Just for Once, Please Argue with What I Actually Said
How extraordinary. Lots of people who enjoy playing nasty computer games didn’t like my attack on ‘Grand Theft Auto V’ .Well, it makes a change from being attacked by police officers, who claim I know nothing about the police and then, when it turns out that I do, flatly refuse to accept indisputable historical facts from my research
(Mr Vernau is wrong, by the way. Producing the figures, which show beyond doubt that an alleged ‘manpower shortage’ is not the reason for declining foot patrols – because manpower has gone *up*, both absolutely and per capita, and police responsibilities and legal duties have been *diminished*, and because the police now have about 40,000 back-up staff which they never had in the days of foot patrol – does not in any way influence most of the police officers who loathe my ideas. That is because it is my ideas they loathe. They simply do not really want to go back on foot patrol, though of course they claim that they favour it. But rather than admit that, they abuse me instead).
Now, back to GTA.
Here come the usual criticisms. ‘You haven’t played it’. No, I haven’t. I never said I had. I relied on the accounts of it written by those who had
Here’s one by James Delingpole in the Daily Mail
Here’s one by Keith Stuart in The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/16/gta-5-review-grand-theft-auto-v
and his response to Mr Delingpole
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/18/gta-5-grand-theft-auto-daily-mail
Even Mr Stuart, in a largely complimentary account, couldn’t resist saying ‘Women are, once again, relegated to supporting roles as unfaithful wives, hookers and weirdos. The one successful female character in the story is suspected of just wanting to screw her boss.’
And ‘Blasting your way out of impossible face-offs with private armies, streaking through the city streets in a new car – some will hate the sheer amorality, the relentless seething darkness of the narrative. [Spoiler] Many too will be horrified by an interactive torture scene that pushes the player to perform acts of cruelty on a defenceless victim [spoiler ends]. But GTA is all about complicity and culpability – what is the player prepared to do in this world? How much are they responsible for?’
But then this is lost in a great cloud of guff about ‘seductive force’ , satire, wit, ‘extraordinary detail’ . ‘beautiful modernist architecture’.
I’m prepared to take these two gentlemen’s word for the fact that the player is invited to become a torturer, and also to treat women as dirt, as well as committing a large number of crimes of varying severity. Forgive me if I decline to try it for myself. I really don’t think the ‘you haven’t played it’ complaint has any validity. I wasn’t reviewing it. I was writing about its moral character, which is beyond dispute.
Then there’s
'No study has ever shown a connection between computer games and violence'
...or its variant
'Studies have shown no connection between computer games and violence’.
But actually, I made no such crude claim (though one contributor suggests, from his own direct experience, that the mentally disturbed are indeed made violent by playing such games) . Those who attack me for not playing the game might at least have read my article. Or maybe English is not their first language, or reasoned thought not their strong suit.
Here’s what I wrote : ‘Oh, quite – lots of people do this and don’t go out and murder their school-fellows or workmates.’
In this passage I quite specifically state that I don’t make a direct connection between games and violence.
Next :’I strongly suspect that the wretched Alexis (who was plainly unhinged in other ways, with voices in his head) was yet another victim of supposedly harmless and ‘soft’ cannabis, now virtually legal in much of the USA. And plenty of British 14-year-olds are playing that game, too – often with the connivance of their parents.’
In this passage I make it equally plain that even the Navy Yard killer, stated by many media to be a player of violent computer games, was *also* plainly mentally disturbed. I suggested that it was very likely that his disturbance was the result of cannabis, a drug which has now been effectively legalised in much of the USA as well as in Britain, which is misleadingly described by its supporters as ‘soft’, and which is heavily correlated, especially in young users, with irreversible mental illness. I further point out that many parents who allow their children to play violent computer games also allow them to smoke cannabis at home.
I then say (which is a logical conclusion from the foregoing) :’…what you put into someone’s mind makes a difference to the way he behaves.’
And then I say :
‘For every one who goes on a rampage shooting, there are thousands whose school work goes off the rails, thousands who treat girls like toys, thousands who consider callousness, dishonesty and bad manners as normal.’
In this passage, I *specifically* say that playing such games does not necessarily lead to violent behaviour . I say that many who never do violence are, even so, morally corrupted by playing such games. And that is what I think. If anyone's got the cash for a big research grant to look into *that* proposition, I'll design the questions and the methodology.
And I go on to explain why I personally feel so strongly about this, as a result of powerfully memorable personal experiences at key moments in my life.
I do not think more than one in 20 of my critics has responded to what I actually said. Yet again, they have responded to what they would have liked me to have said, because if I had said it, they could easily dismiss it.
I understand why they do this. It is never pleasant to be told that one of your chief pleasures is corrupting your morals. But can’t they do better than this?
It wasn’t by the way, seeing the Somali children starving to death which desensitised me. It was seeing so many TV pictures of African children dying in famines, that meant that when I eventually saw this face to face, I was far less grieved than I ought to have been. Familiarity had weakened my power to grieve or be angry, and so made me morally deficient. I don’t think there’s any answer to that. I’ve had the experience. I know. If you haven’t, you can’t really tell me I’m wrong.
It would be polite to acknowledge it. I can’t see much point in my having had the experience, honestly, if , when I describe it, people who have never sat in the same stinking tent as a dying child in the midst of a man-made famine tell me that they know more of life than I do, and that what I’ve actually seen and felt counts for nothing.
I believe that my gift, of some small skill at words, was given to me so that I could communicate such things. The child was doomed before I ever saw him, by terrible events which torture Somalia and its people to this very day (and which have much to do with ignorant and cynical outside intervention in that country). I could not save him, or offer any comfort to his family.
And yet I found to my utter dismay and surprise that I had no tears for the child, and thought I should at least wonder why. And during the remainder of the time I spent in that awful place, I found the answer, which seems to me to be a great reproach to our habit of watching tragedy, violence, destruction and other evils, in sparkling high-definition colour in the comfort, safety and plenty of our homes. Doubtless one of the spiteful twisters who comment here will accuse me of turning the tragedy of a dying child into my own personal sorrow. It will be a lie. I don’t seek or want anyone’s sympathy for the experience. The sufferers were the child and his family.
I just want to use my experience, which few British people will have (and which I hope few will ever have) to teach my readers something they would not otherwise know, and which might make their lives better than they are, by telling them a truth they hadn’t previously known, which might help them in their own conduct, and perhaps in deciding what sort of society they wish to live in, or how their own children might be brought up.
Yet all I get is shouts of abuse. And meanwhile, in all those bedrooms, all those poor lost souls grow crueller and harder, without even knowing it. The refusal to consider that there is any danger is the dangerous thing. Societies which do not believe in hell pretty quickly find hell springing up all around them.