Add Memory | Add To Friends
Shinigami (profile) wrote,
on 11-17-2004 at 11:25am
Subject: Don't mind this stuff, it's for my composition class

AUTHOR: KAREN L. TONSO
TITLE: Reflecting on Columbine High: Ideologies of Privilege in ?Standardized? Schools
SOURCE: Educational Studies (American Educational Studies Association) 33 no4 389-403 Wint 2002

The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher: http://www.uakron.edu/aesa/index.html



ABSTRACT
In this article I explore how a professor of Educational Foundations, living in Colorado, preparing preservice classroom teachers for schools like Columbine, and raising her children in the same school district, made sense of the Columbine attack. After characterizing the peer-group culture, I illuminate the ideologies that framed the social organization of the school. By comparing Columbine to examples from educational anthropology, I make clear that racist, sexist, classist, heterosexist, evangelistic, supremacist ideologies underpin mainstream schools and that these were at the heart of the Columbine attack. Although often held up as the preferred sort of U.S. school, White, middle-class-identified, academic-prep high schools might not promote the values needed to live harmoniously in a diverse society. In fact, at Columbine, the social production of difference, where so little should have existed in a school serving a remarkably homogeneous community, suggests the centrality of privilege as an ordering principle in U.S. schools.
The Columbine High attack became a flash point for discussions about violence in schools. Media coverage following Columbine painted a picture of "outcast" teens as deviants to be feared and controlled, tarring with one brush all so-called weirdos, when only the rare few had fantasies about revenge violence and even fewer acted on them. Being an "outcast" or "weird" meant rather bluntly not belonging, somehow falling outside the bounds of normality in schooling communities. In this article I explore what "normal" and "weird" might have meant at Columbine. I draw on cultural models of schooling to argue that "standardized" schools(FN1) lie at the confluence of racist, sexist, classist, heterosexist, evangelistic ideologies prevalent in U.S. society today and that these ideologies underpin the production of adolescent peer groups in schools serving predominately White, middle-class communities. Although it might be taken as such by some, this article is not intended as another round of blame assessment but rather as a commentary on the salience of these ideologies to the Columbine tragedy. In particular, I am interested in understanding the complex social system that might have framed belonging at Columbine and in puzzling through how "shooters" might have thought themselves into the deadly corner of revenge violence.
Reflecting on Columbine is far more than an academic exercise for me. At the time of the attack (and for most of the preceding thirty years), I lived in Colorado. My children (had) attended similar schools in the same district, with some belonging among the popular crowd and others among the social underclass. I supervised student teachers in secondary schools across the district (Grades 7 through 12) and had seen a wide range of student-student bullying and teasing, something my children and their friends also reported. In one unfortunate incident, two veteran classroom teachers (in a high school remarkably similar to Columbine) chastised me for pointing out student-student abusive behaviors to a student teacher and for suggesting that the student teacher intervene. On another occasion during a supervising observation at another high school (again, remarkably similar to Columbine in its makeup), the building was evacuated for a bomb threat that students had been discussing for over two hours. In our family, we moved one child out of a middle school after over a year of trying unsuccessfully to bring male-on-male harassment to the attention of school authorities. Such was life in the suburbs. Even before Columbine, I had serious concerns about mainstream schools and the power hierarchies within them, and these concerns shape my reflections.
Also, there is an emotionally cathartic strand to my reflections. Although I was not at ground zero, the depths of my connection to the tragedy unfolded for weeks. One of my own children, a young adult, visited Columbine as part of an outreach project in the days before the attack. Several of my college students at the time were Columbine graduates; one had a sibling in the building who was suspected of being involved. A student teacher I had supervised accepted a job teaching at Columbine and spent that fateful afternoon locked down with his students. A close friend called to say that her business partner was the mother of the young man who sold the gun. Yet another friend was a coworker of one of the shooters' mothers. A friend from college was one of the SWAT-team members who crawled atop an armored car to rescue an injured student climbing out of a library window. It was everywhere.
Like many others, I wanted to understand what happened, and as an educational researcher I wondered about preventing its recurrence. Although my research training as an ethnographer prepares me to study complex social organizations like Columbine, to relive the tragedy in the researcher guise or expect others to do so for my edification was unthinkable. Instead, for the four months following the attack, I watched the media and listened to teens, young adults, parents, and community members who passed through my everyday world. During these informal conversations--waiting to check out at the grocery store, while driving teens to movies, in classrooms where I was teaching preservice teachers, at community events and family dinners--I tried to make sense of what happened. I had not intended to write about my experiences, so I kept few notes. Overall, I talked with an estimated sixty to seventy people, of whom twenty or so were teens and the rest evenly divided among the other groups. Analysis strategies were likewise unconventional. First, I used early media reports to think about the kinds of students at Columbine, then checked these by talking to teens and young adults. Second, I listened to what adults (school authorities, parents, and community members) said and compared that to student talk. During 2000, I gathered articles published by the Denver Post and Detroit Free Press immediately after the attack and used these to double-check my preliminary sense of the event. I used my intimate knowledge as a community member and school insider to perform a gut-check of my understandings. Because my nearness to the tragedy necessitated managing its emotional impact on me, I carefully avoided reading both detailed descriptions of the attack itself and analyses of the event.
As I worked out the situation in my mind (and this article is part of that process), it became clear that what I knew about this event might contribute to how we think about schools and schooling. This decision was bolstered when talking to teens about how to identify "shooters," a focus that continues to overwhelm conversations about preventing another attack. Much to my dismay, not one teen thought that anyone could identify a "shooter." One young man whom I have known for years confessed that he, too, had felt like "getting some guns and doing some damage" while in middle school. This further terrified me. If teens with their keen insights into schools and schooling cannot tell who will become a "shooter," then it is highly unlikely that we adults can. Thus, this essay is a reflection on the Columbine tragedy by someone who had a front-row seat at its aftermath. Rather than looking for explanations centered in blaming individuals, the school, the community, or isolated causes, I focus on the social organization of U.S. "standardized" schools and critique the "normality" embedded in how people talked about the event.
In subsequent sections, I describe Columbine from the vantage point of students from "standardized" schools--how they talked about kinds of students there, followed by the views of students from an alternative school. Next, I compare the Columbine social organization to published accounts of high school peer groups and expand those to encompass supremacist thought.


JOCKS AND WEIRDOS AT COLUMBINE
What did Columbine, and other, students have to say about social peer groups in high schools? Many examples came from the media. During television newscasts, clean-cut, White, well-dressed students from the Columbine area talked about the "shooters" and characterized them as "weirdos," members of an alleged cult called "the trench coat Mafia." In newspaper and radio broadcasts, students also mentioned "Goths," "geeks," and "nerds" as kinds of "weird" students.
Soon, stories appeared in newspapers reporting anonymous responses from young men thought of as being among the so-called "weirdos" (e.g., Denver Post 1999a). They told of being hassled by "jocks" who threw rocks at them and who bumped their bicycles with cars when leaving school after football practice. These stories documented that many young men, the "shooters" among them, suffered at the hands of "jocks," seemingly a particular kind of athlete who used school-derived power to pick on others. Youth and young adults of my acquaintance repeatedly told me that "everyone gets picked on and you have to get used to it," thus turning resistance to inappropriate social relations into a character flaw and further entrenching the power of "jocks." The extent to which being picked on was widely accepted made it seem inevitable and "normal." This left critiques of institutionalized distributions of power and its by-product--namely, bullying, out of the conversation.
Even as they corroborated the mistreatment dished out by "jocks," "weirdos" made it clear that they had not resorted to violence, asserting publicly that only the "shooters" sought revenge. "Weirdos" felt that popular students and school administrators unfairly (mis)characterized all "weirdos" as having potential for violence and punished "weirdos" unjustly with restrictions on clothing choices and other historic liberties. "Weirdos" signaled that authorities not only misunderstood teen life but also compounded student alienation from schools with their crackdowns.
As media discussions continued, "shooters" continued to be lumped into this group called "weirdos." It was a very confusing time for adults who lacked understandings about the wide range of students among "weirdos." Those in charge seemed to have few ways to tell "shooters" from "geeks," "Goths," or "nerds," historically proponents of nonviolence. Among the things that seemed to hold the category together, in the eyes of mainstream adults, were recreational pursuits thought of as violent: movies (e.g., The Matrix), video games, Internet interactions, and virtual-reality (cyber) adventure simulations (e.g., Doom). Jon Katz (2000), writing his book Geeks at the time, heard from a national community of computer-literate young men who argued they were being miscast as people who advocated violence or were somehow fascinated by it, people destined to become "shooters."
Meanwhile, football did not strike the popular imagination as an endeavor belonging in the realm of activities considered violent, or likely to produce "shooters." Even though football was a recreational pursuit implicated by "weirdos" as a social arena with an abundance of bullies termed "jocks," it was not marked as violent except by "weirdos." As markers of appropriate behavior in our society, football trumped video- and computer-based recreational pursuits. "Jocks" fit in and belonged; "weirdos" did not.
Another facet of "normality" came in the collective denial that revenge-violence shootings happen in "nice" communities. Students, parents, administrators, community members, and law-enforcement personnel expressed shock that "shooter" violence could occur in such a "model" school. Denial was virtually universal: "Our kids don't do these things in our schools." By implication, and flying in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary, if such violence was "abnormal" in White, suburban schools, then it must be "normal" somewhere else, presumably minority, urban schools. Such statements expressed normative racist and classist assumptions. "Shooters" compounded racist attitudes when they gunned down an African American youth because of his skin color. When no person of color spoke at the memorial service, although a few sat on the stage, some people expressed outrage and hurt at the omission (Denver Post 1999b), further compounding a sense of White dominance.
In addition, events at Columbine suggested that religious affiliations contributed to school peer-group formation. It is hard to know for sure precisely how it figured, but near Columbine, a few evangelical, or charismatic, fundamentalist Christian churches ministered to large numbers of Columbine students. Many in Colorado, myself included, were surprised at the extent to which this ministry impinged on Columbine's aftermath. First came reports that a student was killed because of her religious beliefs. Second, at the memorial service, many were stunned that the public prayer came from a narrow theological arena (evangelicalism). In fact, many worried the prayer set one branch of Christianity above other religious faiths, an action that some interpreted as intolerance toward other religious beliefs and, thus, divisive (Denver Post 1999b). Third, substantial fundamentalist fervor grew out of the tragedy, casting one murder victim as a martyr, which became troublesome when early stories of her death seemed of questionable accuracy.
Thus, immediately after the Columbine attack, comments about schools like Columbine made clear that peer-group relationships within them were anyting but amicable. And, this was not news to some people in the community, notably those from an alternative school where I had affiliations.


THE VIEW FROM ALTERNATIVE HIGH SCHOOL
Six days after Columbine, students, parents, and teachers from Alternative High (a pseudonym for another public school in the district) marched several miles from their school across town to Clement Park, adjacent to Columbine and the site of impromptu memorials. They marched in support of those affected by the shootings as well as in open protest of attacks made on students, both the attack by the "shooters" and attacks by the "jocks." Many Alternative High students had themselves left conventional schools because of being mistreated.
As a person affiliated with the school both as a part-time (volunteer) teacher, former student teacher supervisor, and parent, I participated in the march. We left about 9:00 a.m. and arrived after 1:00 p.m., having toted brown-bag lunches and water. The route followed one of the city's busiest thoroughfares, necessitating a police escort. Most middle school and high school students marched, as did their teachers, administrators, some parents, and the city's mayor. Many cars honked in support as they passed, in spite of the fact that the march disrupted traffic flow for most of the morning. There was, at times, something of a senior-sneak-day atmosphere, but the mood became quite somber about two miles from the park.
It was a very sad day for me, and I struggled to encourage students who were pushed to their limits on the over seven-mile trek. Having hiked with teens on wilderness trips in the past, I filled my fanny pack with chocolate kisses, leftovers from Valentine's Day, and dispensed them to youth along the way. We talked about Columbine and about schools they had attended before coming to Alternative. Like all other schools in the district, their building was closed for a few days after the attack. This left them without the support of their school community, which they countered by meeting in homes and libraries, where they worked on the march. At these meetings, they made signs to support those who had been victimized as well as to protest "standardized" schooling. My favorite sign--"Content Standards for Respect and Tolerance"--recognized the school's "alternative" mission that had it at odds with state-mandated model content standards.
They expressed their solidarity with "outcasts" in a variety of ways, and for some this played out in clothing choices. One young woman marched with a nearly shaved head, front locks died blue (Columbine's color), wearing a late-'50s, yellow-dotted-Swiss organdy-and-net cocktail-length prom dress (from a vintage clothing store), accessorized with a student book-pack; spiked dog collar; gray-with-red-stripe "lumberjack" socks; and knee-high, black, Doc Marten boots. She freely associated with other students whose clothing was more conservative, such as one young man wearing a light-blue, Oxford-cloth, button-down-collar, long-sleeved shirt; tan Dockers pants; a brown belt; and brown leather deck shoes. They modeled for a large press contingent that diverse kids could get along, especially through encouraging each other, sharing snacks and drinks, and consoling those overcome with emotion.
They arrived at the park and gathered near one of the makeshift memorials to leave mementos. Eerily, I was down to thirteen kisses and left them. My sorrow and outrage were inexpressible. One teacher pulled out his guitar and led the singing of "Blowin' in the Wind," a song I bitterly recalled singing after the 1970 Kent State shootings. A student leader from the school read from her prepared comments:


I am tired today as I stand before you. Tired of this whole ordeal; tired of the way we treat each other. ... In the midst of a tragedy, I am struck by one simple and very HUMAN quality that we seem to have forgotten: that is our ability to listen. This seems to be lost among us inside all this blaming and hatred. We all want answers right away and try to comprehend what has just happened by becoming angry at certain groups of people and enforcing security systems in schools that separate us further instead of connecting us. ... We must stand up for each other and not tolerate other people being teased and hurt. ... [D]on't judge or criticize someone by the way they look. So what if they have pink hair, or dark clothes? So what if a guy you know likes to wear makeup? [L]et this walk ... [be] an attempt to show the world that we ... care about one another. (E-mail communication, 26 April 1999)
Her words made more sense to me than most of what I was reading in the newspapers or hearing on TV. As students from Alternative High illustrate, not everyone found schools like Columbine desirous, but these voices were strangely muted in media coverage.


SOCIAL PEER GROUPS IN SCHOOLS
Such comments represent people situated in various locations of the community trying to make sense of what happened. Those involved in the tragedy directly, and those at a distance, framed the event--and actors in it--with a cultural model of high school life. Margaret Eisenhart and Nancy Lawrence (1994) explained the power of cultural models:


Cultural models, or taken-for-granted sets of ideas about how the world is supposed to work, are frames of reference that people use to make sense of, and debate, the meaning or interpretation of events. ... When a cultural model is invoked, it establishes one way of interpreting an event, and in so doing it limits and simplifies the interpretations that people are likely to give to the event. ... [A]ctual events are not determined or dictated by a cultural model, but experiences are anticipated, extrapolated, or evaluated in light of it. When someone acts or speaks in such a way as to evoke a familiar aspect of the model, people are likely to assume that other aspects of the model apply as well. (98)
How is the world of modern high schools supposed to work? How do "jocks" and "weirdos" fit into such a realm? Where are "shooters"?
Research performed by cultural anthropologists in high schools revealed marked similarities between predominantly White, suburban, middle-class-identified (mainstream) American high schools (Eckert 1989; Foley 1990; Weis 1990; Wexler 1992). These studies suggest how mainstream schools set the stage for the production of oppositional peer groups, the development of hierarchical relationships between students from different peer-group locations.
Penelope Eckert (1989) studied "Belten High," a predominantly White, middle-class-identified, suburban, midwestern U.S. high school, serving students from middle-class and working-class circumstances. During two years at Belten, she documented two peer-group categories: Jocks and Burnouts. Jocks were not merely students affiliated with sports but rather students in the "leading crowd," "whose life-style embraces a broader ideal associated in American culture with sports. ... The high school Jock embodies an attitude--an acceptance of the school and its institutions as an all-encompassing social context, and an unflagging enthusiasm and energy for working within those institutions" (3).
Burnouts were "a rebellious crowd" who affiliated with a lifestyle formed in opposition to the middle-class ideals of Belten High. "The stereotypic Belten High Burnout came from a working-class home, enrolled primarily in general and vocational courses, smoked tobacco and pot, took chemicals, drank beer and hard liquor, skipped classes, and may have had occasional run-ins with the police" (3). Being expected to turn to adults in the schools for guidance countered Burnouts' working-class value of youths' looking out for one another. Schooling practices interfered with multiage Burnout friendships and Burnouts used antiestablishment behaviors (such as disrupting class and skipping school) to reaffirm their friendship arrangements. Burnouts "reject[ed] the hegemony of the school and in turn [felt] largely rejected by the school" (2).
By expressing themselves in terms of affiliation with or opposition to school authority, Jocks and Burnouts were related via a calculus of social polarization underpinned by socioeconomic class backgrounds, and this was reinforced in the intended curriculum of the school. Jocks were in the ascendant group and held more power in the school to influence school-related activities. These activities highlighted the Jock way of life. Homecoming, for instance, was a ritual that valorized Jocks through their being selected "king" and "queen," or attendants, being the focus as players or cheerleaders during pep rallies, and organizing and directing the decoration of floats for the parade. Thus, Jocks received public recognition of their statused locations, recognition that led to privileged treatment such as excused absences and more contact with teachers and other authority figures. In time, these privileges accrued into social goods (such as college admission and employment) that reinscribed social class distinctions.
In a study of "North Town High," a Texas border-town high school, Douglas Foley (1990) documented a student peer culture underpinned by racial-ethnic identity, social class, and gender constructs. As had been the case at Belten, successful White athletes, especially football players, held center stage. In the underclass, Latino football players were given less recognition than White teammates with similar levels of athletic ability. Students in the spotlight but supporting the football team--women cheerleaders and men band members (referred to as "band freaks" and "band fags")--were devalued relative to all football players. Terming men in the band "band fags" demarcated masculinity, and football players were more closely affiliated with being "real men" than were "band fags." And, those men and women thought of as fulfilling prototypically feminine roles had lower status.
Hierarchies also partitioned supposedly seamless groups. Among White young men, "town kids" who affiliated with middle-class ways of life held sway over "kickers"--a derogatory term for affiliating with agrarian (ranch), country-and-western, "cowboy" ways of life. Among Latinos, "vatos" were considered "delinquents" and "troublemakers" and held the lowest status as working-class Mexicanos. Foley's nuanced unpacking of high school life illustrated how racial-ethnic identity, social class, gender, and sexuality policed the boundaries of socially preferred behavior.
At a White college campus in the midcontinent, Andi O'Conor (1998) corroborated Eckert and Foley, especially male band members' subordinate place relative to football players:


Male band members were also low status, and were ostracized as "band fags," by students on campus, in spite of institutional privileges accorded them because of their relationship with certain high status varsity athletes. Male band members were also participating in a "feminine" role as boosters of the athletic teams, which likely contributed to their reputation as "fags." Band members were also often called "geeks" or "nerds," were routinely harassed by students during [football] games, and were shunned by some of the higher-status athletes such as female cheerleaders. ... I heard many comments from students about Denson [the dorm closest to the Music Building] being a "weird" dorm. (326-327)
O'Conor made clear that gender epithets and homophobic speech served to maintain the boundaries of privilege. Straight men students were marked as inferior through references to their being feminine (e.g., acting like a girl) and gay (e.g., being called a "band fag").
Taken together, Eckert, Foley, and O'Conor documented the ascendance of football players in White, middle-class-identified schools, something that media reports about Columbine corroborated, and the use of gender and sexuality constructs to delineate different ways to belong among White young men, something also seen at Columbine. None of these studies, however, addressed the issue of religious affiliation.
Elsasser (2000) provided an especially clear example of gendered religious socialization in a case study of a nondenominational Christian (evangelical) high school. It suggests how such religious organizations promote men's power over women, as well as how evangelical beliefs encode religious intolerance. Central to the evangelical school was a belief in submission theology: "the idea that the wife has less authority, specifically spiritual, than her husband" (3). In the school various interpretations of "submission" existed, ranging from all women must submit to all men, to wives must submit to husbands when no compromise can be reached (10).
Gender subordination underpinned the workings of the school. When men students took on school leadership roles--fulfilling their destiny consonant with religious training-- women accepted this. Leadership practices of the two most powerful young men, however, served to control women students' behaviors and to assert men's dominance, implying the more extreme interpretation of "submission." Not all women in the school were comfortable with this arrangement. Women's responses varied with some deferring and others warily expressing concerns that the men went too far. Conversations about these circumstances within the school tended to be about believers "getting right with God's teachings." Thus, the evangelical form of men's dominance (as opposed to sports-hero dominance) was explicitly taught by the school and grounded in Scripture--literally God's word--making challenging it a difficult task.
Other fundamental, evangelical beliefs may have played a part in the social hierarchy at Columbine. Two tenets in particular seem implicated in discussions about the memorial service prayer: believing in "the sinfulness of humanity and their need for salvation, coupled with resurrection of the saved into Heaven and the lost into Hell" (Elsasser 2000, 6). This was most evident at the statewide memorial service. The Reverend Franklin Graham gave the public prayer and invoked the name of Jesus seven times in under forty-five seconds as well as implied that the only way to live a religious life was through belief in Jesus (Denver Post 1999b). Such an expectation of belief in Christ seemed anti-Semitic to some. Ordinary, well-meaning members of several religious traditions in Colorado expressed concern that the evangelical prayer gave the impression that evangelical believers thought they were superior to others, that by implication nonbelievers were destined for damnation. Many (especially Jewish leaders) found the prayer divisive in a state where religious tolerance and separation of church and state have a long history. Nonetheless, the message was clear: Evangelical Christians were given center stage in the public expression of sorrow following the Columbine attack, and they used that power to advocate the supremacy of a narrow form of Christianity over all other religions.
Although some variation across schools exists, forms of race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and religious subordination are built into the way Americans talk about schools in suburbs. As demonstrated by Eckert, Foley, and O'Conor, the intended curriculum and extra-curricular activities of White, middle-class schools reinforce hierarchical relations underpinned by racist, sexist, classist, and heterosexist ideologies, elevating some at the expense of others. These cultural models are not static but are produced and reproduced through social interactions, the site where power relations are embodied, that is, given life through the actions of persons from different places in the social strata. Band members' being harassed by students at football games sent clear messages that some belonged in lower-status locations, even as conversely such harassment signaled the exalted status of football players.
These social interactions were barely hinted at for Columbine. In fact, media coverage obscured social-production processes for belonging by having little to say about the ways that school practices structured oppositional peer-group formation. I suspect that Columbine's "jocks" were a small subset of football players and their friends, those willing to use their power in inappropriate ways, such as in the after-school rock-throwing incidents reported by "weirdos." Many "weirdos" (some from Columbine) reported that administrators and teachers in their schools had turned a blind eye to their mistreatment. Some "weirdos" suggested that this gave them the impression that they must take matters into their own hands, although only "shooters" resorted to revenge violence. Although little studied in mainstream schools to date, evangelistic thought seemed to reinforce gender and religious dimensions of intolerance in Columbine hierarchies. Thus, Columbine students from remarkably homogeneous circumstances came to be sorted and ordered, with some being thought of as "better" and others as "different." Over time it became "normal" to consider "weirdos" people who did not belong, and they may have begun to disappear as legitimate stakeholders in schools. I suspect that becoming invisible as legitimate members of the school community was central to "shooters'" taking matters into their own hands. This was a new twist because earlier studies (e.g., Eckert 1989; Foley 1990; O'Conor 1998) did not encounter students advocating revenge violence, leaving us with few ways to make sense of this aspect.


ASSERTING PRIVILEGE WITH REVENGE VIOLENCE
Thinking about what might be different for "shooters," as compared to other disaffected youth, led me to examine social movements in the United States characterized by responses to perceived threats to White-male privilege. Two are suggested: "White loss" and White supremacy.
Combining findings from four varied research sites, Fine et al. (1997) coined the phrase "White loss" to characterize racist, sexist, heterosexist, and xenophobic explanations that "someone" was usurping White men's "rightful" place in the social order:


[How do] white males, working-class in particular, make sense of their dwindling bases of power[?] With no social movement to attach to, ripped from the nostalgic moorings of the nuclear family, church, and trade unionism, with little prospect of mortgages, of Catholic schools for their children, or of residing in a "safe community," these men are looking for someone to blame. While the workings of capital, the flight of jobs, and the devastation of the public sector escape largely unnoticed, black men, white women, and gays/lesbians are held accountable for their white misery. (Fine et al. 1997, 284)
These men's complaint was overwhelmingly about losing "property": "our" women, "our" jobs, and ultimately "our" place in society, an argument overlooking the underlying causes of their diminishing power.
Ferber (1999) argued that talk of this sort is not limited solely to working-class men. For example, Tonso (1999) found that a higher-status segment of white men student engineers (from middle-class circumstances and on a campus comprised of 15% racial and ethnic minorities and 20% women) thought of women as people infringing on men's "deserved" territory. Although the vast majority of men (students and professors) respected women's places in engineering, "went-too-far over-achievers" gave sophisticated reverse-discrimination arguments to justify their exploiting the work of women colleagues, arguments that turned men's privilege into an entitlement. Thus, men with these perceptions viewed leveling of the playing field as discrimination against men, in spite of the fact that these men continued to have higher status and prestige relative to other (men and women) students.
"Shooters'" actions suggest links to a White-loss rhetoric. Although "weirdos" implicated only "jocks" as the source of their mistreatment, "shooters'" hate speech and bullets were misdirected toward ethnic minorities, fundamentalist Christians, and high-achieving students at Columbine. As had Fine et al.'s respondents, "shooters" articulated a reason to feel like "outcasts" (such as harassment from "jocks") and developed a sense of misplaced blame.
"Shooters" also affiliated with the most extreme practitioners of White-male privilege: White supremacists. White supremacy provides an (illogical) explanation for perceived injustices that resonates with social hierarchies prevalent in U.S. society. And, it offers a solution to such "injustices" through taking matters into one's own hands, especially violence against others. In the main, White supremacy boils down to asserting that one deserves privilege over people of color, women, Jews, and gays and lesbians.
In Ferber's insightful book White Man Falling: Gender, Race, and White Supremacy (1999), she documented the virulent response to perceptions of declining fortunes and elaborated on how White supremacists think of themselves as people whose privilege is preordained and worth fighting (and killing) for. These lock-and-load adherents are well armed and have a long history of virulent racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and heterosexism. In fact, the particular form of domination practiced has its roots in lynchings, that peculiarly American tradition whereby some White men espouse an ownership model of gender relations and, as justification for killing Black men, assert their "proper" place in society as white women's protectors (Davis 1981). Thus, under the guise of "protecting" their White women, supremacist illogic justifies lynching Black men for "trespassing" on supremacist "property."
Evidence of the "shooters'" supremacist leanings came in the timing of their attack. It was no coincidence that the Columbine attack came on April 20, Adolf Hitler's birthday, Also, it occurred on the day after the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, an act of revenge violence in response to the government's intervention in Waco. It appears that the Waco and Oklahoma City events struck a responsive chord with the "shooters." Possibly, the "shooters" patterned themselves after the Oklahoma City bombers, men tried and convicted in a Denver Federal Court, making them somewhat more visible to "shooters" in Colorado than they might otherwise have been. However, the "shooters" did not take up the anti-Semitic doctrine of White supremacy as far as I could ascertain. Instead, the "shooters" seemed to associate evangelical beliefs with being "elite" and deserving revenuge violence.


MAINTAINING AND REGAINING PRIVILEGE
The cultural model of belonging at Columbine grew out of schooling practices that reinforced forms of privilege prevalent in U.S. society. Thus, Columbine peer-group culture lay at the confluence of racist, sexist, classist, heterosexist, evangelistic, and supremacist ideologies. Overwhelmingly, "normal" meant White, male, middle-class, straight, and often conservatively Christian, whereas "weird" meant failing to live up to these "standards." Actively not noticing these ideologies, as well as explaining them away with a rhetoric of normality, made them invisible to many in the White, suburban community. Furthermore, the community's segregation from groups affiliated with other racial/ethnic, religious, and economic roots (who might have promoted more expansive notions of normality) kept these ideologies invisible. Thus, a narrow-minded sense of "normal" set up the deadly tit-for-tat that culminated in the Columbine attack.
Via a discourse that conflated "jocks" with all "elites," and "shooters" with all "weirdos," such a model of belonging obscured the ideological allegiances between "jocks" and "shooters." When authorities glossed over differences between "shooters" and other "weirdos," they failed to appreciate how far some will go to become "visible." They also left unexamined bullying done by "jocks." This left "shooters" with a sense that they had to force people to notice them by taking matters into their own hands. "Shooters" used revenge violence to make a statement about their "rightful" place in society. Building bombs and amassing an arsenal for a deadly show of force provided a demonstration of power to counter the power mongering of "jocks." Thus, the behaviors of "shooters" were overwhelmingly about regaining "deserved" power that schooling distributed to "jocks." On both ends of the belonging spectrum, "jocks" and "shooters" were those students willing to use violence to maintain or regain privilege. This is, I fear, the legacy of racist, sexist, classist, heterosexist, evangelistic, supremacist ideologies: hate and intolerance that flow with and through White-male privilege--that of "jocks" and of "shooters."
ADDED MATERIAL
KAREN L. TONSO
Wayne State University
Correspondence should be addressed to Karen L. Tonso, Theoretical and Behavioral Foundations, #317 College of Education, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202. E-mail: karen.tonso@wayne.edu


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
An earlier version of this article was presented at the Humanities Colloquium at Wayne State University, November 14, 2000. Margaret Eisenhart, Monte Piliawsky, Mark Larson, and Linda Condron read a subsequent revision and their comments helped sharpen my arguments. I gratefully acknowledge the students and teachers at Alternative High for their wisdom and care. They picked me up when I felt only despair and cynicism. Even when many around them could see only fear and hate, they saw the need for their protest march and worked tirelessly to organize and produce it. Likewise, my students at Metropolitan State College, especially those in Anthropology of Education, gave me hope that some teachers understand the harm that alienation does our youth. Jrene Rahm, my friend and colleague from the University of Montreal, helped me decompress the evening of the attack and has steadfastly encouraged me to continue this line of thought and research.


FOOTNOTE
1. I borrowed the term "standardized schools" from students with whom I spoke after the Columbine tragedy. By it, they meant traditional (suburban) academic-prep high schools like Columbine.


REFERENCES
Davis, Angela. 1981. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Random House.
Denver Post (CO). (1999a). April 21, 1999, "High School Massacre: Columbine Bloodbath Leaves Up to 25 Dead," p. A-1; April 22, 1999, "World of Darkness: Comfortable Suburbs Harbor Troubled Teens," p. A-11; April 22, 1999, "Video, Poems Foretold Doom," p. A-10; April 22, 1999, "Massacre at Columbine High," p. A-25; April 25, 1999, "School Tragedy Reflects Gun Use: U.S. Death Rate Leads the World," p. A-1; April 25, 1999, "Diary Shows Gunmen Mapping Out Massacre: Officials Say Efforts Began a Year Ago," p. AA-1.
Denver Post (CO). (1999b). April 29, 1999, "Tone of Service Angers Some: One Minister Felt 'Hit Over the Head With Jesus,'" p. A-8; May 30, 1999, "From Solace to 'Satan': Do Columbine-Area Evangelists Soothe or Fuel Kids' Alienation?" p. G-1.
Eckert, Penelope. 1989. Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School. New York: Teachers College Press.
Eisenhart, Margaret, and Nancy Lawrence. 1994. "Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Culture of Romance." Pp. 94-121 in Sexual Artifice: Persons, Images, Politics. Edited by A. Kibbey, K. Short, and A. Farmanfarmaian. New York: New York University Press.
Elsasser, Stacey. 2000. The Intersection of "Amazing Grace" and "Faith of Our Fathers": Growing Up a Girl at a Christian School. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of American Educational Studies Association, Vancouver, BC, November 1-4, 2000.
Ferber, Abby L. 1999. White Man Falling: Gender, Race, and White Supremacy. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Fine, Michelle, Lois Weis, Judi Addelston, and Julia Marusza. 1997. "White Loss." Pp. 283-301 in Beyond Black and White: New Faces and Voices in U.S. Schools. Edited by Maxine Seller and Lois Fine. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Foley, Douglas E. 1990. Learning Capitalist Culture: Deep in the Heart of Tejas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
Katz, Jon. 2000. Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho. New York: Villard.
O'Conor, Andi. 1998. "The Cultural Logic of Gender in College: Heterosexism, Homophobia, and Sexism in Campus Peer Groups." Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Colorado, Boulder.
Tonso, Karen L. 1999. "Engineering Gender--Gendering Engineering: A Cultural Model for Belonging." Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering 5 (4): 365-404.
Weis, Lois. 1990. Working Class Without Work: High School Students in a De-industrializing Economy. New York: Routledge.
Wexler, Phillip. 1992. Becoming Somebody: Toward a Social Psychology of School. London: Falmer Press.



TITLE: Make Meaning, Not War: Rethinking the Video Game Violence Debate
SOURCE: Independent School 63 no4 38-44, 46-8 Summ 2004

The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher: http://www.nais.org/

Suppose a federal judge was asked to determine whether books were protected under the First Amendment. Instead of seeking expert testimony, examining the novel's historical evolution, or surveying the range of the local bookstore, let's say the judge chose four books, all within the same genre, to stand for the entire medium. Teachers and librarians would rise up in outrage. Right? So, where were educators when they tried to take video games away?
On April 19, 2002, U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh, Sr. ruled that video games have "no conveyance of ideas, expression or anything else that could possibly amount to speech" and, thus, enjoy no constitutional protection. Limbaugh had been asked to evaluate the constitutionality of a Saint Louis law that restricted youth access to violent or sexually explicit content. Constitutional status has historically rested on a medium's highest potential, not its worst excesses. Limbaugh essentially reversed this logic -- saying that unless all games expressed ideas, then no game should be protected.
The judge didn't look hard for meaning in games, having already decided (again, contrary to well established legal practice) that works whose primary purpose was to entertain could not constitute artistic or political expression. Saint Louis County had presented the judge with videotaped excerpts from four games, all within a narrow range of genres, and all the subject of previous controversy.
Several-years ago Jenkins, 2000), I warned Independent School readers about the chilling effects that our country's "moral panic" following the Columbine shootings was having on American education, explaining that a "ritual humiliation" of Hollywood in Washington, DC, was translating into a "witch hunt" against kids who were culturally different. Now, I want to ask you to consider the claims about education that are being made in the public policy debates about video games, arguing that educational interventions, rather than regulatory actions, may be the most effective response to the perceived negative impact of violent entertainment on the young.
Why should educators get involved in the debate? The Pew Internet and American Life Center (2003) reported the results of a survey of more than a thousand undergraduates from 27 American colleges and universities. One hundred percent of all respondents had played computer games; 65 percent described themselves as regular or occasional gamers. What's true for college is true, in varying degrees, for the precollegiate world. A high percentage of high school and middle school students are playing games and bringing into the classroom an interest in and knowledge of these games. In short, video games are a part of student life, and we need to understand not only the attraction of this activity, but also how we can help them to make this activity a meaningful one.
The debate boils down to the distinction between "effects" and "meanings." Limbaugh and company see games as having social and psychological "effects." In particular, they are concerned that playing games increases the likelihood of violent and antisocial conduct. They also argue that children are particularly susceptible to confusing fantasy and reality. Their critics, on the other hand, argue that gamers produce "meanings" through game play and related activities. Effects are seen as emerging more or less spontaneously, with little conscious effort, and are not accessible to self-examination. Meanings emerge through an active process of interpretation; they reflect our conscious engagement; they can be articulated into words; and they can be critically examined. New meanings take shape around what we already know and what we already think, and, thus, each player will come away from a game with a unique experience and interpretation.
I do not come at this debate between the "effects" and "meanings" models as a neutral observer. Based on my research into the place of video games in boy culture, I testified before the United States Senate Commerce Committee about "marketing violent entertainment to youth." I went around the country speaking at high schools and listening to what students, parents, and teachers had to say about the place of violent entertainment in their lives. At trade shows and individual companies, I conducted a series of creative leaders workshops designed to foster innovation, diversity, and artistic responsibility within the games industry. I helped to found a major research initiative, The Education Arcade (www.educationarcade.org), which seeks to examine games' educational potential and foster media literacy training. I was one of more than 30 scholars from different disciplines who filed an amicus brief contesting and helping to overturn the Limbaugh decision. So, in many ways, this article is a report from the front lines.
Higher courts reversed the Limbaugh decision and the St. Louis ordinance seems to be dead for the moment. Yet, similar city and state regulations are being proposed and contested. We have not heard the end of this debate. So it's important that, as educators, we decide where we stand in this debate -- as we draft digital policies (which may allow or exclude the use of games in computer labs or dorm rooms) or consider more broadly whether or not game playing constitutes a warning sign of antisocial personalities or conversely, as we imagine new ways that we may deploy games as educational resources in our classes.
I have two main goals here. First, I want to help teachers to better understand the terms of this debate. Both sides talk about games as "teaching machines," but what they mean by learning, education, and teaching differs dramatically. Second, I want to describe some contemporary efforts to use games as a springboard for discussing and learning about the place of violence within our culture.


THE EFFECTS MODEL
David Grossman (2000), a retired military psychologist and West Point instructor, argues that violent video games teach kids to kill in more or less the same ways that the military trains soldiers. He identifies "brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and role modeling" as the basic mechanisms by which boot camps prepare raw recruits for the battlefield. Each of these methods, he suggests, have their parallels in the ways players interact with many computer games. Kids are "brutalized" by over-exposure to representations of violence at an age when they cannot yet distinguish between representation and reality. They are 'conditioned" by being consistently rewarded for in-game violence. Soldiers in boot camp rehearse what they are going to do on the battlefield until it becomes second nature. Similarly, Grossman claims, 'Every time a child plays an interactive point-and-shoot video game, he is learning the exact same conditioned reflex and motor skills." Such "practice," he contends, helped prepare school shooters for the real world violence they would commit. The shooters in Littleton and Jonesboro did exactly what they were "conditioned" to do: "reflexively pulled the trigger, shooting accurately just like all those times [they] played video games. This process is extraordinarily powerful and frightening. The result is ever more homemade pseudo-sociopaths who kill reflexively and show no remorse. Our children are learning to kill and learning to like it." Finally, Grossman argues, soldiers learn by mimicking powerful role models and players learn by imitating the behaviors they see modeled on the screen.
The problem with Grossman's model is that it leaves no room for meaning, interpretation, evaluation, or expression. Grossman assumes almost no conscious cognitive activity on the part of the gamers, who, in his view, have all of the self-consciousness of Pavlov's dogs. Indeed, he reverts to a behaviorist model of education that has long been discredited. Grossman sees games as shaping our reflexes, our impulses, our emotions, almost without regard to our previous knowledge and experience. And it is precisely because such conditioning escapes any conscious policing that Grossman believes games represent such a powerful mechanism for reshaping our behavior.
Grossman's argument is easy to latch on to because it reaffirms the distaste many educators feel for the contents of popular culture and cagily exploits liberal discomfort with the military mindset. Many teachers are already concerned that time spent playing games often comes at the expense of what they would see as more educationally or culturally beneficial activities. And Grossman is not alone in his professional views. Educational psychologist Eugene Provenzo (2001) adopts a similar position: "The computer or video game is a teaching machine. Here is the logic: highly skilled players learn the lessons of the game through practice. As a result, they learn the lesson of the machine and its software -- and thus achieve a higher score. They are behaviorally reinforced as they play the game and thus they are being taught." Yet, if we think critically about the claims Grossman is making, they would seem to be at odds with our own classroom experiences and with what we know about how education works. This effects model is one of stimulus/response, not conscious reflection.
As a teacher, I may fantasize about being able to decide exactly what I want my students to know, and transmit that information to them with sufficient skill and precision so that every student in the room learns exactly what I want them to learn. But, in real-world education, each student pays attention to some parts of the lesson and ignores or forgets others. Each has his or her own motivation for learning. Previous understandings and experience color how students interpret my words. Some may disregard my words altogether. There is, in short, a huge difference between education and indoctrination.
Add to this the fact that video game players don't sit down at their consoles to learn a lesson. Their attention is even more fragmented; their goals are even more personal; they aren't going to be tested on what they learn. And they tend to dismiss anything they encounter in fantasy or entertainment that is not consistent with what they believe to be true about the real world. The military uses games as part of a specific curriculum with clearly defined goals, in a context where students actively want to learn and have a clear need for the information and skills being transmitted. Soldiers have signed up to defend their country with their lives, so there are clear consequences for not mastering those skills. Grossman's model only works if we assume that players are not capable of rational thought, ignore critical differences in how and why people play games, and remove training or education from any meaningful cultural context.


THE MEANINGS MODEL
Humanistic researchers have also made the case that games can be powerful teaching tools. In his recent book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003), James Gee describes game players as active problem solvers who "do not see mistakes as errors but as opportunities for reflection and learning" and who are constantly searching newer, better solutions to obstacles and challenges. Players are encouraged to constantly form and test hypotheses about the game world. "The game," Gee writes, "often operates within, but at the outer edge of, the learner's resources, so that at many points the game is felt as challenging but not undoable." Increasingly, games are designed to be played successfully by players with very different goals and skill sets.
For Gee, the most powerful dimension of game playing is what he calls "projective identity," arguing that role-playing enables us to experience the world from alternative perspectives. Terminology here is key: identity is projected (chosen or at least accepted by the player, actively constructed through game play) rather than imposed. Gee, for example, discusses Ethnic Cleansing, a game designed by Aryan Nation to foster white supremacy. For many students, he notes, playing the game will encourage critical thinking about the roots of racism and reaffirm their own commitments to social justice rather than provoking race hatred. Whether the game's ideas are persuasive depends on the player's backgrounds, experiences, and previous commitments. Games, like other media, are most powerful when they reinforce our existing beliefs, and least effective when they challenge our values.
While Provenzo and Grossman worry about players being forced to conform to machine logic, Gee suggests that active participation enables players to map their own goals and agendas into the game space.
Another humanistic researcher, Kurt Squire (2003), has been studying what kinds of things game players might learn about social studies through playing Civilization III (the third game in Sid Meier's best-selling Civilization series) in classroom environments. His work provides a vivid account of how game-based learning builds upon players' existing beliefs and takes shape within a cultural context. Students can win the game several ways, roughly lining up with political, scientific, military, cultural, or economic victories. Players seek out geographical resources, manage economies, plan the growth of their civilization, and engage in diplomacy with other nation-states. Squire's research has focused on students performing well below grade-level expectations. The students largely hated social studies, which they saw as propaganda. Several minority students were not interested in playing the game -- until they realized that it was possible to win the game playing as an African or Native American civilization. These kids then took great joy in studying hypothetical history, exploring the conditions under which colonial conquests might have played out differently. Squire's study showed that teachers played an important role in learning, directing students' attention, shaping questions, and helping them interpret events. A central part of the teacher's role was to set the tone of the activity -- to frame game play as an investigation into alternative history as opposed to just learning directly from the game.
Squire asks what meanings these students take from playing games and what factors -- in the game, in the player, and in the classroom environment -- shape the interpretations they form. These kids are taught to explore their environment, make connections between distinct developments, form interpretations based on making choices and playing out their consequences, and map those lessons onto their understanding of the real world.
As we move games into the classroom, teachers can play a vital role in helping students to become more conscious about the assumptions shaping their simulations. Yet, such issues also crop up spontaneously online where gamers gather to talk strategy or share game playing experiences. Just as classroom culture plays a key role in shaping how learning occurs, the social interactions between players -- what is called "meta-gaming" - is a central factor shaping the meanings they ascribe to the represented actions. Almost 60 percent of frequent video game players play with friends, 33 percent play with siblings, and 25 percent play with spouses or parents (ESA, 2003). As Ted Friedman (1999) notes in regard to Civilization, players need to know how the game thinks (and the blind-spots in its assumptions) in order to beat it. And this means that as players discuss how to win games, they are also thinking about the assumptions underlying rule systems and simulations.
Sociologist Talmadge Wright (2002) has logged many hours observing how online communities interact with violent video games, concluding that meta-gaming provides a context for thinking about rules and rule-breaking. There are really two games taking place simultaneously -- one, the explicit conflict and combat on the screen, the other, the implicit cooperation and comradeship between the players. Two players may be fighting to death on screen and growing closer as friends off screen. Within the "magic circle," (Salens and Zimmerman, 2003) then, we can let go of one set of constraints on our actions because we have bought into another set of constraints. The rules of society give way to the rules of the game, yet social expectations are reaffirmed through the social contract governing play even as they are symbolically cast aside within the transgressive fantasies represented within the games.
Comparative Media Studies graduate student Zhan Li (2003) researched the online communities that grew up around America's Army, an online game developed as part of the U.S. military's recruitment efforts. Li even interviewed players as the first bombs were being dropped on Baghdad. Veterans and current GIs were often critical of the casual and playful attitudes with which nonmilitary people play the game. For the veterans, playing the game represented a place to come together and talk about the way that war had impacted their lives. Many discussions surrounded the design choices the military made in order to promote official standards of behavior -- such as preventing players from fragging teammates in the back or rewarding them for ethical and valorous behavior. The military had built the game to get young people excited about military service. Yet, it turns out, they had created something more -- a place where civilians and service folk could discuss the serious experience of real-life war.
Games do represent powerful tools for learning -- if we understand learning in a more active, meaning-driven sense. The problem comes when we make too easy an assumption about what is being learned just by looking at the surface features of the games. As Gerard Jones (2002) notes in his book, Killing Monsters, media reformers tend to be incredibly literal-minded in reading game images while players are not. "In focusing so intently on the literal," he writes, awe overlook the emotional meaning of stories and images.... Young people who reject violence, guns, and bigotry in every form can sift through the literal contents of a movie, game, or song and still embrace the emotional power at its heart."


MEANINGFUL VIOLENCE?
Not every gamer thinks deeply about his or her play experiences, nor does every designer reflect upon the meanings attached to violence in their works. Most contemporary games do little to encourage players to reflect and converse about the nature of violence. But media reformers often fail to make even the most basic distinctions about different kinds of representations of violence (Heins, 2002). For example, The American Academy of Pediatrics (2001) reported that 100 percent of all animated feature films produced in the United States between 1937 and 1999 portrayed violence. For this statistic to be true, the researcher must define violence so broadly as to be meaningless. Does the violence that occurs when hunters shoot Bambi's mother mean the same thing as the violence that occurs when giant robots smash each other in a Japanese anime movie, for example? What percentage of books taught in English classes would be deemed violent by these same criteria? The reform groups are battling a monolith, "media violence," rather than helping our culture to make meaningful distinctions between different ways of representing violence.
In its 2002 decision striking down an Indianapolis law regulating youth access to violent games, the Federal Court of Appeals (Posner, 2001) noted: "Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low. It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware. To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it."
Historically, cultures have used stories to make sense of the senseless acts of violence. Telling stories about violence can, in effect, remove some of its sting and help us comprehend acts that shatter our normal frames of meaning. When culture warriors and media reformers cite examples of violent entertainment, they are almost always drawn to works that are explicitly struggling with the meaning of violence, works that have won critical acclaim or cult status in part because they break with the formulas through which our culture normally employs violence. They rarely cite banal, formulaic, or aesthetically uninteresting works, though such works abound in the marketplace. It is as if the reformers are responding to the work's own invitations to struggle with the costs and consequences of violence, yet their literal minded critiques suggest an unwillingness to deal with those works with any degree of nuance. These works are condemned for what they depict, not examined for what they have to say.
Like all developing media, the earliest games relied on fairly simpleminded and formulaic representations of violence. Many games were little more than shooting galleries where players were encouraged to blast everything that moves. As game designers have discovered and mastered their medium, they have become increasingly reflective about the player's experience of violent fantasy. Many current games are designed to be ethical testing grounds; the discussions around such games provide a context for reflection on the nature of violence.
The Columbine shootings and their aftermath provoked soul-searching within the games industry -- more than might meet the eye to someone watching shifts in games content from the outside. As game designers grappled with their own ethical responsibilities, they have increasingly struggled to find ways to introduce some moral framework or some notion of consequence into their work. Because these designers work within industrial constraints and well-defined genres, these changes are subtle, not necessarily the kinds of changes that generate headlines or win the approval of reform groups. Yet, they impact the game play and have sparked debate among designers, critics, and players.


TOWARDS MORE REFLECTIVE GAME DESIGN
Games, The Sims designer Will Wright (personal interview) argues, are perhaps the only medium that allows us to experience guilt over the actions of fictional characters. In a movie, because we do not control what occurs, we can always pull back and condemn the character or the artist when they cross social taboos, but in playing a game, we choose what happens to the characters. In the right circumstances, we can be encouraged to examine our own values by seeing what we are willing to do within virtual space. Wright's own contribution has been to introduce a rhetoric of mourning into the video game. In The Sims, if a character dies, the surviving characters grieve over the loss. Such images are powerful reminders that death has human costs.
Wright has compared The Sims to a dollhouse within which we can reenact domestic rituals and dramas. As such, he evokes a much older tradition of doll play. In the 19th century (Formanek-Brunnell, 1998), doll funerals were a recognized part of the culture of doll play, a way children worked through their anxieties about infant mortality or later, about the massive deaths caused by the Civil War. Today, players use The Sims as a psychological workshop, testing the limits of the simulation (often by acting out violent fantasies among the residents) but also using the simulation to imitate real world social interactions. As The Sims has moved online, it has become a social space where players debate alternative understandings of everyday life. Some see the fantasy world as freeing them from constraints and consequences. Others see the online game as a social community that must define and preserve a social contract. These issues have come to head as some players have banded together into organized crime families seeking to rule territories, while others have become law enforcers trying to protect their fledgling communities.
As a game's representations and simulations become more sophisticated, enabling players to set their own goals within richly detailed and highly responsive environments, the opportunities for ethical reflection have grown. Morrowind, a fantasy role-playing game, gives characters memories across their family line. Christopher Weaver (personal interview), founder of Bethesda Softworks which produced the game, explains that he wanted to show the "interconnectedness of lives" in a society governed by strong loyalties to families or clans: "The underlying social message being that one may not know the effect of his or her actions upon the future, but one must guide his or her present actions with an awareness of such potential ramifications."
Grand Theft Auto 3 is one of the most controversial games on the market today because of its vivid representations of violence. Yet, it also represents a technical breakthrough in game design that may lead to more meaningful representations of violence in games. The protagonist has escaped from prison. What kind of life is he going to build for himself? The player interacts with more than 60 distinctive characters and must choose from among a range of possible alliances with various gangs and crime syndicates. Every object responds as it would in the real world; the player can exercise enormous flexibility in where he or she can go and what he or she can do in this environment. Certain plot devices cue possible missions, which include expectations of violence, but nothing stops the player from stealing an ambulance and racing injured people to the hospital or grabbing a fire truck and putting out blazes or simply walking around town. Some of what happens is outrageous and offensive but this open-ended structure puts the burden on the user to make choices and explore the consequences of those choices. If you choose to use force, you are going to attract the police. The more force, the more cops. Pretty soon, you're going down. Every risk you take comes with a price. Violence leaves physical marks. Early on, players act out, seeing how much damage and mayhem they can inflict, but more experienced players tell me they often see how long they can go without breaking any laws, viewing this as a harder and more interesting challenge. A richer game might offer a broader range of options -- including allowing the player to go straight, get a job, and settle into the community.
Peter Molyneux designs games that encourage ethical reflection. In Black&White, the player functions as a god-like entity, controlling the fates of smaller creatures. Your moral decisions to help or abuse your creatures map themselves directly onto the game world: malicious actions make the environment darker and more gnarly and virtuous actions make the world flower and glisten. Most players find it hard to be purely good or purely evil. Most enter into ethical gray areas, and in so doing, start to ask some core philosophical and theological questions. His newest game, Fable, takes its protagonist from adolescence to old age and every choice along the way has consequences in terms of the kind of person you will become and the kind of world you will inhabit. If you work out, you will grow muscles. If you pig out, you will get fat. If you carve your initials in a tree, the tree remains scarred as it grows. If you trample your seedlings, the trees will not grow. By living an accelerated lifetime within the game world, teens get to see the long-term impact of their choices on their own lives and those of people around them.


FOSTERING GAMES LITERACY
If design innovations are producing games that support more reflection and discussion, media literacy efforts can expand the frameworks and vocabulary players bring to those discussions. Around the country, people are beginning to experiment with both classroom and after-school programs designed to foster games literacy. The best such programs combine critical analysis of existing commercial games with media production projects that allow students to re-imagine and re-invent game content. What kids learn is that current commercial games tell a remarkably narrow range of stories and adopt an even narrower range of perspectives on the depicted events. Rethinking game genres can encourage greater diversity and, in doing so, introduce new contexts for thinking about game violence.
OnRamp Arts, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit arts organization, conducted an after-school violence prevention workshop for students at Belmont High School, a 90-percent Latino public school in downtown Los Angeles. Students critiqued existing games, trying to develop a vocabulary for talking about the ways they represented the world. Students created digital superhero characters (like a rock-playing guerilla fighter, a man who transforms into a low-rider, or a peace-loving mermaid) that reflected their own cultural identities and built digital models of their homes and communities as a means of thinking about game space. Students studied their family histories and turned immigration stories into game missions, puzzles, and systems. In other words, they imagined games that might more fully express their own perspectives and experiences.
In the second phase, students, teachers, and local artists worked together to create a web game, Tropical America. Because so many of the kids working on the project were first or second generation immigrants, the project increasingly came to focus on the conquest and colonization of the Americas. Jessica Irish, one of the project's directors, said that the greatest debate centered on what kind of role the protagonist should play. Through resolving that question, students came away with a more powerful understanding of the meaning and motivation of violence in games.
In Tropical America, the player assumes the role of the sole survivor of a 1981 massacre in El Salvador, attempting to investigate what happened to this village and why. In the process, the player explores some 500 years of the history of the colonization of Latin America, examining issues of racial genocide, cultural dominance, and the erasure of history. Winners of the game become "Heroes of the Americas" and in the process, they uncover the name of another victim of the actual slaughter. Students had to master the history themselves, distilling it down to core events and concepts, and determine what images or activities might best express the essence of those ideas. They enhanced the game play with an encyclopedia that allowed players to learn more about the historical references and provided a space where meta-gaming could occur. Rather than romanticizing violence, the kids dealt with the political violence and human suffering that led their parents to flee from Latin America.
Rethinking the debates about media violence in terms of meanings rather than effects has pushed us in two important directions: on the one hand, it has helped us to see the ways that game designers and players are rethinking the consequences of violence within existing commercial games. These shifts in thinking may be invisible as long as the debate is framed in terms of the presence or absence of violence rather than in terms of what the violence means and what features of the game shape our responses to it. On the other hand, a focus on meaning, rather than effects, has helped us to identify some pedagogical interventions that can help students develop the skills and vocabulary needed to think more deeply about the violence they encounter in the culture around them. Through media literacy efforts like OnRampArt's Tropical America project, teachers, students, and local artists are working together to envision alternative ways of representing violence in games and, in the process, to critique the limitations of current commercial games. Students are encouraged to think about the media from the inside out: assuming the role of media-makers and thinking about their own ethical choices.
Such educational interventions are still few and far between. They are under-funded and underpublicized, and often occur in isolation. One of the goals of the newly launched Education Arcade is to explore the potential educational uses of games. Our focus includes the development of new games specifically designed for classroom use, the development of curricular and teacher training materials to support the use of existing commercial games for pedagogical purposes, the building of shared resources that teachers can draw upon to build their own games, the management of an online forum where teachers and designers can share notes, and the effort to consolidate and publicize best practices in the emerging field of games literacy education. My hope is that this discussion has offered a new framework for thinking about the challenge of game violence and, beyond that, has helped you to realize why game playing can be a meaningful activity.


SOURCES
American Academy of Pediatrics (2001). Committee on Public Education, Policy Statement on Media Violence. aappolicy. aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/ pediatrics; 108/5/1222.
Entertainment Software Association (2003). "Top Ten Industry Facts" www.theesa.com/pressroom.html.
Formanek-Brunnel, Miriam (1998). "The Politics of Dollhood in 19th Century America," in Henry Jenkins (ed.) The Children's Culture Reader (New York: New York University Press).
Friedman, Ted (1999). "Civilization and Its Discontents: Simulation, Subjectivity and Space." On a Silver Platter: CD-ROMs and the Promises of a New Technology. Ed. Greg M. Smith (New York: New York University Press) available online at www.duke.edu/ˇ­tlove/civ.htm.
Gee, James (2001) What Video Games Have to Tell Us About Learning and Literacy (New York: Palgrave).
Grossman, David (2000). "Teaching Kids to Kill," Phi Kappa Phi "National Forum," www.killology.org/article_teachkid.htm.
Heins, Marjorie (2002). Brief Amica Curiae of Thirty Media Scholars, submitted to the United States Court of Appeals, Eight Circuit, Interactive Digital Software Association et al vs. St. Louis County et al., www.fepproject.org/courtbriefs/stlouissummary.html.
Jenkins, Henry (2000). "Lessons from Littleton: What Congress Doesn't Want You to Hear About Youth and Media," Independent School.
Jenkins, Henry (2002) "Coming Up Next: Ambushed on 'Donahue'," Salon, www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/20/ jenkins_on_donahue/.
Jones, Gerard (2002). Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence (New York: Basic).
Li, Zhan (2003). The Potential of America's Army the Video Game as Civilian-Military Public Sphere, masters thesis, Comparative Media Studies Program, MIT.
Pozner, Richard (2001). U.S. Court of Appeals, American Amusement Machine Association, et al., Plaintiffs -- Appellants, v. TERI KENDRICK, et al. as quoted at www.fepproject.org/courtbriefs/kendricksummary.html.
Provenzo, Eugene (2002). "Children and Hypereality: The Loss of the Real in Contemporary Childhood and Adolescence," draft presented at University of Chicago Cultural Policy Center conference, available online at culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu/conf2001/papers/ provenzo.html.
Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmerman (2003). Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge: MIT Press).
Squire, Kurt (2004). Replaying history: Learning world history through playing Civilization III. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana University School of Education. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University.
Wright, Talmadge (2002). "Creative Player Actions in FPS Online Video Games: Playing Counter-Strike," Game Studies, December, www.gamestudies.org/0202/ wright/.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE)
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE)
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE)
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE)
ADDED MATERIAL
Henry Jenkins is director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the founders of The Education Arcade (www.educationarcade.org).



http://www.apa.org/science/psa/sb-anderson.html


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1295920.stm


http://www.gamespot.com/features/6090892/
Post A Comment