Martin Banks, Personal Computer World 11/87 - checked

November 1987

You will probably realise that this is not an easy thing for me to admit, but I am very much like everyone else in the world. I eat, drink, hate working and have, at the very least, dual standards.

Even my dual standards are boringly similar to everyone else's'. I know that when I want to do something it is OK, but that when someone else wants to do something that sounds reasonably similar, I will often pronounce that it isn't similar at all, is positively harmful and should not be allowed. Everyone, especially everyone who has ever been a parent, will be guilty of such dual standards at least once in their lives.

That is why I have decided to jump in, bite the bullet, run something up the flag pole and see who salutes it. I am going to have a go at something that I feel is bad, even though it is closely related to something else which I feel is reasonably perfectly OK. I won't even leave you to guess which of the two relates to me.

The overall subject can be covered by two words: graphics, and games. Now, I am not the world's greatest fan of computer games, except for one particular sub-species, the flight simulation programs. Whether it comes from growing up in an aircraft-industry family (like coal miners claim to have mining in their blood) or reading too many Biggles books as a child, but I love having a go on them. It is one of the great sadnesses of my life that there are so few simulators available for the MS-DOS environment.

Couple good graphics to a good flight simulator and the effect can be terrific, to the point where, if the computer is big enough, a new reality can be created that is good enough to train real pilots.

Yet so many computer games now available have, for me at least, an overpowering tendency towards violence. I use the word overpowering specifically, for some recent news from the USA is now tending to support a pet theory of mine that was put forward in these pages several years ago. This theory states that young, impressionable minds can be trained by violent computer games into thinking that that is the way the world works.

I seem to remember the last time I voiced this opinion, which also touched on the appallingly sexist nature of many of the games as well, it got treated with a mixture of boredom and mild contempt. Fair enough, I thought, let time see who's right.

Well, I think I might be (which makes a change compared to most of my predictions). I was listening to the radio some time ago with, I have to admit, only half my brain in gear. I therefore missed some specific details of the news report in question. However, the basic details were unquestioned: psychologists in the USA were pin-pointing direct relationships between violent computer games, and in particular adventure games with a high graphics content, and an increase in both murders and suicides committed by young men. (Young women, for a variety of sensible and stereotypical reasons, rarely play computer games).

Adventure games, it would appear, have this strange effect on the young mind, the close interaction between the game and the player distorting their conceptions of what is, and isn't, reality. To get whatever prize sits at the end of the particular game's `rainbow', the player invariably has to perform a variety of anti-social acts. these include entering other people's houses, stealing, carrying offensive weapons with intent and, of course, using those weapons to kill off opponents that stand in the player's way.

Yes, yes, I know its only a game, and I know many people as ancient as myself who enjoy them as a genuine intellectual challenge. Such ancients do not however, have young impressionable minds, and the evidence would seem to be growing that such minds do take the games as the role-model for their approach to life: `If you want it, steal and fight for it. If someone dies then it is all in the game'.

Adventure games are also brutal with failures. Make a mistake and you can find yourself terminated in a single line message. ( you also can get asked if you want another game). Such a request does not come to the growing number of young men in the US who, on considering themselves a failure of suitable dimensions, apply the `game solution' to themselves. Suicides connected to computer games are said to be on the increase.

The unavoidable problem is, the games ARE educational. In another radio report I heard, a Dr Patricia Greenfield of the University of California at Los Angeles, pointed out their educational qualities. She suggested that they were particularly good for training people to infer a three-dimensional reality from a two-dimensional, screen-based image. This, she suggested, would be good for training people to work in the screen-based environments of the future, where operators of all types of equipment, from micro-surgery systems to mega-war machines, will be separated from the reality of their actions.

And once they are trained in this capability, the screen could become their only reality, and the screens themselves are vulnerable, open to (and here comes an emotive word) manipulation. Think about it for a second. The way in which Hi Res graphics are going means you can't tell the difference between a computer-generated picture and a TV shot. Couple that hardware capability to the graphics manipulation software now coming available, applications which let the skillful add, subtract and modify an image in any way they like, and it suddenly becomes possible to foresee a positively Orwellian prospect.

Most people already get most of their information from the 2D TV screen. If they can't tell the difference between camera shots and computer-generated images, then the information they receive will open to manipulation, at the mercy of those controlling the generation process. And yes, I am afraid that people are gullible enough to swallow it. There are armies of people who think Coronation Street is real.

To get the people really in the swing of things, why not use the educational properties of adventure games, coupled to the best in graphics manipulation, to train everyone into getting used to seeing things in a certain `way'. That way, we won't know what is reality, and probably won't care until its too late.

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