Lies, Damned Lies and Letters to the LRB

Until last week I had never written a letter to a publication of any kind. What made me break my duck was an article in the London Review of Books by Andrew O'Hagan entitled Living It, ostensibly reviewing Crossfire by Andy McNab and Strike Back by Chris Ryan. In fact, much of the "review" was taken up by a monumentally ill-informed and badly-researched assault on videogaming, of the kind you'd expect to see gracing The Daily Mail or being aired on Fox.






To give you a flavour, here are a couple of excerpts (LRB subscribers can find the full article here)

Five hundred million games of Halo 2 were played online, and $170 million worth of Halo 3 was sold in the first 24 hours after its release. The ‘Covenant’? The ‘Great Journey’? The ‘faithful’? The ‘Flood’? The ‘Prophets’? This sort of thing is de rigueur, adding an evangelical thrill to the marriage of technology and annihilation that the console generation loves.

and

Boys will be boys, and men will be boys too, but it’s arguable that both the skill and the ideology of the modern Western soldier have been, shall we say, sharpened by years of frenetic and dedicated service in the box bedroom. Halo is basically the story of a super-soldier who is fighting a theocratic nightmare called the Covenant, with the person at the video console, if he is skilful enough, framed as the ‘first person shooter’.

These quotes show a level of ignorance of the matter at hand normally only tolerated in the English judiciary. I was so annoyed by the whole "videogames train killers" tone of the piece, especially coming from an organ which has provided me with such genuine entertainment and stimulation over the years, that I was moved to write the following letter ...

It is perhaps appropriate that an article dealing with tales of warfare and violence should be directed against soft targets but Andrew O’Hagan’s decision to use his review of the latest books by Andy McNab and Chris Ryan to launch an assault on video games and those who play them was – like the most recent war – opportunistic and ill-informed.

Mr O’Hagan begins his attack with a series of skirmishes with what the article seems to suggest are some of the most popular video games of recent months: Halo 3, Assassin’s Creed and Eternal Forces. The first two titles will be instantly recognisable to almost anyone who plays video games. The last, summarised (I presume accurately) as “a game set in new York in which the Antichrist attempts to achieve world hegemony” will not. A brief trawl of the most popular gaming websites finds scarcely a mention of Eternal Forces. Those who do mention the game hardly do so with favour, as can be seen from the following extract from www.worthplaying.com,

“Avoid this title like the plague. Not only are you sparing yourself the discomfort of ham-fisted preaching and shoddy game mechanics, you’ll also be doing your part to ensure that this obscene mess of eschatological flotsam and apocryphal jetsam never sees a sequel”

Furthermore a check on www.metacritic.com, which aggregates review scores from across the best-known gaming magazines and websites, reveals that the game has received and average mark of 38 out of 100. This hardly bears out Mr O’Hagan’s claim that this is a game which, “has proved popular with a generation trained – one way or another – in the mental rigours of holy war”. As to Halo 3 and Assassin’s Creed, it would be hard for a fair-minded critic to deny that both have at least some artistic merit: Assassin’s Creed in particular provides genuinely fascinating evocations/recreations of Jerusalem, Acre and Damascus at the time of the Crusades and in its dealings with the questions of Knights Templar and hidden artefacts is at least superior to The Da Vinci Code (though this is, admittedly, not an especially proud boast).

Mr O’Hagan then goes on to cite research at the University of Missouri-Columbia which he suggests shows a clear link between videogaming and a tendency towards aggressive behaviour and a “lowered P300 response”, P300 being, “a way of measuring the emotional impact of what players see”. He does not mention the penultimate paragraph of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology article in which that research was published, which states,

“One important limitation of the current findings deserves mention. Although our hypotheses (and indeed, our findings) suggest a potential mediational role for P300 amplitude in the link between video game violence exposure and aggressive behavior, specific tests for mediation did not support this idea. Thus, although these three variables are clearly significantly associated, the brain response to violent images did not account for the effect of violence exposure on aggression in this study. It will be important in future research to identify potential mediators of this effect.”

Nor is Mr O’Hagan apparently aware of the paper by Christopher J Ferguson Evidence for Publication Bias in video-game violence effects literature: a meta-analytic review, whose analysis reveals that,

“... publication bias does exist for experimental studies of aggressive behavior, as well as for non-experimental studies of aggressive behavior and aggressive thoughts. Research in other areas, including prosocial behavior and experimental studies of aggressive thoughts were less susceptible to publication bias. Moderator effects results also suggested that studies employing less standardized and reliable measures of aggression tended to produce larger effect sizes..”

Nor does he cite any of the many pieces of research suggesting positive effects for videogame users in terms of education, hand-eye co-ordination and even (in this age of multiplayer gaming) socialisation.

Mr O’Hagan then goes on to cite the now notorious case of 14-year-old Leicester boy, Stefan Pakeerah, who was murdered by his 17-year-old friend Warren Leblanc. Stefan’s MP Keith Vaz, much more so than his parents, has loudly and repeatedly linked Stefan’s tragic death to the game Manhunt. This despite the fact that, as confirmed by the Leicestershire Constabulary, the (18 certificate) game was found in Stefan’s home, not that of his killer and that, in the words of the police’s spokesman “Leicestershire Constabulary stands by its response that police investigations did not uncover any connections to the video game, the motive for the incident was robbery”.

Finally, Mr O’Hagan seems to suggest that it is videogaming that produces the kind of brutish and unthinking uniformed killing machines portrayed in books such as McNab’s and Ryan’s, archetypes whom Mr O’Hagan seems further to suggest we can readily find on the field of battle in Afghanistan and Iraq. I am unaware as to whether Mr O’Hagan has in fact spoken to many soldiers or been out to Iraq or Afghanistan to witness the fighting there. I have not done either and am thus not in a position to comment on this last point. In relation to the suggestion that it is videogaming which has led to the alleged desensitised attitudes of the modern British or American soldier (and dare I say that I suspect Mr O’Hagan would also like a suggestion of enormities such as Abu Ghraib and Fallujah to suffuse his readers’ thoughts?), I can say with some confidence that it seems to have very little support on close examination of the current evidence.

Though it may have served to spice up an article on two books, neither of which is of any particular merit, nor – I suspect – of any particular interest to readers of the LRB beyond the type exhibited by Georgian visitors to Bedlam, Mr O’Hagan’s assault on videogaming was, I regret to say, as tendentious and unreliable as the “dodgy dossier” that helped propel British troops (and McNab and Ryan’s heroes) towards Iraq.

Lastly, I should point out that I am not, nor have I ever been, a representative of the videogame industry. I am, however, a 38-year-old who has played videogames since the advent of Pong in the 1970s. Anecdotal though my evidence may be I am happy to say that I do not find that I am filled with violent urges after playing a game like Halo 3 or Assassin’s Creed, in fact such urges are far more likely to occur when the person in front of me in the concert hall chooses to unwrap their sweets in the middle of the Prokofiev.

This is what the LRB chose to publish

Andrew O’Hagan begins his attack on video games with a series of skirmishes with what he suggests are some of the most popular games of recent months: Halo 3, Assassin’s Creed and Eternal Forces (LRB, 24 January). The first two titles will be instantly recognisable to almost anyone who plays video games. The last, which he describes as ‘a game set in New York in which the Antichrist attempts to achieve world hegemony’, will not. A check on metacritic.com, which aggregates review scores from across the best-known gaming magazines and websites, reveals that Eternal Forces has received an average mark of 38 out of 100. This hardly bears out O’Hagan’s claim that the game ‘has proved popular with a generation trained – one way or another – in the mental rigours of holy war’. As for Halo 3 and Assassin’s Creed, it would be hard for a fair-minded critic to deny that both have at least some artistic merit: Assassin’s Creed in particular provides fascinating evocations of Jerusalem, Acre and Damascus at the time of the Crusades and its treatment of the Knights Templar and hidden artefacts is superior to The Da Vinci Code’s at least – though that might not be saying much.

Of course, I fully appreciate that the LRB would not be able to post my letter in full but to edit it in such a way as to ignore the main thrust of my argument (that this was an ill-researched, anti-gaming scare story) seems like a breach of trust between reader and magazine. This may be rather Pooterish of me but I hope you'll see why I'm sorely tempted to cancel my subscription.