Doom Creator: Games Are Cathartic, Reduce Aggression and ViolenceThe game industry certainly had a major victory last month when the Supreme Court ruled against the state of California and its unconstitutional violent games law. Games are still a viable target for some politicians and mainstream media, but we get the sense that games have turned a corner in the public eye today. The violence in games debate will probably linger a little while longer, but it's clear that games are no longer the scapegoat they once were.
id Software's Doom for some time was the poster child for video game violence, and many blamed the game for the terrible Columbine massacre in 1999, but Doom creator John Carmack told IndustryGamers that he never bought into the whole debate. In fact, Carmack believes violent games like Doom can help by reducing aggression in players.
"People just play games now and I never took seriously the violence in video games debate. It was basically talking points for people to get on CNN and espouse their stuff on there," he told us.
He continued, "There was an E3 where all that was going on where I was giving interviews and the reporters would start going into their questions, and I wasn't supposed to talk about any of that. My wife was there and she’d start kicking me when I was about to go, 'Well, I think…' And in the end it didn’t matter, it didn’t make any impact on things. I never felt threatened by it and it turned out not to matter."
"And I really think, if anything, there is more evidence to show that the violent games reduce aggression and violence. There have actually been some studies about that, that it’s cathartic. If you go to QuakeCon and you walk by and you see the people there [and compare that to] a random cross section of a college campus, you’re probably going to find a more peaceful crowd of people at the gaming convention. I think it’s at worst neutral and potentially positive."
Beyond being cathartic, Carmack also sees Doom as a turning point for the industry, where games suddenly became much more mainstream.
He reminisced, "I can remember when I was a freelance programmer when I was 18 doing games for the Apple 2 and a guy that I worked out with, I was showing him what I do on there, and he just totally didn’t get it. It’s iconic little graphics and stuff moving around and he’s like, 'Why would someone want to play this, let alone pay for it?' In the really old days, games took a certain type of person that could fill in all the blanks with their imagination - they could project themselves into that world. There was a clear point."
"I remember what I think was one of the turning points, really for the industry, when we were developing Doom and we were at our office and I noticed that the janitor that was emptying the trash had just been sitting there watching... John Romero was playing something and he had just been sitting there, a guy who probably never had played a video game in his life. And he was just mesmerized watching this. And I realized that we had reached a point now where we were reaching beyond the self-selected geeky gamer-type audience that used to be all that there was."
He continued, "And we were now doing things that could make an impact on everybody, where we got the mainstream. And it certainly has gotten to the point now where, as the graphics guy I could look and say,'Well, there’s this huge gulf between what we do and offline film rendering,' but there’s a large chunk of the population that’s just like, ‘Oh, this looks like movies to me.' So we have stuff that can appeal to everyone and the games have gotten broader. Take things like The Sims, that had a much broader appeal than a bunch of other games and a large fraction of the population are gamers to some degree and you see it even more with the iOS devices today."
