"We need violence and we need tragedy," he says.
"I'm sorry to inform people of this, but that's how we got here. We beat the crap out of everybody else all up the evolutionary tree. That's why we have dominion over this planet now. You don't wring that out of your DNA in just a couple of generations because people are uncomfortable with where things came from. We are some ethnocentric, murderous motherfuckers."
... MIT professor Henry Jenkins, who runs the university's Comparative Media Studies Program. He points out that older studies warned that television violence was especially nefarious because kids had such a passive relationship to it. By simply watching people killed without having some sort of way to react and influence what they saw, children were supposedly susceptible. "Now we're being told that because these games are participatory, they're dangerous," he says, sounding dubious
Testifying to Congress, Jenkins explained: "Some teens are drawn toward the angst-ridden lyrics of industrial music; others are happily jitterbugging to neo-swing. Selling popular culture to our kids isn't quite the same thing as selling cigarettes to our kids. When it comes to popular culture, we all 'roll our own.' We cobble together a personal mythology of symbols, images, and stories...and we invest in those symbols and stories meanings that are personal to us."
Jenkins thinks what's really behind any movement to curb video game violence is adult anxiety about new technologies that kids adapt to more quickly. He warned Congress that it was only feeding hysteria about video games that was baseless. "The Internet is no more to blame for the Columbine shootings than the telephone is to blame for the Lindbergh kidnapping," he testified.
"If video games are causing these shootings, why haven't any of these things happened in arcades or theaters? Why always in the schools? Might it have something to do with the social environment at the schools?" Jenkins asks. "And as we look at more and more of these shootings, it's hard to link them all to video games. There's the day trader case in Georgia for example. I didn't hear people saying that the Wall Street Journal has a lot to answer for in that case."
