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SOCIAL CONTRACT

VIOLENCE AND THE RSAC

Trent Contrall

In the year 1984, in Sandpoint, Idaho, after being discharged from a mental health facility by Ronald Reagan's new "Choice in Mental Health Act", a teenaged boy became obsessed with the video game "Pac Man". He purchased a high-powered rifle and several boxes of ammunition from a local sporting goods store, put on a yellow hooded sweater, ingested several pellets of lysergic acid diethylamide, and went on a killing spree. He chased several "ghosts" - men who later turned out to be organizing a White supremacist rally - into a corn maze, managing to shoot and kill several of them before he finally died in a confrontation with Sandpoint's police.

Dubbed "The Pac Man Killings", this grisly event would shape America's obsession with video games and violence for years to come.

1993-1994's American congressional hearings on violence have brought this topic once again to the fore. After hearing about a particularly visceral segment of Sega's Full Motion Video game, "Night Trap", where a hooded ninja attempts to abduct a woman in a sports bra but gets flung into the bushes by a giant spring, Senator Joe Lieberman (D. - Connecticut) threw up into his hat. After presentations from Sega and Nintendo, what was most eye-opening was the Senate's deep dive into Superego's "Eviscerator", a game so gory and disturbing that C-SPAN had to temporarily cut their broadcast while it was discussed.

The video game industry has been quick to rally around their proposed solution to the problem: defensively self-regulating before the government can step in.

Let's compare and contrast some of the industry's regulatory solutions.

RSAC

The Recreational Software Advisory Council is run by the non-profit Software Publishing Association, and helmed by the general counsel for LucasArts. Their proposed scheme for quickly communicating a game's objectionable content to parents is a four-point scale for each of sex, violence, and language.

ESRB

The Entertainment Software Rating Board, run by a board backed by EA, Sega, and Sony, proposes a scheme as simplistic as the ham-fisted one applied to movies. The ESRB has all games divided up into categories like "EC for Early Childhood", "K-A for Kids to Adults", "T for Teen", "M for Mature", and "AO for Adults Only", - obvious analogues for movies' "G" (General), "PG" (Parental Guidance), "PG-13" (For teens), "R" (Restricted), and "X" (Adult).

The ESRB's draft for what these schemes will entail overlap so comprehensively with the work of the MPAA that it felt like they just copied their homework, whole. As is endemic to the American rating ecosystem, violence is expected throughout the rating system while even the faintest whiff of sexuality is punished with an immediate "Mature" (R) or "Adult" (X) rating.

Why they did not simply adopt the MPAA's existing rating system I do not know, it seems like a lot of time could be saved.

A Plea for Sanity

I must hope that the public demand more nuance from their entertainment choices than a simple four point numerical system - or, much worse, the ESRB's unbelievably simplistic categorical bins into which they attempt to segment all of humanity.

In Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" he posits that the communications media should be considered as important if not more important than the message it carries as a focus of study. These efforts to pen all of the myriad expressions of digital media into narrow bands of acceptability will ultimately stunt the emotional development of video games as an art form.

WholeCross

During the Senate hearings, Representative J. Tilligan Hollwether (R. - Kentucky) mentioned that the advocacy group, "Evangelical Family", had proposed and begun successfully rolling out a video game rating scheme of their own, and advocated for its adoption country-wide.

The WholeCross rubric doesn't use numerical dimensions, but instead a wide variety of disqualifying factors - a pass-fail: either a game passes its tests, or it doesn't.

These factors include but are not limited to:

• Taking The Lord's Name in Vain

• Satan Worship

• Anti-Family Messaging

• Hostility Towards Faith

Their definitions for these categories are very broad, as it seems that any supernatural or even "fantasy" elements that aren't explicitly Christian-coded fall quickly under the aegis of "Satan Worship". Gay characters or any too-liberal themes drop games into the "Anti-Family Messaging" bucket. Sesame Seed Junction was denied certification for its "troubling depiction of a fantasy monster who lives in a garbage can" although I can't help but suspect that the WholeCross censors were fishing for an excuse to clamp down on Sesame Seed Junction's depiction of a multi-cultural neighborhood.

A brief peek at the Evangelical Family informational booklet shows that the list of games that manage to achieve WholeCross certification is vanishingly small, and includes such barn-burners as "Job's Quest" and "Inquisition of Josiah".

While I believe that it is safe to dismiss WholeCross as a kind of sanctified gaming for home-schooled children who aren't allowed unsupervised access to caffeinated sodas or mixed fabric trousers, I find it troubling that it was brought up at all.

I hope I don't need to say how catastrophic I think that it would be if WholeCross were widely adopted by the industry at large, even if just from within the United States. One upside, however - the USA essentially opting its own software out of the world's cultural output could present compelling opportunities for Canadian, European, and Asian video game companies to build their own cachet.

LAYERS

Abandoning the often subjective realm of censorship boards and narrowly-banded age ratings, experimental psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley have been working on their "Little Albert Youth Experimental Rigor Scale", or "LAYERS".

The "Little Albert" experiment was a famous psychological exercise where a young boy was conditioned to fear animals through operant conditioning. While ethical concerns were raised over this experiment, it turned out to be something of a moot point as the boy died shortly afterwards from unrelated hydrocephalus.

Using the highly scientific proposed LAYERS system, researchers would expose a room full of children aged 3 through 14 to playthrough recordings of the video games in question, and then monitor them for 2 weeks to see which and how many of the children show signs of emotional distress. While game "ratings" could be expressed as a simple percentage of distressed children, thorough notes could be provided within the game box detailing the exact nature of the childhood trauma.

While this appeals due to its scientific rigor, industry representatives asked to comment on it have complained that it would be an inappropriate choice due to the expense involved in locating a sufficient supply of pre-hydrocephalic children.

A Humble Proposal

One thing that bothers me about the schemes we've been looking at is how insufficiently detailed they are at truly expressing the breadth and depth of myriad violences that can be visited upon a person.

Let us construct a brief taxonomy of violence:

• Violence of Body (Physical)

• Violence of Concept (Emotional)

• Violence of Soul (Modernist)

• Violence of Gender (Patriarchal)

• Violence of Capital (Oligarchic)

• Violence of Organization (Bureaucratic/Systemic)

• Violence of Meaning (Nihilistic)

We'll expand the meaning of these in the following sections, but that also introduces the idea of "second-order" violences that exist in the overlap between these categories, which...¹

Conclusion

Ultimately, I believe that attempts to "box in" human creativity with an easy-to-parse "family friendly" label are doomed to fail - people will demand much more critical nuance in their evaluation of media's themes than a "T for Teen" will be able to provide. I hope that my in-depth analysis of the problems at hand will serve as something of a guidepost for a floundering video games industry.

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COUNTERPOINT

Violence in gaming? Reading that might have done violence to your attention span. I'm glad you're still with us! Let's hear from everyone!

Brett Doug: What everybody seems to be missing is that violence in games is awesome. Has anybody testified that in front of congress yet? I'll volunteer if nobody else will.

William Henderson III: The number one selling video game category of all time is and will always be bloodless, in-depth strategic war simulations. If a teenage boy were to inadvertently calculate fuel usage for a battalion of Panzer V's, they might walk away from it having learned some math but they're not likely to be influenced to shoot up a school. Unless they come across a playground battalion of Panzer V's.

Mike Czech: Unlike Trent, I'm very confident that the brilliant minds at the RSAC and ESRB will get us out of the grasping clutches of Big Government. I don't want Uncle Sam telling me what games I can or can't play when I could have a non-profit regulatory board funded by the industry it's purporting to regulate get there first. That's how we got brilliant stuff like the Hays code!

Riesling Brandt: The real mistake is turning this over to humans. It would be trivial for a company to launch a simple heuristic pattern could produce a digital score that would be exactly as accurate as these rating boards, at a fraction of the cost. Expect to see that on sale in a few months at the most.

Polly Mereyes: I think I've found an inconsistency with Trent's scheme. I think a game that allows sectarian violence against domesticated animals would trigger a loop that ends up giving the game an infinite score in all of the different dimensions of the Contrall-Hendley-Mencken Violence Toroid.

Haymann Nieschott: Once again, Trent has managed to do what he does best. Hopefully some day I will determine what, exactly, that is.