let’s talk for a moment about bullying and video games. i have strong feelings about video games, mostly because i have spent most of my life in an industry where i have participated both in the development of them and in their promotion. so i’ve been there in meetings where we have discussed what sells, what works, what hooks, and who the target audience is. how much violence is enough, too much, acceptable to parents, desirable to teens, to kids? how can we make violence seem better to parents? aliens? monsters? if it’s not a human, can we get more parents to buy their kids the game?

but those meetings are mild compared to the ones that i don’t get to be in — the meetings with the psychologists and psychiatrists and researchers. they called those “directional” meetings. i called them “pavlov” meetings. i know that behaviorism is a bit of a past-tense yet present-tense issue in education but it’s definitely the way things work in game development in the very-present and very-future sense. if you think for a moment that game companies think of a game as an independent release, then you’re missing the big picture. the idea is to train the audience, by the release of one game, to feel an inherent need for the next one. and then the next one. to make the game player angry enough, sad enough, violent enough, or anything else enough, to feel like buying the next game is not an option but a necessity. and that includes everything from blood splatter patterns and maps to console compatibility, graphics quality, and the strategic insertion of bugs to delay gratification and increase anger at key moments of gameplay.

that’s just clarification, though, before i actually talk about what i said i was going to talk about. video games are both the best thing and the worst thing to happen to youth. and i really mean that in the most extreme way. we talk about the bad side of gaming a lot. i will, too. but first, the good. (we’re doing these out of order. first the ugly, then the good, then the bad. it feels like a seminar on aesthetics.)

video games increase hand-eye coordination, spatial reasoning, physical movement coordination, fine motor skills, and computer familiarity. they give a way to release stress (even though they often create more, in the process) and participate in a group environment without any of the fear associated with actual group environments. and a child who is playing a video game isn’t watching television. some of the highest brain functioning levels are present when games are being played, while the lowest tend to follow the tube-oriented babysitter’s illumination. that’s only the beginning. they develop an understanding of complex social environments, the concept of racial diversity, the value of teamwork, organizational skills, strategic thinking, and delayed gratification. and they give the best possible introduction to the mathematical skills of spatial approximation, graphical reasoning, and logic. not to mention the ability to read information quickly, process it, and apply it in a meaningful way.

gaming is starting to sound a lot like another activity that children often engage in, isn’t it? school.

but when you engage in physical violence in school, someone gets hurt. and then someone goes to juvenile detention. or prison.

of course there are bad things about video games. many are violent. they can develop problems like rsi and contribute to non-linear reading issues. video games are blamed for an inability to deal with precise numbers and a favoring of approximative methods and a functional incapacity to grasp basic differentiation without unlearning a variety of graphical routines. but does this bad side of video games, combined with the ugly industrial complex from above, solidify enough of a link to violent tendencies in schools to be harsh with the games, rather than with the students?

in a word, no. never. not in the least.

i’m not a gamer. i’ve never been a gamer. i have played video games, yes, but not frequently or for long periods of time. i get bored more easily with things on-screen than i ever have with the real world. and that’s saying something, indeed. but many of my friends are and they are not particularly violent people, to say the least. often they are the most passive of individuals that you will ever meet.

but that’s not scientific research. i don’t like violent people. so i wouldn’t befriend the violent gamers, anyway.

what i can tell you is this — violence is human nature. no, not just for boys or even just for the youth. if you want examples of this, simply look through history. what is history? it’s frequent and lengthy wars, between nations, between tribes, between individuals, punctuated by brief periods of theoretical peace. war aside, we watch hockey for the fights, american football for the bloodshed, and employ bouncers at every public house to intervene, not if there’s a fight, but when it occurs.

if you think that humans are not vengeful, mindless animals, looking for a fight and only remaining socially acceptable most of the time because of laws, then i applaud you, since that means that you are likely in the minority for whom violence is reprehensible, without the motivation of the boys in blue. welcome to my world.

but that’s not the norm, i can assure you.

society is not a choice; it is an absolute, a definite, a necessity. when you are born, you are already in society. by the time you can choose to leave it, it has already affected you more than you could possibly know. and society is violent.

so you have either successfully fought against this violence and won. or you have given in.

what about students, though?

let me tell you a story. i went to a middle school where violence was not only a way of life, it was a way of survival. it was both random and targeted. it was a somewhat rural school with the attitude that “kids will be kids” and it was simply enough to get through the day. students lit fires in classrooms, came to school higher than the majority of people that you see on the downtown east side, attempted to explode devices on busses, and attacked both the weak and the strong. it was torture. the school had a name but i thought of it as “sixth ring of hell middle school”.

and i wasn’t alone.

but these were not gamers. not only was this happening in the era of king’s quest and mario, most of these people wouldn’t have known a computer if it walked over, introduced itself, and sat on their heads. repeatedly.

so what was the problem? broken homes? alcohol abuse by the parents? family conditioning?

no. most of these people had lovely parents. they came from stable homes. most were not particularly poor. there were some on the extremes of the ses scale but that was a vast minority.

from whence cometh the violence, then?

expectations.

we play the expectations game with our students all the time. and this is the result. it can go very wrong. assume that they will degenerate into animals and then watch how it happens. youth are a self-fulfilling prophesy.

the moral of the story?

there are two. first, don’t apply to teach at a middle school in foxtrap, newfoundland. second, expect your students to behave like adults. the kind of adults that they should want to be. ones who don’t fight, don’t vandalize, don’t hurt people. and don’t take no for an answer.

this is not about comedy. it’s about friendship. as are most of my discussions, lately.

yesterday, i had a rather depressing encounter with a very close friend. no, she wasn’t the source of my depression. it was her friends.

you all know how much i hate dirty restaurants. food frightens me to no end but it’s overwhelming in a place that holds itself under the banner of “fast food”. i would much rather live next to an explosives laboratory than to a location wherein items of vague edibility are placed in hot substances, coated, and then served in paper packages to herds of youth.

i digress.

when i got a call from my friend, she invited me to one of these places and said that she was going to meet her friends there. i thought to myself several things. i wanted to see my friend. i didn’t want to be in this place. i don’t really know her friends and i’d like to meet them. they’re not going to show up, are they? ah. we have hit the point of the thoughts.

i had a feeling that they would disappear and that my friend would be sitting, all alone, in a terrible place, wondering why she wasn’t worth enough to her friends for them to show up and eat with her.

she’s not a flaky person. but anyone would start to wonder if a whole group of people simply didn’t bother to arrive at a restaurant with you. alone is bad.

so, of course, i went. not to eat, mind you. but that’s a story for another day.

it took me ages to get there. the police were blockading my neighborhood, curiously enough. i think there was a gas leak that needed to be repaired. and on top of that, traffic was mindnumbingly painful on the kingsway. but i made it. as she was finishing. which gave me cause for a lot of thought, since then, about what one can and cannot do to one’s friends.

i don’t like alone. being with one other person is nice, of course, but i’m a group animal. i love doing things in packs. but alone is bad and the rest, i shall cover later.

i have noticed a trend in this city, since i moved here, that people commit to things and then back out. often without telling anyone. my friend in the restaurant is very, very forgiving about these things. i am not. i don’t like to see people hurt that i care about. i think it’s bad. and when friends do this to you over and over again, it certainly necessitates the question — are they really your friends?

not to misunderstand me here, of course, dear reader. i’m not saying that you should question your friends if they call you and say that they have to stay late at work and can’t meet you somewhere. or if they text-message you at the last minute and cancel because their mother is ill. that’s different. it’s when they simply don’t tell you. over and over again. and have no real reason other than that they don’t want to. are these the kind of people that you are going to continue to trust?

there you have it. my rant.

i trust my friends. if they’re going to do something with me, that’s great. if they’re not, i expect that they’ll tell me. and they do. and that’s perfectly fine. what do you expect?