Opinion: dignified silence is the only proper response to mainstream ignorance

This afternoon, Kotaku published a news story about a boy in New York called Damori Miles who fell to his death last Tuesday imitating a wrestler from the game SmackDown vs Raw. Kotaku’s headline is ‘Wrestling Video Game Blamed for Child’s Parachuting Death’.

The story, in other words, is not that the boy died, and nor should it be, since the relationship between his death and video games is irrelevant. Instead, the story is that video games are being unfairly associated with Damori Miles’s death.

Kotaku cites, among others, the New York Daily News: “9-year-old Damori Miles dies in jump off Brooklyn apartment, may have been imitating video game”.

At the time of writing Kotaku is the only blog in my Google Reader list to have reported the story, but others are likely to join in. Stories like this always travel well, since the blogosphere detests the mainstream media’s fatuous association of video games with real world violence and misadventure.

Gun massacres are the most prominent points of collision. The shootings at Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, and Gutenberg School in Germany all brought video games into the frame. Shooting virtual people, goes the argument, makes young men want to shoot real people.

It goes further than that, though. The death of Brandon Crisp, who ran away from home after arguing with his parents about Call of Duty 4, was also blamed on video games. In essence, if somebody either does something bad or has something bad happen to them and they like video games, video games are assumed to be the cause.

The video game media protests, but it makes no difference. The flow of information only goes one way. We listen to the mainstream, but the mainstream doesn't listen to us, and we’ve got very little means of addressing the unfair criticisms that are constantly colouring the world’s perception of our hobby and livelihood.

It’s infuriating, isn’t it? So infuriating that when a means of redress appears, however tenuous, we leap on it, as MCV did recently when it rallied the industry against the Government’s Change4Life campaign, which had the audacity to depict a boy holding a DualShock controller as an example of inactivity.

MCV’s complaint was hysterical, of course, and the ASA duly dismissed it. But the frustration that compelled MCV to make the complaint and convinced so many other members of the industry to support it is perfectly understandable.

So what do we do about it? When tragic deaths like those that befell Brandon Crisp and Damori Miles occur and the mainstream media, astonishingly, places the blame at the feet of the video game industry, how should we respond?

It’s simple. We shouldn't. And there are two reasons why we shouldn’t.

Firstly, it’s just not our subject matter. It may be wrong for the media to inculpate video games, but at least it has the remit to cover the stories. We, on the other hand, are video game journalists. If our argument is that the deaths of Brandon Crisp, Damori Miles, and the students at Gutenberg School are irrelevant to video games, then it follows that we shouldn’t be drawing traffic from them.

This isn’t to suggest that the various journalists who do write such stories do so distastefully. I’ve rarely read a story by a video game journalist on this subject that wasn’t measured, sympathetic, and intelligent. The question is simply one of whether the stories should be written at all.

In covering them, we run the risk of obscenity. "It's a tragic story," writes Kotaku blogger Mike Fahey about Damori Miles, "made even more upsetting by the amount of focus the video game angle is being given by the mainstream media."

I disagree. While it may be annoying that the New York Daily News mentioned video games, that doesn't make the tragedy of Damori Miles's death 'more upsetting.' It doesn't even touch it, and the two ideas don't belong in the same sentence.

"The roof should have been locked," Fahey goes on. "Neighbors said that an alarm should have gone off, but it had not. The boy's mother had left him alone to go to the store. A 9-year-old who had received special education instruction, left alone to his own devices."

All good points, but is it really appropriate to highlight parental failings solely to make a point about mainstream coverage of video games?

I suspect that question will divide opinion.

Secondly, the kind of ignorance and prejudice that we’re writing about simply doesn’t deserve our attention. The evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins refuses to formally debate with creationists because, he says, to do so is to treat them as equals, giving them more credibility than they deserve.

We should apply the same principle to those who believe that a video game can be the cause of death and suffering. When such people start prattling, we should shake our heads and turn away.

What we shouldn’t do is start prattling back.