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On a Lady Throwing Snow-Balls at her Lover

WHEN, wanton fair, the snowy orb you throw,
I feel a fire before unknown in snow.
E'en coldest snow I find has pow'r to warm
My breast, when flung by Julia's lovely arm.
T'elude love's pow'rful arts I strive in vain,
If ice and snow can latent fires contain.
These frolics leave: the force of beauty prove,
With equal passion cool my ardent love.

Christopher Smart



When (Conj)
Wanton (Adj)
Fair (Adj)
The (Def Article)
Snowy (Adj)
Orb (Noun)
You (Pronoun)
Throw (Verb)

For countless many years, there has been a highly publicized and highly controversial debate on the rights and effect of virtualized gaming. The two primary fronts which butt heads are the liberal front, based primarily in gamers themselves, which claim gaming as an art form and a free-access escape from mundane life, and the conservative front made primarily of lawyers and religious factions, who claim that gaming is both self-abusive and morally degrading. This debate has been strengthened by real cases for both sides, and has touched everywhere from classrooms to court rooms in its devastating history. For the case of my report we will look at all games as the average sum of their content. It does not matter genre or specific content from title to title, this report will take them as a whole and deal with the issue as such stated. The questions raised within are : “Does this media qualify for the first amendment?” And “What is the true effect of gaming on social habits?”

Firstly, I would like to make the case that there is an age gap between the average of both groups. The more convective group is made primarily of men and women over the age of thirty five, born in middle class, and raised to an world of productivity and unionized truth. The opposing group is made almost solely of men and women below he age of thirty-five, born and living to a varied array of modern American family and culture, who play virtualized games on at least an occasional basis. By examining the people feeding the argument, I believe we can become better acquainted with the issue and more fully understand the gap.

In the American system, ranging for at least sixty years or more, children have been raised in a manner which feeds a particular ideal set. It is an assumed agreement that we understand this. Children are raised to believe certain things and to do certain others for their interest and the interest of the nation. The easiest way to have done this, and a way still used often, is to introduce the items of an adult world into the play space of a child, whether they be a baby doll or a toy vacuum. This trend was very strong, teaching boys to built forts and girls to play housewife, all the way into the rising seventies. Until then, boys were to be GI Joe and girls were to be Barbie. These people, now facing their thirties and forties, were unconsciously raised to see their toys as training and find the reality in all toys.

After the late seventies, America began a true reform of children’s interaction. This change included a wider embrace for children’s fantasy and entirely fictional shows featuring no tie to our realm of being. This trend remained low and dormant as it slowly rose, leading our nation in a new direction and teaching new rules for the world. This slowly rising remain steady in the years which followed, and never truly exploded until the introduction of the arcade cabinets in local stores; The first of which contained gun fights and kidnapping. These things were shunned by some, but loved by many others, and so the nation remained quiet as these large metal cubes birth a generation of home-based consoles.

It is there which we must stop. Virtual gaming was born, it prospered with the children who played it, and no great sin was born. Shortly after the release of gun-fighting Galaga, and Jumpman’s kidnapped lover, came the Atari and with it the first sexually based game. Custer’s Revenge, an X title released on the Atari2600, was never met with success due to a low-rate control system and lack of playability, but was likewise never linked to any outrage or social disturbance; Nor where any virtual games through 1999 linked or associated with the results of any violent or anti-social act within this nation. May it be said that in 1971 there was an isolated case of controversy over a game name ‘Death Race’, which was under controversy for violence by a select few but was rapidly forgotten without link to any real world action.

In the late nineties, gaming had seen a large push in the First Person Shooter genre of games. Games like Doom, Wolfenstein, and many others had found great success in the computer and home console sales. Nothing was said against them, nor were any concerns raised until parents were taken in surprise and outrage of the violence of the world around them.

It was April 20 in 1999, at an average school in Colorado. Two students, irate at their unacceptance in the student populace and the unresponsive staff to such unfair treatment, retrieve firearms of varied caliber and undertook a planned killing announced weeks before. Countless children were killed in Columbine High School, and the two crazed gunmen later died without explanation or confession. This event was locked in history as both the fourth most deadly school shooting in US history, and as the first time a killing was legal placed as being motivated by virtual gaming.

Despite neither killer having mentioned being provoked by or aided by gaming, and a previously admitted reason for such actions; The incident at Columbine is the single largest example of virtual games being dangerous or immoral. This single instance, committed for an aforementioned vendetta and with no mention or tie to any form of gaming, is used to argue that children are programmed and depersonalized by the action of playing games such as Doom.

Many other games quickly rose, as killers across the nation began naming game titles in court as motive. One man shot seven people from the seat of his vehicle and proceeded to court to claim the PC game, ‘Doom’, had trained his hand for killing despite his lacking both a computer and a copy of this or any PC game. Several others were given insanity pleas or hefty lawsuits against entertainment companies on this coat-tail excuse for their nonexistent motives.

It was in late October of 2001, when this controversy began again over the third installment of the Grand Theft Auto gaming franchise. The game sold amazingly well to the young populace of America, and was hailed as one of the most successful and best games of its time. As this title rose to fame, still obscure for several months, the world and its hatred rolled on without care. Only after its great peak of success did individuals ban together and cry off their crimes in its name. I need not given examples, but be welcomed to enjoy such tales on the internet or local news. They still exist six years later.

Although religious members and older citizens of our fine nation will often claim that any game with fighting or swearing in its content is an immoral statement from and for psychotic madmen or demons, I would like to propose no defense or opposition on such basis. Instead I would like to reveal their ideals’ origins and leave that to be its own evidence.

As mentioned before, the rend for children’s entertainment has been changing over the years. These conservative groups who oppose games of violent or negative connotation are made mostly of those born in over before the mid-seventies; A time when toys were vacuums and brooms for little girls and GI Joe or armymen for boys. These were real world examples of life and living. These toys were where they get their ideas of what a toy or game is. These people see the virtual gaming as much the same. Thus, the violence is see to them as trained violence and is, in their eyes, a subconscious command to follow those examples. They see virtual games as they saw their babydolls and plastic tools, and thus as a dangerous threat. This is how such people deny the right of creativity on the basis of these games being harmful to others.

It is very much the opposite effect for the opposing group, supporters of a game’s freedom who are offended by those they see as constricting a media’s right to be as it is. These are primarily young people born into a world where toys and games are an escape from their life and world. This world values, now more than ever, freedom and the actions of evasive reality and escapism as health actions when used appropriately. It is on this argument, often left unspoken due to assumed knowledge, that gamers will defend their games. They are not training for any real event, violent or otherwise, nor are they examples of who hey should think or live. These virtual games are simply escapes from the real world and are thusly entitled, by the groups’ eyes, as being protected by out First Amendment.

I see this debate as the ignorant assumptions of two groups who refuse to act civilly and agree upon either case. There are no registered cases of violence for any game predating Doom, nor are their any large controversies or recalls before on any case. It was only after a single instance was declared on the fault of this media, without any confession or allusion to support such from the well-spoken killers, that we began to see the rise in controversy and linked cases. Violent games outdate their effect by twenty years. Can this really be so? For twenty years nothing happened, and now it is just taking effect?

I am not now, nor will I ever be, in a situation where I can conclude without any doubt or error, that games of any content or message are unreliable to real world actions by normal, fully functional, people; But I will firmly say that, by all logic, there is no link to any case, now or previous, which shows gaming as anything but mistaken media. These games are not made to simulate reality, as toys were preciously, and there is not a person, of sound mind and moral, in the modern age who will take anything from them anything but entertainment. And there is where we stop. Are those who harbor insanity right to blame the game that triggered it? Can the trigger really be the sole cause? It is like trying to sue the gun instead of the killer.

Based on modern mindset of active gamers, this media form holds no more logical responsibility or fault than any other media form. A simple escapist folly will not built a cold killer, and no sane individual will claim such, so I ask why a media form seen by its consumer as pure fiction, no matter how its persecutors may interpret it, can be held as factual training