TonyInterview

Tony Kauffman Mass Media and Children

Video Game Violence Interview
I chose to interview my father, Fred Kauffman, for this assignment. He is now 61 years old and hails from a rather strict Mennonite household in Nebraska. He has always had a strong opinion on children’s exposure to violence and has always had a deep understanding of violence and how it affects our world. For many years he and my mom traveled around the world working for a relief agency called Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). For ten years he was the pastor of West Philadelphia Mennonite Fellowship, and now works for a MCC here in Philadelphia. He has seen a lot of the world and is the most logical and reasonable I have ever met. If he sees something wrong with a situation, it is not because of his biased view or twisted logic, there is actually something fundamentally wrong with that situation. He understands issues beyond the level of most people; he can always dig one layer deeper and find where fundamentals come in to play. After spending most of his life traveling from one culture to the next, he now lives in an American culture that goes against many of his own views. When my brother and I were children my dad never bought us video games. He didn’t ban them from the household but he certainly never appreciated them. Our relatives were the ones who supplied us with game systems, usually for holidays or birthdays. Violent games, however, were //never// permitted in the house. Because it was so forbidden, the game //Street Fighter// quickly became one of our favorites. Once we were caught playing it at a cousin’s house. We were grounded for a week and our backsides received the royal treatment. I grew up __fully__ aware that violence was not a good thing, so once my brother and I entered high school my father allowed us to play and watch whatever we wanted, because he knew that he had instilled a strong sense of right and wrong when it came to violence. I asked him five questions about violence in the media.

Yes. I believe human beings are predisposed to getting into rivalries, which can lead to violence. If violence is seen as the preferred way of dealing with conflicts, there is little reason to pursue other options. We make sense of life by "meta-narratives" which provide a framework for understanding the world we live in. Violent entertainment provides a violent meta-narrative which leads a person to believe that there are no alternatives to blowing the other person away. It also feeds a sense of vulnerability and danger that raises the anxiety level and sense of needing to defend oneself. "After they were exposed to violent media?" I can't imagine a time when they weren't exposed! I believe it was around high school. They were already doing what they wanted anyway! Absolutely. There is no one factor that produces a violent person. I believe that living in situations of conflict and violence plus exposure to the meta-narratives implicit in violent entertainment can work together to make a person more inclined to act violently. Depression--because if I am not able to overcome my competitors violently it means that I am worthless. That's crap. Addiction to violence--In order to "come alive" I need to see or take part in violence. Life without violence is drab and colorless. Politics, f.i., the pro-gun lobby in the US. They live in a "parallel universe" where they are always being threatened, and need to have a gun at their side to feel that they can fight the evil forces against them. Much of this is a figment of their imagination, but they impose absurd public policy/laws on the rest of society because of their paranoia.
 * Do you think exposure to violence in video games and on television have an effect on children? How? **
 * Did you notice a difference in your children after they were exposed to violent media? **
 * At what age did you give your kids the freedom to play or watch whatever they wanted? **
 * Do you think a child’s home life and/or community change how they might be affected? **
 * Is there anything besides violent and disruptive behavior that may result from violent media exposure? **

I thought his term “meta-narrative” was very interesting. Children have not fully developed their own meta-narratives and if they are continually exposed to violence it makes sense that they incorporate violence into their own understanding of the world. If you see the world around you revolve around violence, it makes you scared and paranoid. My father has done a lot of research and work regarding gun regulation. He was recently arrested (which I never thought I would see in my life) for protesting straw purchases at Collisimo’s gun shop at 9th and Spring Garden, which has since been shut down. So when he mentions the pro-gun lobby, he sees the violence in the media as their paranoia extending on to the public. Through conducting this interview I realized more of the reasons my father prohibited violent video games. It was not simply because it caused fights between my brother and I, it was much deeper than that. The effects he envisioned stretched much deeper into the well of society, and many of the problems he witnessed around him could be traced back to an exposure to violence. I used to ask him why we weren’t allowed to play //Street Fighter// and he would always say “there’s enough of that going on in the streets already.” To a very basic degree I understood what he meant, but I can now see the much broader point that he was getting at; in a society where violence is often glorified and already around us 24/7, why let a child make a game out of it?