Obama to parents: Turn off TV, put away video games

Note in passing: President Obama made one of the strongest, most widely heard appeals ever for media literacy in his speech before the joint session of Congress on Tuesday.

Here's what he said:

….education policies will open the doors of opportunity for our children. But it is up to us to ensure they walk through them. In the end, there is no program or policy that can substitute for a parent -- for a mother or father who will attend those parent/teacher conferences, or help with homework, or turn off the TV, put away the video games, read to their child. (Applause.) I speak to you not just as a President, but as a father, when I say that responsibility for our children's education must begin at home. That is not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue. That's an American issue.

A "Baffling" tragedy?

Once again law enforcement officials are baffled about why a young man would randomly kill with “no apparent motive.”

This time the toll was two teenage girls killed and seven other people wounded. Three remain in the hospital. One was in critical condition Monday.

The shooter, 24-year-old Erik Ayala, died today from his self-inflicted gun wound.

Baffling?

Everything points to a depressed, out-of-work young man who, for hours on end, escaped to the fantasy world of shooter video games.

Here’s how Ayala’s roommate, Mike Delisle, described Ayala: “He wasn’t big on talking about what was bothering him.” He was “down lately,” and “stuck to playing video games,” said Delisle.

The Oregonian reported today that among the “numerous” video games was “Grand Theft Auto,” the infamous hyper-violent, shooter game.

CAUTION: I’m about to enter into speculation that invites your comment.

The one thing I am not is “baffled.”

Armed with a fully loaded Italian-made pistol and an unstable mind, Ayala took his practiced gamer fantasy out into the very real streets of Portland with very real tragic results.

The gun and its bullets were suddenly real. The dead and wounded weren’t some animator’s depictions.

One mortally wounded victim was Martha Paz De Noboa, cut down at age 17. “Tika,” as her friends called her, was a Peruvian exchange student. According to The Oregonian, she “loved to dance and had never frolicked in snow until last month’s big storm,”

The other murder victim was Ashley Wilks, murdered in her 16th year. She was described as “the consummate best friend.”

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I teach at a community college and so I know a lot of good kids and upstanding, bright young adults who play violent video games. Many play for hours on end, yes addictively. I know this because I have them keep media logs of how they spend their time. They very often are surprised by how much time they spend with "screens."

They would never kill a soul.

But they too are often isolated. They too lose touch with others. For many who are still social, their contacts frequently are circumscribed by a shared virtual world. Human interaction is dependent on a shared game.

They lose touch with reality. They lose touch even with themselves, with the value of their lives to themselves and to us.

Of course, the current economic economic vortex also devalues them in the work place.

It’s a textbook situation for depression.

Then add a 9 mm pistol, so easy to score in our gun-obsessed society, and you have the makings of what happened in Portland on Saturday night.

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For an insightful psychological analysis the pathology of the “ScreenWorld,” I recommend this article in the current issue of the “Psychotherapy Networker.”

Baffling murders?

The headline on the on-line version of the New York Times story reads “Mother baffled in Arizona Murders.”

The story recounts how an 8-year-old boy confessed to shooting and killing his father and another man.

I’m going to highlight a few of sections from the story. They don’t give the necessary details to end the bafflement, but they certainly point to at least one obvious line of inquiry.

First, note the boy’s age — 8.

A substance abuse counselor at the local health clinic in the remote community of St. Johns, Arizona, tells the Times reporter, “A lot of people around here say there’s nothing to do.” Boredom leads to drug abuse, she says.

Then there's the description of the boy by his mother, Erin Bloomfield, who had divorced his father, Vincent Romero, six years ago but talked to her son every week and visited every month.

Ms. Bloomfield called her son a “normal boy” who "played video games nonstop and doted on his new dog, a boxer." But in recent months, she said, he “seemed to be changing.”

That’s an interesting definition of “normal,” playing video games "nonstop." Of course 8-year-olds and all children have this habit of "changing." The question is, who, or what, is influencing those changes.

According the Times account, authorities said there was no evidence that the boy had been abused, but his mother worried he might be. The boy had told her that his father and his step-mother had quarreled often.

Recently, Ms. Bloomfield had learned that her ex-husband bought the boy a .22 rifle for hunting. To quote from the story, hunting is “a common pastime of young boys and their fathers in this town of about 4,000 people.”

It’s worth reading the Times’ story. The case is still unfolding. The investigation continues. The mother doubts her son even committed the murders. There were no witnesses; the boy confessed in a police interview.

Here’s what caught my eye: the boy’s impressionable age, his “non-stop” video gaming (question: What games? First-person shooters?) giving him a .22 rifle (not locked in a gun locker?), the possibility of child abuse or an environment of abuse, which could also include drug and alcohol abuse.

Baffling murders?

We’ll see….

Video games: "M" for "mentally stable"

It’s connect-the-dots time at The Oregonian again.

Dot A: A sentence from a story on the front of Thursday's Metro page. The story carries this headline: “Inside the mind of a school shooter —Warning signs/ An FBI expert offers police and educators insights into preventing a school tragedy.”

The expert is Terri Royster, a supervising special agent with the FBI Behavioral Science Unit based n Quantico, Va. Royster says that parents should be the first ones to notice unusual and potentially dangerous behavior in their children.

Here is Dot A: “She encourages nosiness, especially if the child spends excessive time playing violent video games or reading violent books.”

Note her concern is with time spent with violent video games and books and not with the violence per se.

(Question: Is the Bible a “violent book”? Ever notice strange behavior from people who read the bible “excessively”?)

On to Dot B, in the next day’s Oregonian.

This one is a review by one Doug Elfman of the “gruesome” video game, “Manhunt 2." Elfman reports that the game is so violent that it was banned in Britain.

Then he writes, “Britain banned a fun game,”

In an editorial note at the end of this glowing review, we learn that Elfman is an “award-winning columnist” who writes regularly for the Chicago Sun-Times, apparently, as you will see, in a moral vacuum.

In any case, Elfman goes on to describe the “fun” you or your teenager (who must be “mature,” but who’s checking?) can have role-playing “Danny.”

“’Manhunt 2’ starts with Danny’s sneaking behind an evil henchman and slipping a suffocating plastic bag over his head. Danny’s vision blurs red. ‘I killed him,’ Danny says. ‘I feel sick.’ Then he pukes.”

Fun, huh?

Here’s another sample: “The ever-escalating panoply of weaponry at your fingertips begins with a syringe and plastic bag; it advances to knives, meat hooks, baseball bats, crowbars, bricks, a pistol and a gun whose bullets set men on fire. Sometimes, you chop off heads with a fireman’s ax, then carry the head around on your belt loop.”

What a kick. The fun just never stops.

As noted this game is rated “M” which means you have to be “mature” to watch it. So who decides what mature is? Go here for the Entertainment Software Rating Board's (ESRB) mushy definition. (With Agent Royster’s caution in mind, better that “M” stand for “mentally stable,” but I digress.)

If “Manhunt 2” is intended for “mature” players, we seem to be teetering on the edge of an oxymoron.

Biased but needed definition: A “mature” person is anyone with the emotional maturity to reject role playing the obscene violence found in “fun” video games like “Manhunt 2.”

In other words, if you play this game and find it “fun,” you are immature and can’t play it. Which, come to think of it, is probably why Britain banned it.

I don’t know what the editors at the Oregonian think of all this except they choose to print it. They lay the Royster story and the Elfman (love the name, by the way) opinion out on journalistic platters and leave it to us to pick and choose.

The chance is remote that we will read both and connect the two.

Here’s a sodden idea: Put Special Agent Royster in the same room with “fun”-loving critic Elfman, and see where the conversation goes.

Here’s my greatest fear:

Royster: “Well, Doug, as I say, I don’t have any problem with the violence in the game. Sounds like a lot of fun to me. But parents and friends should be careful that the players, ‘mature’ though they be, don’t play excessively and start behaving strangely. Watch out for severed heads on belt loops, ha, ha. Also associates might be advised to keep syringes, plastic bags, rifles, pistols, baseball bats, bricks and meat hooks locked up, just to be on the safe side. You never know where a little ‘maturity’ might lead.”

Time in "Cyberia"

At one point over the holidays, three of our family/guests—adults one and all—were sprawled out around our living room, each staring into some kind of screen—two laptops (we have wireless access in the house) and a Play Station.

One checked e-mail, another visited MySpace "friends," another was on a quest for a sniper gun in some cyber warehouse.

An eerie glow bathed their faces; no one spoke; no one cared or particularly noticed that they were together.

And yes, I confess that in the pre-dawn hours, I too put in "screen time." After feeding the cat, I "feed" The Red Electric, just as I am as I write these words.

One of our number was a true TV junkie. As we prepared dinner, he sat in the TV room and channel surfed. Alas, he kept running out of channels. We have a mere 32 on our "basic service" but he is accustomed to clicking through 246 or some astonishing number. We could tell when he surfed beyond our cable's limit. It was a kind of video wipe-out. The unfettered static from the frenzied, foamy screen would simultaneously roar and hiss and squawk at him.

He would grumble and fuss in disbelief before righting himself and surfing back to some working channel.

Media in upheaval are throwing us into upheaval.

A couple nights ago the Lehrer News Hour had a segment on the demise of print journalism. "The experts" have taken to calling newspapers a "legacy medium."

The term reeks of doom.

A legacy is something valuable you leave to posterity after you die. I happen to have started a newspaper in this community. I'd be kidding my self to think of it as one day being my legacy. At best it will survive in musty, bound volumes hidden away, unread, on some archival shelf.

McLuhan would say that new media are literally changing who we are. Kids, especially boys, are much more dexterous with their thumbs than their forefingers because portable video consoles are operated with thumbs. Blackberries, the electronic kind, require the same thumbs.

The language is changing too—words unheard a year ago are now in common usage. Math, of course, is something you do on a calculator, if you do it at all. Multiplication tables anyone? And what is a dictionary or a phonebook or an encyclopedia in a Google world?

I teach at Portland Community College and in my first “Information Gathering” and “Writing for the Media” classes next week, I will ask the questions, "What does it mean to be informed?" and "Given your answer, how does one become informed?"

The answers should serve as markers.

A more relevant question might be “Who is your avatar?” Avatars are those video role-playing creatures created to represent (be?) each of us in the cyber world. Fat people can have thin avatars, dull people can have clever avatars, those who have failed can be successful, etc.

This is the stuff of science fiction. Dreams come true in a dream world. Which world (or persona) is more real, the "real" one (with real friends and real family and real love in a real living room on a real holiday) or the hyper animated, time gobbling "cyber" one tucked behind the glow of the computer screen where we can shape and edit ourselves and gather “friends” on MySpace?

We know that time spent in cyberia is spurting ahead, pushing aside other activities. At some point we will spend more time the cyber world than we do the real one. We will care more about what happens in "cyberia" than we do in "reality."

Many people now have stronger attachments to media-concocted creatures—actors or celebrities or, god forbid, politicians—than they do to friends and relatives. With precious few exceptions, the feelings are based entirely on carefully orchestrated imagery. When people say, "I just really love Katie Couric (or Brian Williams or Tom Hanks or George Bush or John Kerry)," I still ask, “Really? How well do you known them?”

Often they just shrug and say, “Well, you know what I mean.”

I’m not sure I do.