Relaxation and Release with Violent Video Games

I don't have any particular love for games like Grand Theft Auto - they're just not my type, and truth be told, I do find some of the violence more than a little distasteful. But as a game designer by education and trade, I feel compelled to defend GTA and similar games. I feel the violence is over the top in GTA, but that is between the game designers and the game players. What gets me is media and quotations like this one from the blog Feministing:

So, many young men are going to have their first (or already have, as this is not new content for GTA) sexual experiences via GTA and then they are going to kill the women they are sleeping with

I respect the author's right to believe this, but I had the same response every time I read it: "uh, what?" There are plenty of ways I could state my disagreement: there has always been media with content not suitable for young people; what people see does is necessarily indicative of what they will do; the violence is not intended for the young genre; a video game being the deciding factor in a young man killing his lover seems frankly absurd. However, what really made me pause about the above quotation is that it seems inherently patronizing to assume that the author has the ability to morally evaluate a game she has never played, while in the same breath asserting that the players of the game do not have the ability to learn to distinguish between right and wrong.

I played ice hockey from the time I was a 4 yeas old until I graduated high school, and one of my favorite parts of the game was, quite frankly, the violence. I'd lace up and step on the ice and turn all my anger against the other team - but off the ice I'm a very non-violent person. There have been days where I've needed to hit a pillow until I couldn't hit it any more, in order to burn off some anger. Is my "virtual violence" also abhorrent, when I imagined it was the face of someone who had angered me to the extreme? In any case, the point I am getting at is one briefly touched on by the Feminist Gamers blog:

Another interesting statistic (and one that has a pretty narrow gap) is the “gaming to release anger” statistic, half of boys and a third of girls report playing violent videogames as a means of anger management. What really blows me away about this is that the report takes a very different tack from others of its ilk, suggesting that playing violent videogames as a means of anger release is not necessarily unhealthy:

Olson recommended that parents gauge their child’s emotions after playing a game. If playing the video game appears to wind up the child or incite anger, that could be a sign of a problem, she said.

However, for most healthy children with a good family relationships, the study suggests violent video games will not cause problems, Olson said. The concern arises when a child has other risk factors, such as an aggressive personality or having witnessed real-life violence.

(Here's a link to an article about the study)

All I'm saying is that I have difficulty swallowing all the ethical preaching of violent video game critics. Some people need a release... and some people probably should not be encouraged by violent video games. It seems the argument that is ultimately being made is that it is better to have an overzealous censorship policy in order to prevent the possibility of violence. Of course, I agree that we should protect children from overly violent influence - but that is not the job of the game manufacturers, and we should not lay blame at their feet, nor at the feet of those people who do happen to enjoy the game. All that is accomplished by such accusations is the alienation of that vast majority of the game's audience who can switch the game off and go on with a peaceful and morally upright life. If it is a solution to the "violence in video games" problem which we want, we must look elsewhere than criticizing the games for their very existence.