My feelings have evolved around video games and violence since I was a younger man. I’m going to try very hard not to make this piece be reductive and oversimplified – I’m married to a psychiatrist and am a psychology major myself, and I take pains to note nuances. This is not a “playing violent video games make children into school shooters” sort of post, although I believe there’s a relationship there. This is also not a “ban all violent video games” post – consenting adults have a right to whatever sort of entertainment they want, and anyway violence in video games is only part of a larger tapestry of violent media. What I hope to make this is a piece on the lazy, extreme over-use of violence in games and how it’s warping and desensitizing us when it comes to actual, real violence in the world.

Background

It’s not a stretch to say that I grew up on video games. I was born in 1973 and came of age in the era of the earliest home consoles. I’ve played hundreds of hours on so many platforms – Atari, Coleco, Apple ][c, MacOS, Windows, iOS, Nintendo everything. I’ve played all types – strategy (Zelda, StarCraft), puzzle (Myst, Tetris, Portal 1/2), action/adventure (Rygar, Mario Bros., Blaster Master), massive multiplayer online (World of Warcraft) and of course combat (Quake, Doom, Marathon, Mortal Kombat, Contra). My children are frequently awed at how good I am at any game right off the bat, even though I remind them of the enormous amount of practice I’ve had in my 44 years of life. My wife and I have had many conflicts over the amount of time spent gaming. My interest surges now and again as new games are released – I had a massive World of Warcraft problem years ago, mercifully kicked after our third child was born. More recently have spent many hours playing the new Zelda game and Cities: Skylines. My current mission is to decide, based on exhaustive research, which VR headset to purchase so we can delve into that realm. 16 years ago I even wrote my Masters thesis on the effects of video games on modern society. So you could say that I’m just a little into gaming. (As I write this it seems excessive even to me, except for the thesis part which I’m kind of proud of.)

I have passed this interest on to my children. Ever since he was 3 my son (now 13) has gamed – first it was iOS games like Angry Birds, then games on the Wii/Wii U, although I’ll say that many of these are very social games that we played as a family (Wii Fit, Mario Kart). He was delighted to discover my old Gameboy Advance SP tucked away in a cupboard, and most recently he bought himself a Gameboy Color just for completeness. He’s now buying up Pokémon games old and new (Sun and Moon, Black and White, etc.). A couple of years ago he bought a Nintendo 3DS XL, and last year (with a heroic midday mall assist by Dad) he bought a Nintendo Switch.  I’m still coming back from that one with his mother. Suffice it to say that he’s totally into gaming, retro and otherwise, and it’s something we share. My 10 year-old daughter is now into simulation games – The Sims 4, Cities:Skylines, and House Flipper are her current faves. She and I built a gaming PC to better support this habit, and we really enjoy playing together and working out problems. It’s a bit early to say about our nearly 7 year-old, but she does really enjoy playing Sims with her big sister and has watched me build an online city as recently as this morning. As an avid gamer, I’d say my work here is done.

Perspective

In absolute terms we are living in a time of unprecedented peace. The rates of violent deaths per 100,000 have declined dramatically – for context, scroll through the 18 slides of this presentation: The Visual History of Decreasing War and Violence. Go ahead, do it – I’ll wait.

Fascinating, no? What it must have been like to live hundreds of years ago, especially in non-state societies. Not only was there no modern medicine, which meant children and women dying as much as men, but there must have been wars and tribal conflicts all the time. In an environment like this even children must have been exposed to seriously violent injuries and deaths, in real life – what must this have done to their psyches? The stats alone tell us – they grew up to be violent just like the previous generations. It wasn’t until organized nation-states and democratic government came about relatively recently that things really settled down. Now you rarely see two democratic states go to war with each other, and the death rates even from our modern wars and genocides are nothing in comparison with prior centuries’. It’s a very good, very non-violent time to be alive, historically speaking!

Yet here we are – in the U.S., 154 mass shootings have happened since 1966.  Our firearm-related injuries and deaths topped 31,000 in 2017, and 733 children aged 0-11 were killed by guns. Over 21,000 people commit suicide here annually, more than half of them using guns. (Firearm suicides are 90% effective, whereas other methods are 90% ineffective.) We have a President who has literally advocated violence against protesters at his own rallies, and turned a blind eye to (even praised) racist thugs beating brown people. Reduced or not, violence surrounds us in our news and society, and I don’t think there’s anyone arguing that it’s a healthy thing.

The Popularity of Violent Video Games

Now let’s get back to video games. The story that prompted this post was about the major PC game platform Steam and a leak of data that “allowed observers to generate extremely precise and publicly accessible data for the total number of players for thousands of Steam games.” Unlike TV viewership, platforms like Steam don’t typically release statistics like these, regarding them as competitive secrets much like Netflix regards its own ratings numbers. But a flaw in some of Steam’s coding allowed outside developers to figure these numbers out quite precisely using some nifty math. (Caveat: It’s an incomplete list since the leak was only for games with “Achievements”, so games without those are not represented, but most major games have Achievements so we can take this as a fairly accurate list.) Take a look at the top 20 games:

It’s easier to list the games above that do not include violence as a core gameplay mechanic: Portal 2, Sid Meier’s Civilization V, Rocket League, Portal. That’s it – four games out of twenty, just under 46 million players (fewer in absolute humans since undoubtedly there’s overlap). That’s only 12% of the players in the top 20 games that favor non-violent games over violent ones.

Note: Garry’s Mod is a bit of an outlier here, since it’s a modification of a shooting game (Half-Life) that turns it into a physics simulation. Normally I think physics simulations are super-cool (see: Kerbal Space Program), but if you watch YouTube videos of gameplay you’ll see that a) the player carries some sort of gun in front of him/her constantly, and b) people still use it to model violent scenarios and/or shoot things. It also lacks an ESRB rating because it’s technically a mod and not a standalone game, Therefore I’m going rogue and classifying it as violent. 

Again I will say that I’m not heading in a “ban all violent video games” directions. Gaming is escapism and fantasy, and there’s validity in that mode of entertainment. Games have ratings just like movies, and ostensibly games rated “M for Mature” are not that easy for young kids to purchase. But anyone who has spent time playing online or watching Twitch can tell you that young kids are swarming over the most violent games, and more often than not their parents are allowing it. This has a self-sustaining effect on multiple levels – because the community overwhelming lives in these top games, everyone goes there to play online. Because the games are so widely played and have been for years now, a generation of game developers has grown up predominantly playing violent games. Because these games are generating tens of millions of dollars in revenues, more than some Hollywood blockbuster, we see major development houses being risk averse and channeling their resources into violent sequels or new titles that remain violence-based. Search for “gaming industry running out of ideas” and you’ll see articles dating back 8-10 years or more – once this became a huge-money business developers got seriously lazy. Trouble is, “lazy” equates to “violent,” since that’s what they know and that’s what sells. Not to mention the rampant sexism! I encourage you to watch the entirety of “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games” for an eye-opening look at the sexism and underrepresentation of girls and women in gaming.

The Role of Parents

The range of parental involvement runs the gamut – many worry about it, some ban them outright, and others give their children complete, unsupervised access to all games. You might think, given my history, that I’d be on the more permissive end of the spectrum, and relative to my wife I am. We both play games, I more than she, and we’ve of course allowed our children ample access to platforms and games of their choosing. BUT, there are definite limits. During the school year we don’t allow gaming on weekdays, and on weekends we restrict it to 30-60 minutes per day. Most importantly, however, I’ve declared a ban on violent, gun-based games (with an exception for Zelda: Breath of the Wild due to the fantasy nature and lack of actual guns; also, that game is a total masterpiece.) I believe that it’s every parent’s role to become thoroughly familiar with the content of the games their children are playing, and not to take their word for it. If we’re responsible for the TV and movies they watch we sure as heck better be responsible for the content games and YouTube videos. Because being familiar with that content means being able to have a conversation about some of the more edgy material that lies within. In our house we’ve had interesting car discussions on the difference between Link shooting fantasy monsters with a bow as compared to a more realistic Fortnite player picking up a sniper rifle and picking off shooting other players in the head at a distance. (Language matters. Realism matters. Talking in the car matters!)

Why have I done this? Firstly, I’ve become hugely anti-handgun in my old age – ever since the Virginia Tech shooting I’ve been a proponent of stronger gun control, handgun bans, assault weapon bans, and generally raising awareness of the prevalence of gun violence in this country. The more I’ve written about and been active in this cause the more that the normalcy of guns, shooting, and bloody death in video games has struck me as jarring and upsetting.  How can we as a culture write hang-wringing pieces about school shootings alongside glowing reviews of the latest gory shooters? What does it say about us that we tacitly accept the staggering amount of shooting and killing in fantasy realms while decrying the real-world equivalent? Watch a popular TV show or movie with this in mind and note how people wielding weapons and shooting “bad guys” is so common it’s almost offhandedly portrayed. Then watch a news report about Parkland and the horror of children lying in bloody pools in the hallways, or the Capital Gazette accounts of reporters stepping over their dead colleagues while fleeing the killing ground that was once merely their office. The contract is almost unbearable.

I cannot in good conscience hold these positions and also allow my son to play games like Fortnite or Call of Duty. Fortunately he gets this and is okay with it, mostly because he likes being an iconoclast at school but also because he’s internalizing our rhetoric about gun violence. But are all parents having these conversations, or drawing these comparisons so vividly? If we don’t give our children insight into the cultural contradictions we’re faced with literally daily, how will they develop the ability to discriminate between responsible escapism and irresponsible, bloodthirsty virtual atrocities? Exhibit A is the “active shooter video game” that was briefly released and then with drawn – what a fascinating contradiction that story was. So a game about stealing cars and shooting prostitutes is acceptable (and huge enough to have 4 sequels and counting) but a game that simulates shooting schoolchildren is somehow beyond the pale? Do schoolchildren matter that much more than prostitutes? What about a game where someone shoots up a school full of prostitutes? Or merely grown women? Or an automotive school? Would those be acceptable? This is not a binary situation here, folks – the spectrum of what is accepted and what isn’t is a very slippery slope indeed. (One could make a lot of money on a game that lies right on those boundaries; it’s only a matter of time before someone does.)

We need to decide, as a culture, not only how much violence is acceptable but what context we put it in and what kinds of discussions we have about it. I believe that living with a constant backdrop of “imaginary” shooting and killing leaves us dangerously desensitized to the real thing, something that our outsized reaction to the “active shooter” game paradoxically demonstrates. It’s as if we need to overreact to a game to remind ourselves that the real violence is truly REAL. If only our overwhelming reaction to the real shootings paralleled the universal condemnation of the fantasy depictions – absent actual crime scene pictures of dead elementary school students lying in pools of their own blood, we can all be outraged at pixelated renderings of them. We must never, ever allow our children to become inured to the real problem of gun violence in America because they are permitted to endlessly shoot and kill on a screen, and we should make every effort to withhold these experiences from them until they are mature enough to understand the difference.

“My top priority has always been our social mission of connecting people, building community and bringing the world closer together. Advertisers and developers will never take priority over that as long as I’m running Facebook.” -Mark Zuckerberg

That’s one of the many statements our friend Mr. Zuckerberg made before Congress this week, in his apology tour and bar and grilling that he had to endure, again, because Facebook really screwed up, again. Along with his robotic delivery that was nearly devoid of humanizing “um’s” and “uh’s,” statements like this demonstrated just how disconnected he is from what truly happens on the platform he built. Because while “connecting people” may be the surface tension that holds Facebook together, it’s what goes on in the fathoms of ocean below that is the real story – one he and countless other social media platforms do not want to talk about.

To me the true picture of Facebook and its ilk is this disingenuous posture of servitude toward non-paying users, 2+ billion in Facebook’s case, while at the same time cultivating a cesspool of paying customers (advertisers) with a level of permissiveness and lack of supervision that is truly criminal. Because the very business model of any ad-supported site depends upon keeping the advertisers as or more happy than the rubes who flock there to share kitten videos. How? By allowing them to target, micro-target, and nano-target users for their ad content. Which of course is done by gathering as much data as possible about each user. This is dead simple when the users dumbly give up everything about themselves over the course of months or year. Every like, every article shared, every status posted, even every picture uploaded tells Facebook something about that person. Taken individually it’s not much, but taken all together and you have a portrait that is not just useful, but downright gold for any advertiser – or political firm. That’s the realization Cambridge Analytica had, along with many other companies I’m certain – that this data wasn’t just marketing gold, it was vote-getting nirvana. After all, what do campaigns want more than the ability to micro-target voters. These days you can know each household intimately through voter databases alone, but stitch that demographic info together with the “psychographic” profiles Facebook so assiduously collects and suddenly you have a voter database the likes of which have never been seen in American politics. EVER.

Now, the question of whether Cambridge Analytica actually had the technical chops to turn this data into ironclad voter profiles is an open one – I mean truly, who has ever had to analyze and synthesize voter data that is this deeply personal before? It’s a staggering task, whether we’re talking 10,000 profiles or the potentially 87 million profiles that CA managed to scrape up through their illicit collection app. But the fact that this happened shows two things: first, that the very existence of a dataset like the one Facebook is sitting on absolutely guarantees that it will be exploited in creepy and possibly illegal ways. This same principle holds for massive video surveillance networks, U.S. census data, NSA surveillance data, and IRS records. There is literally no way that a dataset that large and tempting is going to be successfully protected from bad actors willing to do anything to exploit it. Nothing in human history suggests we’re capable of that kind of integrity.

Second, no private company whose profits depend upon the continuous collection of personal data should ever be given control of the ultimate dataset. Again, there is nothing in the history of human corporate behavior that indicates this will end well. The real criminal act here is that Facebook refused to acknowledge that their immense aggregation of people’s intimate details was in any way a risk to humanity, society, or governments. No, Zuckerberg and his droids just kept vacuuming up the profits whilst spouting pap about their noble mission to connect people, because with Noble Motives Nothing Bad Could Ever Happen.

Facebook is not a new company – at 14 years old it is now middle-aged in Silicon Valley terms. They had plenty of time to internalize the fact that nefarious acts were certainly happening right under their noses with the data they’d collected. (Were collecting. Will continue to collect until Congress reins them in.) The idea that no one in the company said, “Hey guys, we should really put HUGE safeguards in place to make sure this stuff doesn’t get to Bad Guys” is ludicrous – of course someone said that, they just didn’t do anything about it. Or to be fair what they did was window dressing, because to truly limit access to the data would mean cutting advertisement profits dramatically, since they by definition wouldn’t be giving their paying customers the exact thing that made them pay money in the first place. Facebook’s data is their golden goose – any threat to the goose’s health is a threat to the company itself. On second thought, Facebook is the goose itself – any rhetorical attempts by Zuckerberg to separate “connecting the users” from the advertisements is just bullshit. The former could not exist without the latter, and the latter could not exist without utterly exploiting the former. Such exploitation had to happen in near-secrecy, because nobody who truly understood what they were giving away would have agreed to it. Oh sure, Americas are as cavalier about their online privacy as the Naked Cowboy is about his groinular region, but I think we’ve just seen where the limits of their tolerance are.

Which is exactly why government regulation must happen. There is no force on earth that is going to make Facebook-the-company become a corporate culture of personal privacy protection – it’s going to take a Ronda Rousey-style arm bar by the government to force them, under threat of extreme agony, to submit. Because submission is anathema to everything their survival depends upon. It’s the same way that banks and investment houses need regulation to stop them from doing stupidly greedy and illegal things in the name of obscene amounts of money – if the vampire squid needs to relentlessly jam its blood funnel down the throats of people in order to survive, you’d better believe it’s going to protect that goddamn funnel until its dying breath. Ads are Facebook’s blood funnel – they are the gigantic chute down which money pours. Zuckerberg’s billions are the bins at the bottom of the chute, and the careers of everyone at the company depend upon that chute remaining open and unobstructed.

A major problem here, as evidenced by the Senate’s embarrassing performance in the hearings, is that government is always ten steps behind industry when it comes to recognizing and preventing large scale abuses. Whether it’s the pharmaceutical industry, the tobacco industry, or the financial industry, you’re pretty much guaranteed a ten- or twenty-year head start at least before the dolts inside the Beltway figure out that the world has fundamentally changed and those billionaires giving them money didn’t exactly obtain the funds by being Eagle Scouts. (Sorry to be sexist, but let’s face it, it’s almost always men who are greedy dicks – Theranos notwithstanding.)

I’m still grappling with giving up Facebook permanently – I’ve done a thorough purge of my apps (I had well over a hundred), I’m exclusively using Firefox’s Facebook Container to access the site now, and I’m trying to build up this blog and my Twitter feed as alternatives – but I fervently hope that this moment is a pivotal moment in the history of Americans and privacy. Just as the presidential election awakened a huge swath of the electorate to the flawed mechanics of our electoral politics, so too should the Facebook enablement of (let’s be frank) a stolen presidential election awaken our understanding of how negligent the tech industry and our country has been about protecting our privacy.

For a while now I’ve been thinking about setting up a custom home network l in our house to enable faster, more controlled traffic and better security. So I did a bit of reading up, and I discovered that Ars Technica has a great series reviewing home routers and comparing their performance to commercial ones. The bottom line: a homebrew router provides the best performance, especially for high-bandwidth connections. Intriguing – now that I knew, I couldn’t let it go. Visions of a home network closet danced in my head, with a custom-built router, firewall, media server, core switch, and a newer mesh wifi system like the Linksys Velop humming on all three floors. The germ of a plan began to form…

First I did some more reading. To my great satisfaction, it’s totally possible to ditch the Verizon-provided router and provide your own! I honestly didn’t know that the Verizon router was optional, I had thought I’d have to jump another router off the current one and do some double-NAT setup that felt really hinky. But since I’ve long since turned off the wifi on the Verizon router there’s no reason not to consider swapping it out for something that will give our house better performance, security, and customization. Pushing me further in that direction is that our current AirPort-based wifi setup is showing its age – my Extreme AC router won’t even show up in the AirPort util anymore, and I don’t feel like fiddling with it. Plus Apple is dropping wifi altogether, which means that the universe is telling me it’s time for a wholesale change. In phases, of course.

The fine print reveals a few caveats – turns out that only Internet-only FiOS customers can do this – bundles with phone, TV, or both need the standard router(s) Verizon provides, because of reasons. The biggest obstacle is that the Verizon Optical Network Terminal (ONT) is default configured to output over the coax cable, even though it has an ethernet port nestled right in there on the customer-accessible side. But by all accounts one can simply call Verizon and, with a bit of coaxing (or de-coaxing – see what I did there?) get them to switch the signal to output from the RJ-45 jack instead. Still a few steps between here and there, however.

Phase I is to acquire the necessary hardware. (Phase 0 is to check Mint and make sure my fun-money account is charged up. It is – auto-saving ftw! Also, I highly recommend Mint.) Since I now knew enough to be dangerous about building a homebrew router thanks to Jim Salter’s excellent Ars Technica article, last night I pulled the trigger. I ordered a barebones PC, a 120GB mSATA SSD, and 8GB DRAM. (I also had to grab a cheap VGA monitor, VGA cable, and USB keyboard/mouse combo because I’m a bad geek and don’t actually have any of those lying around.) I chose to get the 120GB SSD just like Salter, because I also have visions of running a Plex media server off of this box and loading it up with family photos and videos. (My children never, ever get tired of watching themselves in old home videos, and having Plex to serve those up from anywhere is another dream. 120GB will almost certainly not be enough!)

Phase II will be to download Ubuntu Server, get it on a bootable USB stick, and install it on the barebones box. Seems simple enough, even for a relative Linux newbie like me.

I’ll take pics of the setup when it all arrives, and document my journey through config and testing. First I’ll just configure the PC to be a router, DHCP, NAT, and DNS device, so it will pass traffic. Then I’ll get a long Ethernet patch cable and run it from the ONT to our family room setup directly above. Since I demo’d our recently-renovated basement myself and know where the speaker wire ran, I think this will be straightforward. I’m most nervous about the ONT changeover with Verizon – my worst fear is that I take my family offline for a day or two, which would be doubleplusungood. Also since I’ve recently learned, thanks to Circle with Disney, that we have nearly 40 devices hooked up to our wifi, and everything going down at once would be apocalyptic. The Internet of Things is Real, people! I’m still going to have to reconnect those devices to a new router system…good times await.

Next up: I’ll document my process of setting up the homebrew router and switching over to Ethernet. After that, it will be the process of choosing a new mesh wifi setup – not surprisingly, my new guru Jim Salter at Ars Technica has a great review of the current crop, and I’m torn. Stay tuned!