NCTV Takes
Stand
On Video Game
Violence
By Howard Mandel
| The debate
over video games' effects intensified recently as they were attacked
by several medical authorities for their "violent scenarios" and
"graphically aggressive themes." Surgeon General C. Everett
Koop charged that video games produce "aberrations in childhood
behavior" and that the object of most arcade classics is to
"eliminate, kill, destroy." Only days before, the National
Coalition on Television Violence (NCTV), a Washington-based watchdog
group that has monitored TV shoot-'em-ups, movies and Saturday
morning cartoons, announced it was launching a new campaign against
video game violence.
NCTV has asked the Federal Trade Commission to ban video game advertisements, claiming they are deceptive. And Dr. Thomas Radecki, the NCTV chairperson, told VIDEO GAMES in an interview that "concerned public interest groups and psychologists should be allowed to go on the air and caution people as to their harmful effects." Radecki, a psychiatrist at Southern Illinois University, charges that "video games teach a violent reaction in a crisis situation.: In Berzerk, he wrote in an NCTV press release, "You're a stick figure with a handgun; the object is to kill as many other stick figures as possible, before they kill you. This type of role-playing practice is certain to have long-term harmful effects on the player; it teaches violent reactions. These games are training the next generation of Americans to be even more violent than our current generation, already the most violent in American history." |
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