Video Game Violence is Not Violence

In the 1960s, as Bandura conducted his media effects research, the British folklorists lona and Peter Opie spent years observing and studying children's outdoor play. They watched children play games—many of them made up—with names like Underground Tig and Witches in the Gluepots and concluded, "A true game is one that frees the spirit. It allows no cares but those fictitious ones engendered by the game itself." When children commit to the games, they opt out of the ordinary world and "the boundary of their existence becomes the two pavements this side of a pillar-box, their only reality the excitement of avoiding the chaser's touch.'"It may seem a stretch, but we should apply the same understanding to the first-person shooter games that teenagers enjoy. "In games a child can exert himself without having to explain himself," the Opies wrote, "he can be a good player without having to think whether he is a popular person, he can find himself being a useful partner to someone of whom he is ordinarily afraid.'"*^

To be perfectly clear, what looks from the outside like killing is not. In a way, said Brian Sutton-Smith, the renowned play theorist, it's the opposite. The kind of fighting kids do when they're playing—either in a physical game or a video game—is always just a simulation, with "inhibited" outcomes not meant to hurt one's real-life opponent. "This may be a display of fighting," he wrote. those who are not enemies and who do not intend to harm each other, and always accompanied by the special faces and signals that different species use to convey that their intent is only to play. Play-fighting as an analogy to real fighting seems more like displaying the meaning of fighting than rehearsing for real combat. It is more about meaning than about mauling.