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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 23, 2004)
Newsroom: (541) 346-5511 Suite 300, Erb Memorial Union P.O. Box 3159, Eugene, OR 97403 E-mail: editor@dailyemerald.com Online: www.dailyemerald.com Friday, January 23,2004 -Oregon Daily Emerald COMMENTARY Editor in Chief: Brad Schmidt Managing Editor: Jan Tobias Montry Editorial Editor: Travis Willse LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Measure 30’s surcharge is progressive, fair Be dear when you mark your ballot on Measure 30. A yes vote will provide temporary funding to sustain pro grams and services essential to our state's future prosperi ty. Approval of Measure 30 will ensure that the state's 2003-05 budget, passed by a bipartisan majority of the Oregon House and Senate, will protect education, public safety and social services from devastating cuts. Since the state has the primary responsibility for fund ing public schools, the League of Women Voters believes that the state must provide sufficient funds to give each child an equal, adequate education. Business leaders across the state have indicated that the recruitment of new companies and the jobs they bring are being adversely af fected by the condition of our schools and the uncertain ty of school funding. The league supports Measure 30's temporary income tax surcharge because it is progressive (those who earn less, pay less), compatible with federal law and is fair. Measure 30 is responsible because it avoids borrowing that mortgages Oregon's future prosperity. Oregonians have been misled by statements that additional cuts and additional borrowing at premium interest rates are bet ter than temporary tax increases. Data from the failure of Measure 28 in January 2003 clearly indicates a crisis in the court system, human suffering from lack of hous ing and medications, shortened school years and crowd ed classrooms. League members urge you to carefully weigh the bene fits of Measure 30 as compared to the negative results of its failure. Vote yes on Ballot Measure 30. Janet Calvert president League of Women Voters of Lane County Spending on sports center shoots through the roof I guess the University of Wisconsin's new (1998) Kohl Center must be made of cheese. How else could this mul ti-purpose, $76.4 million facility — which seats 17,142 for basketball, 14,000 for hockey and between 15,000 and 17,000 for concerts, and includes 2,200-square-foot state-of-the-art locker areas and the Nicholas-Johnson (practice) Pavilion and Plaza, located in the heart of cam pus — have been built? The University wants to be ranked with the "big boys" and I think Madison is well within those desirable ranks. So, I ask, why does our arena have to cost the sky and the moon? At the current projected cost of $ 180 million, the price tag per seat for one of those 15,000 basketball-only seats is $ 12,000. Yikes! Outlandish? You bet. Christine Sundt visual resources curator Architecture & Allied Arts Library Stories focus on Israel, but ignore conflict Thank you for expanding the thoughts of University students with Steven Neuman's recent travelogue from Is rael ("Visit to Israel reveals opposing images," Jan. 8; "Playing the tourist" Jan. 15). Any attempt at interesting students in the world outside their own city, state, or na tion should be rewarded. These stories are particularly welcome if they address the human side of an issue, as Neuman's article did. Unfortunately, Neuman glazed over any and all issues regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He exclaims his shock at how well the Israeli people handle the stress of attacks. Yet where are his descriptions of the daily life of Palestinians? How do the Palestinian people deal with roadblocks, curfews, extraordinary unemployment, a di vided country, land theft, etc.? Jared Paben's coverage of the recognition given Lach Litwer ("An international education," Jan. 16) suffers the same blind eye. He quotes Litwer, "There's nobody in Israel who hasn't lost a family member." How about that there isn't a family in Palestine who hasn't lost a family member, or had a family member illegally arrest ed? He shudders at the need for a security wall, yet where is the grief over Palestinians kept out of Green Line Israel, where the jobs are, or away from their homes? How about the tens of millions of Palestinians who are refuges from their homes? Jeffrey Stout Eugene Shooting down excuses If you've read my column regularly, you'd probably recall from my Oct. 31 col umn that I love a good video game. I like constructive, pacifistic games — I like building cities, maybe playing golf with an anthropomorphic dinosaur and solving puzzles. But I like violent games, too. I want to smash a supersonic race car into my opponents' machines, sending them spiraling into a smoldering mechan ical wreck in the city streets below. I want to shoot big guns and wave pointy swords around, I long to throw bombs at fellow go-karters, I yearn to run through big cas tles and flatten goombas with steel-toed boots. I want to pander to my id and exer cise my brain at the same time. But, I just want to do all of this in a virtual world. "But Travis," censoring talking heads wail, "despite your dashing charm and quick wits, your appreciation of the simu lation of violent acts, however ethically you behave in real life, promotes a desensi tizing culture that tramples the universal perception of the sanctity of life." Their responsibility-dissolving leftist counterparts are no better, charging that companies who produce violent games ir revocably compel naive consumers to em ulate violent acts and conclude those companies must be held ethically and legally (and presumably solely) account able for these acts. Fortunately, even in a judicial system that's had considerable difficulty adjusting to the complicated implications of rapid technological development in the last decade, judges have generally found these absurd, disconnected claims of culpability by proxy to be just that. US. District Judge Lewis Babcock dis missed a suit filed by relatives of a teacher killed in the 1999 Columbine High School shootings. The claim purported several dangerous arguments: that game makers could have reasonably foreseen that their product would have caused violence; that video games should not be protected as free speech as other media are; and that specific games are (presumably ethically) defective, in that the game taught players how to use an object — namely a gun — without accurately reflecting the complex responsibilities and consequences of using a weapon in real life. And therein lies the catch: Arguments that reassign responsibility rely on the no tion that a video game's players have enough difficulty distinguishing between fictional (and generally unrealistic) conse quences in a fictitious world and actual consequences in the real world; that they believe reasonable actions in one parallel legitimate behavior in the other. This is, of course, entirely false for that majority of gamers who are old and sane enough to make these distinctions. Unfortunately, some pundits disagree. Travis Wilise Rivalless wit In a 2001 article in Maclean's, Simon Fraser University's Stephen Kline oblique opines that "the industry is getting away with murder" — never mind that the National Institute on Me dia and the Family, which assesses media for responsible regulations, hailed the video game industry "more responsible than the other media industries." Judge Danny Boggs sagely agreed, writ ing in a ruling from a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that "We find that it is simply too far a leap from shooting characters on a video screen to shooting people in a classroom." Boggs is right: Millions play violent video games; only a few commit violent crimes that could even loosely be linked to those games. An NIMH study suggests video games that reward aggressive behav ior stimulate aggressive thoughts immedi ately following play; similar studies sug gest the same is true of other media. But for all but the psychopathic, a fine-tuned system of social and cultural inhibitions prevent aggressive thoughts from mani festing into aggressive, harmful behavior. Moreover, claims of the gaming industry's responsibility for violent acts, in conjunc tion with these rightfully rejected legal claims, imply a deeper, more problematic assertion: That video game makers are not only culpable for others' acts (possibly result from an inability to distinguish between the real and the virtual) but that these compa nies are largely responsible for this schizo phrenic disconnect in the first place. Could the violently tragic events that have prompted protest about video game violence been rooted in deeper issues? Ac cording to the Federal Trade Commission, 85 percent of game purchases are mediated by parents. Could some parents be faulting in their responsibility to screen content for age appropriateness — even with the help of the Entertainment Software Rating Board's rating system? Or worse, could these parents simply be guilty of failing to culti vate an ability to distinguish fact from re sponsibility, and senses of responsibility and causation in their children, in the large majority of the time when those kids aren't playing games? Could it be that parents, overzealous activists and some politicians are looking for a scapegoat for a social ill, rather than a solution? The most potent and relevant question in the debate about violence in video games, it seems to me, is not whether video games might catalyze violence, but whether society will allow people to dissolve themselves illegit imately of responsibility for their own actions. Contact the editorial editor at traviswillse@dailyemerald.com. His opinions do not necessarily represent those of the Emerald.
