Killer Video Games And Cash Grabs?

The following was originally intended as a “Letter To The Editor” of the Hamilton Spectator, in response to an article about the Ubisoft Toronto studio deal.  You can read that column here… but here’s what stuck out to me.

If using tax dollars to assist a foreign private-sector company is an iffy proposition, the thread becomes even more frayed when you look at some of the games in Ubisoft’s roster.

Assassin’s Creed enables players to experience the thrill of murdering people in Renaissance Italy. Red Steel allows you to feel the power and freedom of slaying your enemies with bullet and blade.

{snipped for repetitive inaccurate examples}

The McGuinty government’s investment is offering concrete support and official blessings to amoral games that both glorify and trivialize violence and, arguably, contribute to anti-social behaviour — all in the name of business.

It especially stuck out to me because the tone suggests that Ontario is giving free money to a GASP! French! company, which is nonsense, but just this week, Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! covered the ‘video games as slaughterhouse training ground’ meme.  On a more ‘business angle’, The Globe and Mail’s Marcus Gee complains about the ‘grant’ when it’s actually a tax break, not free money for Ubisoft.  But I digress.

On with the reply…

Discussing the ‘surface’ returns, as you call it, in the Ubisoft studio development, the very basic investment of $263m over 10 years is half of the $500m that Ubisoft brings to the province, which wouldn’t have been coming here if the deal weren’t struck. On the ‘surface’, that’s a net gain of $237m.

Though I understand the need to question a heavy investment such as the one McGuinty’s Liberals have made in the Ubisoft deal, breaking the numbers down in the way you presented in the article is hardly an accurate representation of exactly how much Ubisoft brings to the table, not just in terms of the aforementioned money, but in what it means to related businesses, as well as local businesses in general. This totally ignores the boost in the status of Ontario as a creative center, especially in the film an animation departments, since the city is full of creative, talented people, with some of the best post secondary animation schools in North America.

I’m no economic major by any stretch of the imagination, but I commend your honesty when you describe your own analysis as a ‘surface’ one, since the nature of the $263 million investment is not a quater billion dollar hand out, or ‘grant’, as some have called it.  The investment comes from lowered tax incentives up to the full amount over the term of the deal, and said money will only be saved by Ubisoft if they maintain their commitment to the Toronto studio over that time period.

I also couldn’t help but find the rhetorical elements of the article regarding the violence in some of Ubisoft’s games was meant solely to inflame outrage. The descriptions were quite simplistic (and somewhat factually inaccurate), especially for a game as generally well-received as Assassin’s Creed.

Ultimately, a line like:

But there’s no escaping the fact the McGuinty government’s investment is offering concrete support and official blessings to amoral games that both glorify and trivialize violence and, arguably, contribute to anti-social behaviour — all in the name of business.

Shouldn’t appear in any publication that has actually bothered to read the research on the relationship between video games and violence. Since the early 1980s, when video games went from a niche sub-culture to an industry that has surpassed the record industry and is nipping at (or taking sizeable chunks out of) the heels of the film industry (and the graphic realism has also grown exponentially), youth violence has actually decreased. If the amoral cultural cesspool of videogames were turning kids into mass murderers, then surely there should be a HUGE surge of violent criminal behaviour. However…

First, the statistical evidence. It is somewhat ironic, given the current public debate about crime, that the most recent statistical data shows that the crime rate actually dropped yet again in 2007 over the year previous. This continued a trend that has been documented in Canada for decades and in fact, the 2007 represented the lowest percentage rate in 30 years! (http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/85-002-XIE/85-002-XIE2008007.pdf [PDF LINK]). The violent crime rate also fell by 3%, making it the lowest since 1989, and reversing a slight upward trend noted for the two years prior.

From: http://www.johnhoward.ab.ca/PUB/closerlk/closerlk.pdf [PD

Of course such facts are generally obscured by a media bent on the “if it bleeds it leads” mentality, and sells more papers by feeding ignorance and sowing fear instead of enlightening and educating. Oddly enough, this is also a trend that started in the 1980s. The amount of airtime given to murder/rape/child abduction crimes has grown as much over the past two decades as the actual crime rates have decreased.

I’d do more research to back it up, but I’m not a real journalist, I just play one on the internet (when I’m not assassinating people on either side of the religious divide in Assassin’s Creed, that is).

Oh, as a matter of synchronicity, while I was looking for the crime stats online, I stumbled upon the latest episode of Penn & Tellers Bullshit (conveniently about the supposed link between video game and real life violence) which aired just this past week. Here’s part one Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBtxB_PnCTo (with parts two and three in the related videos link).

Depending on your demeanour, you may or may not find it entertaining, but it offers up much of the same that I do here, but using US data, which shows that video games are not turning the youth of today into deadly assassins, any more than Motley Crue did over 20 years ago.