CNews reports the sad story of a woman killing her three sons. The headline: Mom shoots son playing video games. The headline would naturally have you believe that the woman shot either her one son, or all of her sons, while they played videogames.

In fact, it isn’t that simple. She murdered all three sons separately — drugging them, shooting one while he slept on the couch, shooting another when he sat down to play a videogame, and shooting the third when he went to use the computer. But the headline ignores the death of two sons in favor of linking murder and videogames.

Over the past week, most news articles in my feed having anything to do with videogames have focussed on the supposed causal relationship between videogames and real-life violence. While there are more “it wasn’t the videogames” editorials than there were previously (because it’s been made obvious that Cho wasn’t a gamer), there are still plenty of assertions that videogames are nothing more than educational tools to turn perfect little angels into rampaging killbots. Yet each study that is released shows that videogames have no greater influence on behavior that any other entertainment medium. But within two hours of the Virginia Tech massacre, Jack Thompson was on Fox News beating his usual drum against videogames, and no one had the courage to call bullshit on his complete lack of evidence in the matter until he ‘coincidentally’ happened to be wrong.

Why do news outlets continue to hammer home even the most tenuous link between videogames and real-life violence? CNews went pretty out of its way to tie this murder to videogames, even though the murderer doesn’t have a history of consuming videogames, and only one of her three victims was involved in playing videogames.

Videogames are (at the latest number I was able to scare up), a $15 billion-dollar-a-year industry. That’s money that people could be spending on other things: things that newspapers advertise for; even newspapers themselves. When you consider all of the media options people have when trying to figure out how to spend their (disposable) dollar: buying a newspaper, buying a CD, going to or renting or buying a movie, or buying a videogame (not to mention paying your internet bill), the growth of the videogame industry has to have the other mediums very worried. Now, with the growing market for advertising in videogames, the sweetest plum of the traditional media markets is in danger of being cut into by the gaming medium as well.

Internet media has faced a similar onslaught from traditional outlets. Television shows, prime-time news, and movies have fixated upon the idea that the internet is teeming with pedophiles, losers, and people whose grip on reality can be measured in Star Trek quotations. Since all the perverts live on the internet; that leaves videogames to the dominion of the psychopaths and the gangbangers. Similarly, so long as television and movies have videogames to point to as being horribly violent, and the internet to point to as being full of kinky sex, they can shirk accountability for their own saturation of sex and violence, and the impact it may have on behavior. Videogames provide a useful distraction to the public who tutt-tutt over Grand Theft Auto but never miss an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit or CSI: Miami. Your friendly hometown newspaper (owned by a news conglomerate, no doubt), will be sure to remind you daily of the dangers of straying from the tried-and-true classics of media consumption.

Addendum: Australian IT reports on Video games invading TV’s domain.

Mighty Ponygirl posted this entry on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 5:55 pm and filed it under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.