Who Kills and Who Do You Blame?
By Kimberley Grams
Why you may ask would I choose to comment on the irresponsibility of society instead of games, game designers and producers, mass marketers and the multimedia industry as a whole for their involvement in sometimes inapropriate material? Because I believe that you cannot blame technology for anything. Whether the impact is for better or worse, the only thing that can matter is how the technology is used. Morally, I don't have any objections to blowing a character or a ficticious place up, to destroying all the "big bad guys." But that doesn't mean everyone can cope with different forms of stimulation and suggestion in healthy and productive ways.
So, do I also have a problem with the technology that allows such easy access to things better not seen by the faint-of-heart and/ or children? No, I don't. I do have a problem with the so-called responsible adults who allow this type of information to flow unfiltered and undetected into the minds of our children. Yes, there are 25-year-old people who are not mature enough and responsible enough to view and use these things also - they however, are another topic altogether.
Guns have been around for thousands of years; gun powder, as a destructive device, even longer. But who is at fault when a man is shot and killed? The manufacturer? (Well, if we were in the U.S. maybe.) The seller? No, the person put on trial and subsequently punished for the act is the person who pulled the trigger while the gun was facing someone else. True, a 15-year-old boy may play hundreds of hours of a game where the primary goal is to destroy, shoot, maim and kill, but the only force at fault for his actions outside that world is the society which fails to properly explain how his angst and hostility should be channeled.
I can say or even do anything - although those actions may hold consequences for me, I am ultimately responsible if I commit an offense. I should not have - and rarely does society - fall back upon the placing of blame to someone else. We are rife with the necessity to fault others. To be a thief at 30 was because your mother didn't love you at three. To kill a man is because you had a bad date in high school.
The inability of society to act and be responsible for their own actions can not and should not determine what those of us who are responsible should see and be able to do. Do not fault me for the stupidity of another, if I don't want to be at an internet site involving jello and naked women, I won‚t go there. True, by entering a search parameter on the "history of Jello" I would not want nor expect to see such things. But as an educated adult I have learned that this is to be expected and therefore, can understand that this may occur and will not travel to those sites.
I suppose that there are certain things which are inappropriate, but these things are either simply against the law - which is beyond the parameters which I have defined for this article - or they are impossible. New technologies have allowed for more realistic and creative expressions of violence and fantasy. It is no more a controlling factor than the coyote beating up on roadrunner for all those years two decades ago. Many adults would argue that those images had no lasting negative affects on them. Of course - maybe Jeffrey Daumer has a different take on the situation. Quite simply, there is no room in this society for yet another shift of blame to occur. If you are a good person with good morals and a good environment, you should have no problems regardless of what you see or play.
Simple isn't it?
