The following is an open letter aimed at the MP’s who are signatories to Early Day Motion 2427 – Call of Duty 3, tabled by Keith Vaz. It is particularly aimed at Mr Vaz and Martin Caton (MP for Gower) as I live within his constituency.
Dear sirs,
Can I humbly request why the Right Honourable Gentlemen and Ladies of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland feel they have the right to legislate upon what entertainment law abiding adults engage in during their leisure hours?
In this country, we enjoy freedom. Freedom of expression, freedom of the person and surely freedom to enjoy video games?
The Right Honourable Gentleman Mr Vaz raises three concerns to the sale of the video game within the UK, which we will deal with in turn.
I should now perhaps note that while I am a fan of video games and have played previous entries into the Call of Duty series, I have not played the latest title so have no first hand experience of it.
1. “players engage in gratuitous acts of violence against members of the public”
Can we please assume that law abiding adults are aware of the difference between fiction and reality? The video games in question are rated 18 and are marketed at and sold exclusively to adults. If the game is purchased by a parent on behalf of a child, then that is not the responsibility of the game producers any more than it would be if a child was given a DVD of The Exorcist for their birthday or given a working chainsaw for play time.
Law abiding adults are aware that the actions and violence in the game are fiction, and hence will not go out and commit gratuitous acts of violence upon members of the public. Non law abiding adults may go out and commit these acts, but would have done so anyway, so a video game cannot be blamed.
To do so, would be tantamount to restricting the sale of cars, crowbars, and cutlery for similar “preventative” measures.
2. “harrowing scenes in which a London Underground train is bombed by terrorists, bearing a remarkable resemblance to the tragic events of 7 July 2005″
As Mr Tom Watson MP has noted in his amendment to the motion: “the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) gave the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 an 18 classification, noting that `the game neither draws upon nor resembles real terrorist attacks on the underground'”
Do we now ban all media that may possibly remind people of terrorist outrages in London? In which case I request the Right Honourable Gentlemen request the BBFC ban the following:
Spooks
The Taking of Pelham 123
24
Speed
Four Lions
Body of Lies
Die Hard with a Vengeance
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but is a starting point for films or TV series’s we need to review and ban as they contain images of bombings or attempted bombings of trains and buses and may elude to the 2005 London bombings.
3. “increasing evidence of a link between perpetrators of violent crime and violent video games users”
Would the Honourable Gentlemen care to cite the evidence of this link? Several pieces of research have found no or no significant link between violent behaviour and violence in video games in ADULTS (summaries of which can be found on Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_controversy#Crime_and_violence), but even those that find a link stress that correlation does not demonstrate causality. There is no way to determine which way the link goes – do violent video games make people violent or are violent people attracted more to violent video games?
Is this an argument to ban? No more than it is to ban violent sports such as boxing or wrestling or violent films such as those by acclaimed directors such as Coppola, Scorsese or Tarrantino. We are consenting adults and can make the choice ourselves of what material we view. If we then go on to break the law it is a personal choice and not caused by a video game or film.
Such an argument would not seem complete without an anecdotal remark to conclude. I have spent my life playing video games. I spent afternoons as a child playing Street Fighter. I spent my teenage years firing phasers and laser guns at aliens, and I have spent my adult years shooting pixelated people and (currently) stabbing enemies in the streets of medieval Constantinople (In the brilliant Assassins Creed Revelations). Never in my life have I beaten someone up, shot someone or stabbed another living soul. This is because I am a law abiding adult who enjoys video games (and often violent ones) and knows that fiction can be seperated from reality.
So gentlemen, I implore you: This is not China and we are not idiots. We know right from wrong and fiction from reality. And for those of us who don’t, restricting the sale of video games to adults will not alter their likelihood to commit a crime one bit.
Thank you for your time,
Jon Rees