A Letter to The New York Times

Friday, 30 April 1999

I sent the following letter by email to The New York Times after reading today's editorial "The Gaming of Violence." It's probably too long to see print, but maybe they'll print part of it.

Dear Sirs,

The editorial "The Gaming of Violence" (30 April 1999), about the psychological effects of playing first-person shooter video games like Doom and Quake, makes a number of claims which I think are highly questionable.

You say that "After a few hours of Doom, a child isn't virtually more skillful at pointing and shooting, he is actually more skillful." I've spent many hours playing these games, and I'd be very surprised if it were to be proven that the skills involved in hitting keys on a keyboard carried over to any significant extent into the real world of running, dodging, aiming, and firing. Many of the skills necessary to succeed at the highest levels of the games are very specific to the quirks of the game software. The experienced Doom player knows all sorts of things about the behavior of levitating, fireball-launching cacodemons and the operation of the BFG-9000 superweapon that have no real-world equivalents, and might actually be detrimental to the success of someone in real-world combat.

You also claim that players of Doom and Quake are prevented from personifying or humanizing their game adversaries. When I played these games, it was over an office local-area network (I work for a computer game company, so this was research), with my opponents in the same or nearby rooms, and there was a constant stream of chatter between the players. It was common for a player who had just been killed in the game to shout a congratulatory "Nice shot!" at the player who had killed him. The games also let players type messages to each other as they play. The many players who form teams and compete over the Internet can communicate with each other much the same way my officemates did.

You praise the sort of fantasy play that involves "dramatiz[ing] and bring[ing] to life the world around them," even describing it as an "important step toward understanding the psychological reality of other human beings." I can't think of any kind of play that matches that description better than the playing of role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, and it wasn't all that long ago that such games were characterized in much the same tones used today for Doom and Quake. This reminds me of the way each generation demonizes the following generation's popular music. I suspect that in twenty years, we'll consider first-person shooter games a safe, even wholesome pastime, and be wringing our hands over some new development in gaming.