Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The Video Games Cause Violence Argument
Aired: 2015-01-17
Duration: 04:41


=== Violence Against Women in Games (03:49) ===

[00:00:04]  Tonight on Nightline, The Virtue Vigilante is a Christian conservative lawyer on a crusade against video games he says are evil.
[00:00:14]  Violent depictions of women being beaten, raped, and run over by cars.
[00:00:18]  It's not the movies, it's video games.
[00:00:21]  And now the women calling for change in this multi-billion dollar virtual industry are facing a very real backlash.
[00:00:28]  And for one man in Florida, it was another sign that American culture is going straight to hell.
[00:00:33]  Here you're literally stomping somebody into the pavement, and you can stomp them until there's a pool of blood in the street of the person you just killed.
[00:00:42]  Critics say in these virtual worlds, things often take a turn toward the dark side.
[00:00:47]  As a player, you can solicit a prostitute, kill her, and if that's not enough, you have the option to run her over.
[00:00:54]  The sense of violence against women being used as almost background decoration, right?
[00:00:59]  As texture to make an environment gritty, more real.
[00:01:04]  The conservative Christian attorney says he is on a mission to protect children from evil.
[00:01:09]  What is it exactly that's so disturbing in some video games that's making women like Anita willing to face death threats?
[00:01:16]  Just when you think you hit the worst example or the most misogynist example, you find another one.
[00:01:20]  When it comes to the company behind some of the most mature titles, he is hardly coy.
[00:01:25]  I'm out to shut down Rockstar because they're run by a bunch of sociopaths and they're a one-company crime wave.
[00:01:34]  On her website, Anita dissects these games.
[00:01:38]  Developers regularly utilize the brutalization of women's bodies, and especially the bodies of female prostitutes.
[00:01:44]  Her goal to bring attention to what she calls the inherent misogyny in the gaming world.
[00:01:49]  To him, this is not entertainment.
[00:01:52]  It is a murder simulator.
[00:01:54]  You're kicking, punching, ultimately shooting, cutting the heads off of people with machetes of people you don't even know and don't have a motive to be violent against.
[00:02:03]  I'll teach you!
[00:02:04]  In Watch Dogs, she points out how women are murdered to give the hero a reason to chase down a bad guy.
[00:02:11]  You are learning in a virtual reality to be violent, to enjoy being violent, how to kill.
[00:02:16]  And so you're given an appetite as well as scenarios in which to be violent.
[00:02:20]  It gets worse and worse.
[00:02:22]  Reinforces this idea of women as sexual objects, right?
[00:02:25]  It reinforces this idea of women as playthings for their amusement.
[00:02:31]  I guess you could say I've rattled some cages and they've rattled me.
[00:02:35]  They've come after me.
[00:02:37]  They've repeatedly tried to end my legal career.
[00:02:43]  Some people have intentionally incited people to kill me, try to threaten to kill me.
[00:02:47]  I'm constantly aware of the fact that there's an enormous amount of hate directed towards me.
[00:02:53]  Hate in the form of bomb threats, rape threats, even death threats.
[00:02:58]  Why such hate?
[00:02:59]  Why such anger?
[00:03:00]  I think a lot of it comes from this idea that gaming is a male-dominated space, right?
[00:03:06]  And that games are for men, by men.
[00:03:08]  But it's a very misogynist backlash.
[00:03:10]  We are not meant to be treated with respect.
[00:03:12]  Somebody call Jack Thompson.
[00:03:15]  And it makes him an object of scorn in the gaming world.
[00:03:18]  I'm on the case.
[00:03:20]  And it's this kind of talk that makes her a target.
[00:03:24]  And that's when the cyber mob, right, the hate mob descended, bombarding her with mostly anonymous tweets and messages.
[00:03:30]  Kids who wear I hate Jack Thompson t-shirts can trade blows with his likeness in the game Mortal Kombat.
[00:03:37]  Someone even created a grotesque game where players can beat and punch a picture of her face.

=== Games and Reality (01:01) ===

[00:03:43]  In a world of make-believe battles, Jack Thompson considers himself a real-life warrior.
[00:03:48]  How do you respond to critics who say, well, this is fantasy.
[00:03:51]  This is not reality.
[00:03:52]  You have to lighten up.
[00:03:54]  Yeah, that's a fun argument.
[00:03:56]  How then do you account for the statistics that as the popularity of video games have gone up, violent crime has gone down?
[00:04:03]  It's not true.
[00:04:04]  According to the FBI, kids, you know, teenagers arrested for violent crimes fell by half between 94 and 2000.
[00:04:12]  Games have a huge impact on our society, so it's not just fantasy.
[00:04:17]  It actually works to potentially reinforce some pretty harmful messages about women.
[00:04:22]  Game industry lobbyists are quick to point out a total of nine federal courts have rejected so-called studies that video games cause aggression.
[00:04:30]  They express confidence in the current rating system, as did the parent company of Rockstar Games.
[00:04:36]  People who blame arts and entertainment for society's ills are always on the wrong side of history, they wrote.