NCTV Takes Stand
On Video Game Violence
By Howard Mandel
| The
debate over video games' effects intensified recently as they were attacked by several
medical authorities for their "violent scenarios" and "graphically
aggressive themes." Surgeon General C. Everett Koop charged that video games
produce "aberrations in childhood behavior" and that the object of most arcade
classics is to "eliminate, kill, destroy." Only days before, the National
Coalition on Television Violence (NCTV), a Washington-based watchdog group that has
monitored TV shoot-'em-ups, movies and Saturday morning cartoons, announced it was
launching a new campaign against video game violence. NCTV has asked the Federal Trade Commission to ban video game advertisements, claiming they are deceptive. And Dr. Thomas Radecki, the NCTV chairperson, told VIDEO GAMES in an interview that "concerned public interest groups and psychologists should be allowed to go on the air and caution people as to their harmful effects." Radecki, a psychiatrist at Southern Illinois University, charges that "video games teach a violent reaction in a crisis situation.: In Berzerk, he wrote in an NCTV press release, "You're a stick figure with a handgun; the object is to kill as many other stick figures as possible, before they kill you. This type of role-playing practice is certain to have long-term harmful effects on the player; it teaches violent reactions. These games are training the next generation of Americans to be even more violent than our current generation, already the most violent in American history." |
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