Illinois Rep. To Expand The Term “Violent Games” & Ban Them

Ahh, here we go again, and there haven’t even been school classes for someone to shoot up the place this time. The general rule of thumb for this nonsense is every few months, at least twice a year, and here we are in February following a study published in December on games and behavior in teens. I’ve been doing this for what is coming up on three-years, and it seems every time I am here playing the same old hippy Green Tambourine: There is lacking evidence to back up the claim that video games are the cause of hyper-violence. In fact, a majority of large scale aggressors (mass shooters) are very anti-games themselves.

However, every time someone like myself mentions this, it falls on deaf ears such as those of Marcus Evans Jr. The Chicago born Democrat and real estate appraiser has filed HB3531, a proposed bill in the Illinois House of Representatives that wants to ban the sale of video games depicting “psychological harm,” and “motor vehicle theft with a driver or passenger present.” So, Representative Evans, you want to ban all video games then? Yes, well that’s the problem with this, it is taking one thing and going a mile out of proportion just to curb an actual crime that’s unrelated.

This bill comes about following calls from Operation Safe Pump founder Early Walker contacting Evans back in January, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Operation Safe Pump is an organization set up to impede the number of carjackings in the Chicago area, proposed to set up private security guards at gas stations throughout the city that are hit hard with these crimes. Specifically on the South Side, a predominately Black neighborhood. Walker himself set up another organization, I’m telling Don’t Shoot, as a form to curb violence notes of speaking with a number of victims of these gas station-based crimes. The thing is, I can’t deny that South Side has been mostly ignored, and that the best way for these crimes to stop, is for people like Walker to step up.

Walker said, “I feel like this game has become a huge issue in this spectrum,” though the Sun-Times seems to keep it vague which Walker is referring to, it could be Grand Theft Auto. Going on he says, “When you compare the two, you see harsh similarities as it relates to these carjackings.” This would, of course, bring up the cliched line: That’s like comparing apples to oranges. That’s something you can do if you’re comparing them to see which one is more acidic. However, I just don’t get the point that is being made here over, say, any other piece of entertainment. Chicago, the land of organized crime comes in only second to the New York-New Jersey area as a breeding ground for all the gangster flicks. Yet, we’re not proposing to curb the movie and TV industry, I see.

HB3531 also proposes to change the definition of “violent video game,” possibly to make it sound more appealing to gain bipartisan support. The bill’s phrasing suggests it is one for which the player “control[s] a character within the video game that is encouraged to perpetuate human-on-human violence in which the player kills or otherwise causes serious physical or psychological harm to another human or an animal.” Do you see where this comes to all games? Even things like Animal Crossing would fall under this definition if you run into someone and make them say “ouch.”

I’m sorry to tell you lads, the evidence just doesn’t stack up. In many other countries, much like the discussion I had on gun violence and games through time, these other countries have both cars and games. However, there is just no evidence to say car theft (or grand theft auto as it’s called legally) increases because of games. I don’t think there is evidence of South Side having a higher frequency of people playing games than anywhere else on a median average either. The area has been a hotbed of the city and state seemingly ignoring problems. A majority of residents to the area happen to be Black. Yet it simply feels strange to blame entertainment for the city and state’s failures.

It is said, time and time again, you provide people things to do in the community and they will see it as something of their own. COVID has, of course, put stop to after-school clubs and group activities. Though as COVID has, video games and at-home entertainment such as games have put an end to these types of community-led projects for young people (I should know). With young people at home on their phones, and I’m including those all the way up to 25 as young, the local government isn’t putting in the effort needed to make those clubs viable. Thus those that do need it don’t get it. As a result we have a higher crime rate as teens are out at local parks drinking, getting into trouble and possibly doing things just as carjacking.

I’m by no means trying to blame one solitary cause for the symptoms that places like South Side are seeing, as HB3531 seems to be or the former President did. However, Sydnee Goodman said in IGN’s Daily Fix the other day, along with many others, the claims that video games are the root cause are simply not based on facts. Goodman also noted a quote from Patrick Markey, Ph.D. and author of Moral Combat: Why The War on Violent Video Games is Wrong, when he was on a “free-speech podcast” called So To Speak. Markey said in the research that of people after playing games and feeling more hostile, “The rub is, obviously if you just saw a sad movie and I asked you were asked after you saw the sad movie, ‘do you feel sad?’ You’d probably say, ‘yeah, I feel sad.'”

Markey continued, “But that doesn’t mean it causes clinical depression.” We’ve seen these stupid arguments that something in entertainment that’s relatively new is the cause of the world’s ills. Elvis was the cause of sexual feelings in teens, not that they were horny teens. Metal music was the cause of violence in angry young men, not that they were angry and full of built-up emotions they didn’t know how to express. Of course, video games are the newest thing to blame for violence and sexual misconduct, but never films and TV such as Game of Thrones with all its murder and sex crimes.

Anyway, come back around here in three-months time when uncle Keiran will be moaning about the next time someone blames games. We can have this all over again, and maybe then I won’t be angry about people trying to curb things like GTA or Animal Crossing. Instead, we might be talking about the literal atrocity that Six Days in Fallujah uses as a backdrop. This case won’t(/shouldn’t) fly, as the Supreme Court ruled games are part of free speech; halting California’s proposed regulation of sales.