The Sacramento Bee

Sunday Forum--Opinion Section

27 August 1995

WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU WANT TO GET RID OF VIOLENCE ON TV?

by S.L. Katzman

S.L. Katzman is a communications researcher at Stanford University.

Congress is considering plans for a "Violence Chip" that would be inserted in television sets to screen out violence and other material some viewers might deem offensive. But to work, the chip has to be coded so that it knows which transmissions to block. And that brings up the question of how to label the bad stuff--what, for example, do we define as violence?

That was the question addressed by software publishers last summer when they were facing pressure from Congress to produce a system for rating computer games. The industry created a Recreational Software Advisory Council (RSAC), which developed the following symbols to appear on game packages:

* A bomb for violence.

* An eye peeking through fingers for nudity/sex.

* An exclamation mark for language.

The level of potentially objectionable material for each content category is shown by a thermometer with rising quicksilver. The worst of the worst would have level four for violence, nudity/sex and language.

The next, and much harder step involved designing a code book that manufacturers can use to determine which acts to count toward a rating and which ones to leave out. If pre-schoolers watch a bucket of slime thrown to stop animated action, for example, should this rate as violence? To resolve that quandary, RSAC created a "benign immobilization" category with a violence level of zero.

To resolve thousands of questions like this, designers and executives from big and small companies talked for three months about figures from their games: karate fighters, pixies and elves. The game makers learned that studies of the behavioral changes that can result from exposure to violence agreed that there is a causal relationship. But there's less agreement among experts on the effects of smut, and no agreement on lists of words that might have an adverse effect. As a result,according to Karen Crowther, president of Redwood Games Inc. of Mendocino and a founding member of RSAC, they relied most often on "what a reasonable person" might conclude.

Disagreements revolved around basic questions: How many levels should a labelling system include? Should objects or non-human sentient creatures be considered? At first, Crowther recalls, "It seemed like an easy task to define violence." But the volume they produced describes itself as an amalgam of "research and seat-of-the-pants understanding of American cultural standards."

KEEPING TRACK OF VIOLENCE WITH JOYSTICKS]

The code book reads like a devil's dictionary. It considers types of violence, how they are portrayed, the victim's stance (whether passive or threatening), the damage done and the consequences for the perpetrator. The binomial approach common to computer language yields only a "yes" or "no" for all the sins that flesh is heir to. But how can you describe behavior clearly enough to allow for an accurate rating?

Here, for example, is how the RSAC code book distinguishes different forms of destruction:

Damage to realistic objects: A dam breaks, washing away the houses and cars below.

No damage to realistic objects: Smashing an alphabet letter to solve a spelling problem.

So far, so good. But then comes this entry:

No damage shown to sentient beings: A deer head on a wall; an amputee seen on the street; the eating of a steak.

What sort of a mind would consider the eating of steak in the context of violent acts? And what are "sentient beings" anyway? According to the code book, that term includes humans and non-humans, such as elves, headless horsemen and rocks that speak of show feelings--but not blobs. Who made that decision? What about fair play for blobs?

Gratuitous violence must be visual and immediate, such as ripping the spine out of an opponent already defeated. All visual presentations of such events are counted--no matter how crudely drawn--because research shows young children learn from stick figures sometimes better than from detailed depictions of reality.

What about violence against "artifacts of civilization," which the code book says imply "social presence?" That means if you see the demolition of a building, you can assume someone was hurt. But social presence is not implied when doing violence to an empty rowboat or a mailbox.

Violence against humans gets a higher rating than actions against other sentient beings because, the code book says, "The closer an object or being in a game is to a true human being, the more serious aggressive violence toward it becomes." But the rating goes down if the negative consequences of aggressive violence are spelled out. That's because imitation--by a youthful audience at least-- is more likely when the perpetrator is rewarded.

But are the people playing these games likely to learn anything they can apply to their real lives from the moral restraints the codebook defines? According to Walter Korman, a college senior majoring in computer programming, the games are just a means of escape. The violence "allows people to perform actions they would otherwise never be able to do." And so, Korman concludes, "Nothing one does has anything to do with reality."