Video Games and the Tea Party

It's vanishingly rare for video games to be discussed in the media without at least one anti-game crank being given a microphone and allowed to rant about the evils of violent games. Those who don't play games are all too often perfectly comfortable to assert a simple cause and effect relationship between games and real-world acts of violence.

That same media has been bending over backwards for a year and a half now to tell us that the Tea Party movement bears no responsibility whatsoever for any of the acts of violence done in its name. When Joe Stack flew an airplane into an office building, leaving behind an anti-tax screed perfectly in line with the Tea Party platform, we were told that it was laughable to suggest that his Tea Party affiliation played a role in his actions. When Sarah Palin released an ad with gun sights superimposed over swing districts, those who showed concern about the implication were dismissed as cranks. When one of Tea Party candidate Rand Paul's advisors stomped on the head of a woman representing MoveOn.org outside a rally, we were told that it was the act of one person, and not representative of the party as a whole.

Now that congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, one of those "targeted" in Palin's gun sight ad has been shot for real, can we finally admit that the Tea Party has ushered in a culture of violence, in which opposition politicians are not just ideological enemies, but targets for assassination?

Consider the wording of the above ad for a Jesse Kelly campaign event, in which supporters are encouraged to "Get on Target for Victory" [sic], and which closes with a line that would become a call for Giffords's assassination with strategic use of the word "by" and the suffix "-ing". If it's not a stretch to say that Grand Theft Auto has directly caused some players to commit crimes in the real world, surely it's also not a stretch to say that a campaign event at which real people are encouraged to fire real automatic weapons played some role in a real assassination attempt.

Of course nobody will say this, nor should they. Human behavior is incredibly complicated, and suggesting that one-to-one causal relationships, such as committing a crime because you played a video game in which crimes are committed or shooting a congresswoman because a candidate used rhetoric that blurred the lines between voting someone out of office and killing them, is ignorant at best. But even I, as staunch a defender of games as I am, think that consuming nothing but violent games could foster an environment in which the impulse to look for non-violent solutions to problems is weakened.

That's why the Tea Party scares me. Its leaders have risen to prominence by stoking the anger of their constituents. Yes, they have argued for a set of political ideas, but they've also encouraged the imagery of violent revolution, such as in Palin's ad, or her tweet reading "don't retreat, reload", or Sharon Angle's suggestion that Tea Party supporters might need to pursue "Second Amendment remedies" if their candidates fail to be elected. If violent games foster a culture of violence, it is ludicrous to go on saying that the Tea Party doesn't.

Sadly, I don't expect this to happen, no matter what we learn about the political ideas of the thug who shot Gabrielle Giffords. The media, in an attempt to preserve its weird notion of "balance" will say that Tea Party candidates can't be held responsible for the actions of deranged individuals, and the more nuanced issue of the group's wink-nudge encouragement of politically motivated violence will be swept under the rug again.