Are videogames breeding killers?

“Most importantly, have fun.” This is a quote from Gus Van Sant's film, Elephant (out this week). Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes and a stately, artful response to the Columbine high-school massacre. The line in question is spoken by the boy who masterminds then co-perpetrates the film's climactic murder spree.

A terrible sense of the fate awaiting the kids is present pretty much from the get-go, and the killers are revealed fairly early on. Van Sant does this both with his looping narrative and the fact that they’re shown playing Beethoven on the piano (not an activity the media associates with violent crime) as well as a first-person shooter videogame (very much an activity the media has targeted) while buying guns online.

Now, as a gamer and someone who thinks it unlikely that he'll ever pick up a gun and kill, an immediate reaction to Van Sant making this association is nominal outrage. Van Sant makes a point of providing a checklist of negative social factors that could be accused of affecting kids: Nazi activity on TV, guns available on the internet for anyone with a credit card, violent videogames. It's so blunt that it's possible that, within Van Sant's graceful film, there's a strong irony. He's asking, can kids really be turned into killers merely by being exposed to unmediated violent elements in culture and/or bullied (jocks shoot spitballs at one of killers-to-be)? This is exactly what the media said about the Columbine killers who were notoriously outsiders with “dangerous” tastes (Marilyn Manson, Doom).

Interestingly, Van Sant – unlike many commentators – did actually play some games to get a sense of their culture. They didn't simply inform him about the violence debate, though. “The way information is dealt with in Tomb Raider influenced the way I started thinking about motion pictures," he says. Indeed, the film’s many gliding shots are reminiscent of movement within game environments, and even the shooting ratio (1:33, not the wider 1:85) is comparable with a monitor/TV screen.

Other nods to gaming are less subtle. The FPS the killers play is a rudimentary looking affair made specifically for the film. Consisting of figures walking in a desert-like space, it's arguably more referential to Van Sant's previous film, Gerry, than to a genuine videogame. Later, the game's format of gun at the base of the screen, Doom-style, is emulated in a first-person shot in a school corridor. Van Sant says, however, that his experience of playing Doom “didn’t influence the way I was thinking about cinema”. He acknowledges it's “very vicious… A very addictive game,” but doesn't seem keen to explicitly concur with the simplistic connection the knee-jerk media are intent on.

The big questions are: can games involving extreme, ostensibly realistic violence genuinely influence people's actions? Can cultural items affect people's mental functions? Can they cause the morals and ethics society relies on to be by-passed? Can playing a killer make you a killer? I’ll look at these questions in more detail next week. Daniel Etherington 30 January 04

useful link: elephant official site