls beckoned. The Smiths’ debut single, “Hand in Glove,” and other anthems of teenage disaffection, were only a few months away. But there before me in a 14th-century poem was a violent hell, lurid and lewd. It wasn’t intellectually edifying – little is at 13— it was just like the games of my middle age, awesome.
For years, I simply ignored video games because life was too full; but then, out of curiosity, I tried the original Halo — the revolutionary first-person shooter, as such games are known, which had debuted in 2001. It was weirdly compelling, which was a deeply embarrassing thing to admit because it was also, by 2010, the equivalent of touting a brick-sized mobile phone.
Advancement proved tricky. Trying to play the infinitely more sophisticated Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on an underpowered laptop — especially after the ritual downloading of a gazillion patches to make the game play nice with Windows — was its own ironic and joyless form of modern warfare. A tragically misguided attempt to repeat the process on a machine running Windows Vista was a bit like trying to waterboard yourself — and succeeding.
So, at the tender age of 41, I broke down and bought an Xbox 360, and armed myself for long winter nights with Bad Company 2, Halo Reach, Mass Effect 2 — and many others, typically sequels, as I wanted to experience the most sophisticated game in any given series. As someone who was advised by a professor to read Proust by starting with the final part of the three- volume “In Search of Lost Time” and working backward, I had no problem ignoring chronology. And while this turned out to be a terrible strategy for reading Proust, I was merely in search of things I could shoot.
And a lot of shooting I did. Still, compared with the average teenager, I am a pathetic gamer: I am easily pleased; I don’t mind dodgy artificial intelligence — coding glitches that cause your computer-generated enemies to walk into walls — because it evens the odds of my survival; and I do only solo campaigns, instead of the more popular teaming up with fellow warriors online because I suspect I might end up melding with my couch.
I have three observations about my journey. The first is that I’ve gone straight back to the past. Violent video games are not that much different from what my cousin and I did in the late 1970s with thousands of tiny, inch-high soldiers. We created worlds and characters, built tanks and aircraft, and committed mass slaughter week in and week out. Occasionally, plastic dinosaurs would suddenly appear and decimate our imaginary, cardboard- box cities; sometimes, a plague would turn most of the soldiers into zombies requiring our band of heroes to use extreme violence to survive.
My cousin and I weren’t alone, and my neighborhood was anything but extraordinary. We pitied the kids whose parents banned them from playing with “war toys” in the misguided belief that exposure to anything militaristic was a gateway to belligerence and fascism. Didn’t they know it was just pretend violence? In fact, the most dangerous kid on my street was pacified by military model-building, mesmerizing us all with his fabulously airbrushed miniature warplanes instead of his fists.
That is, perhaps, one deficit of video gaming — you don’t have to learn how to make stuff to have the coolest stuff on the street. (Although I suspect that today, the nanny-state brigade would be horrified at the idea of children using craft knives and glue and “chemical” paints.)
The second point that struck me was that video gaming seemed like a mass initiation rite. Instead of joining a gang and beating up other gangs, or going off to war and winning honor, or undergoing potentially deadly trials to prove one can transition from childhood to adulthood, you can advance through a virtual world that rewards increasing courage, skill and tenacity. The games industry has become, in effect, a tribal elder for the world’s teenagers, pushing them through ever more complex feats of prestidigitation.
In defending violent video games on the grounds of free speech, Justice Antonin Scalia couldn’t help but apologize for the implication that the court was allowing bad art a license: “Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat,” he wrote. “But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional.”
I happened to read Dante’s Inferno at 13, as the thrill of toy soldiers and war games was passing into the fixed memory of childhood, with a sense that it could never be felt again. Girls beckoned. The Smiths’ debut single, “Hand in Glove,” and other anthems of teenage disaffection, were only a few months away. But there before me in a 14th-century poem was a violent hell, lurid and lewd. It wasn’t intellectually edifying – little is at 13— it was just like the games of my middle age, awesome.
