A Nurturing Society

Excerpt from the book Masters of Doom icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 by David Kushner icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12

David Kushner's "Masters of Doom" book cover. [Formatted]

     Like a lot of parents in 1993, Bill Andersen knew exactly what his nine-year-old son wanted for Christmas: Mortal Kombat. The home version of the violent arcade fighting game was the hottest thing going, eclipsing even Street Fighter II with over 6.5 million sales. Andersen lamented about the game to his boss, an ambitious Democratic senator from Connecticut named Joseph Lieberman. Senator Lieberman listened intently to his chief of staff. He wanted to see the game for himself.
     Mortal Kombat defied his imagination. Secret moves let players rip the spines from their opponents in gushes of blood on screen. More distressing to the senator, gamers seemed to prefer the brutality; the more graphically gory version of Mortal Kombat for the Sega Genesis home video game system was outselling the blood-free version for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System three to one. The success of the Sega version had dealt a staggering blow to Nintendo, which had demanded that the developer of the game, Acclaim, remove the controversial “death moves” to adhere to the company’s family values. By choosing to release the blood-and-guts version, Sega became the new must-have system, racking up nearly 15 million units in sales. Nintendo’s squeaky clean perch, for the first time in the industry’s history, was gone.
     And this wasn’t the only such game. Senator Lieberman came across Night Trap, a big-budget title for the new Sega system that included live-action footage of scantily clad sorority girls—including one portrayed by Dana Plato, former child star on the TV show Diff’rent Strokes—being attacked by vampires. Violent films like Reservoir Dogs and Terminator 2 had conquered Hollywood; now an edgier, more aggressive video game age seemed to be dawning too. On December 1, 1993, Senator Lieberman called a press conference to blow the whistle.
     Beside him sat Democratic senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, chairperson of the Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice and chair of the Subcommittee on Government Regulation and Information. Senator Lieberman was also joined by a somber Captain Kangaroo, the children’s television host Bob Keeshan. Kohl said, “The days of Lincoln Logs and Matchbox cars” had been replaced by “video games complete with screams of pain [that] are enough to give adults nightmares.” Keeshan warned of “the lessons learned by a child as an active participant in violence-oriented video games… lessons the thinking parent would shun like a plague. Indeed it could become a plague upon their house.” He urged game developers to “understand their role in a nurturing society.”
     Senator Lieberman took it as a call to arms. “After watching these violent video games,” he said, “I personally believe it is irresponsible for some in the video game industry to produce them. I wish we could ban them.”
     This wasn’t the first time that America’s political and moral establishment had tried to save youth from their own burgeoning culture. Shortly after the Civil War, religious leaders assailed pulp novels as “Satan’s efficient agents to advance his kingdom by destroying the young.” In the twenties, motion pictures were viewed as the new corrupter of children, inspiring sensational media-effects research that would be cited for decades. In the fifties, Elvis was shown only from the waist up on television; MAD magazine’s publisher, William Gaines, was brought before Congress. In the seventies, Dungeons and Dragons, with all its demons and sorcery, became associated with Satanism, particularly after a player enacting the game disappeared under the steam tunnels of a Michigan university. In the eighties, heavy metal artists like Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne were sued for allegedly invoking young listeners to commit suicide. In the nineties, video games were the new rock ‘n’ roll—dangerous and uncontrolled.
     This sentiment was a long time coming. The roots were in the thirties, when pinball arcades were thought to be havens for hoodlums and gamblers. New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia placed a ban on pinball that lasted until the mid-seventies. By then the controversial arcade game Death Race, which featured players driving over pedestrianlike stick figures, had made headlines. As the golden age of arcade and home video games exploded into a $6 billion industry in the early eighties, concerns over the potential ill effects on children exploded.
     In 1982 the national Parent Teacher Association issued a statement decrying game arcades. “The PTA is concerned over the increasing number of video game sites which may have an adverse effect on many of the young people who frequent such establishments… Initial studies have shown that game sites are often in close proximity to schools. In many cases there is not adequate control of access by school-age children during school hours, which compounds the problem of school absenteeism and truancy. Where little or no supervision exists, drug-selling, drug use, drinking, gambling, increased gang activities and other such behaviors may be seen.”
     Cities including Mesquite, Texas; Bradley, Illinois; and Snellville, Georgia, began to restrict or ban access to arcades. “Children are putting their book fees, lunch money, and all the quarters they can get their hands on into these machines,” said Bradley’s mayor in 1982 after he saw “hundreds of teenagers smoking marijuana in a video arcade in a nearby town.” Though the Supreme Court overturned the bans following the Mesquite incident, countries including Malaysia, the Philipines, Singapore, and Indonesia not only banned video games but shut down arcades.
     The media began to stoke the flames with headlines like “Video Games—Fun or Serious Threat?” in U.S. News & World Report and “Video game Fever—Peril or Payoff for the Computer Generation” in Children’s Health. “The video game craze,” said the newscaster Robert MacNeil on PBS, “is it warping young minds or educating them for the future?”
     Scientists, academics, and various pundits struggled to come up with the answers. C. Everett Koop, the U.S. surgeon general, fired a sensational salvo when he stated that video games were causing “aberrations in childhood behavior.” Children are into the games body and soul—everything is zapping the enemy. Children get to the point where they see another child being molested by a third child, they just sit back.”
     Newsweek reported on others following suit: “Dr. Nicholas Pott, who treats two such patients at a clinic at North General-Joint Disease Hospital in New York, says disturbed youths may dodge reality and human contacts as well as meteorites. The clinic director, Dr. Hal Fishkin, objects to the repeated kill-or-be-killed theme. ‘We don’t need more fodder for the violence mill,’ he says. Others worry about subliminal messages that the medium may transmit. ‘The more you can titillate your emotions, the less tolerant and patient you are going to be for things that don’t deliver as fast,’ says Fred Williams, professor of communications at the University of Southern California.”
     Despite the assertions, not all academics found substantiation for the damaging effects of video games. “There is no evidence to indicate that the games encourage social isolation, anger, antisocial behavior, and compulsivity,” concluded the Journal of Psychology. Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, praised video games’ ability to provide encouragement to emotionally disturbed or retarded children. “A lot of kids who are good at this are not good at other things,” she said. “This mastery experience is very important.” But when the video game industry bloated and crashed in 1983, so did the rhetoric—for the time being.
     Ten years later, on the morning of Thursday, December 9, 1993, Senator Lieberman reignited the cause with the first federal hearings on violent video games. The hearings were filled with impassioned statements by expert witnesses who decried the new scourge. Dr. Eugene Provenzo, a professor who authored a book called Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo, proclaimed that “video games are overwhelmingly violent, sexist, and racist.” Robert Chase, president of the National Education Association, suggested that games incite real-life violence. “Because they are active rather than passive, [video games] can do more than desensitize impressionable children to violence,” he said. “They actually encourage violence as the resolution of the first resort by rewarding participants for killing one’s opponents in the most grisly ways imaginable.”
     Later, Howard Lincoln, the executive vice president of Nintendo of America, and William White, vice president of marketing and communications for Sega of America, took their brawl over Mortal Kombat to the stage. Lincoln portrayed Nintendo as the martyred defender of family values. White argued that the industry was simply growing up, with more and more games being played by people over the age of eighteen. Lincoln bristled at that notion. “I can’t sit here and allow you to be told that somehow the video game business has been transformed today from children to adults,” he said to the panel. “It hasn’t been.”
     After much debate and media fanfare, the hearings ended at 1:52 P.M. on December 9. Senator Lieberman declared that the video game industry had one year to develop some kind of voluntary ratings system or the government would step in with its own council. He would call a follow-up meeting in February to determine how the publishers and developers were coming along. The gamers had been warned. It was time to change their ways.
     The next day, id Software released Doom.

Just Deserts

Excerpt from the novel The Stand icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 by Stephen King icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12

     Irma Fayette lived in Lodi, California. She was a lady of twenty-six, a virgin, morbidly afraid of rape. Her life had been one long nightmare since June twenty-third, when looting had broken out in town and there had been no police to stop the looters. Irma had a small house on a side-street; her mother had lived there with her until she had died of a stroke in 1985. When the looting began, and the gunshots, and the horrifying sound of drunken men roaring up and down the streets of the main business section on motorcycles, Irma had locked all the doors and then had hidden in the spare room downstairs. Since then she had crept upstairs periodically, quiet as a mouse, to get food or to relieve herself.
     Irma didn’t like people. If everyone on earth had died but her, she would have been perfectly happy. But that wasn’t the case. Only yesterday, after she had begun cautiously to hope that no one was left in Lodi but her, she had seen a gross and drunken man, a hippie man in a T-shirt that said I GAVE UP SEX AND DRINKING AND IT WAS THE SCARIEST 20 MINUTES OF MY LIFE, wandering up the street with a bottle of whiskey in his hand. He had long blond hair which cascaded out from under the gimme cap he was wearing and all the way down to his shoulders. Tucked into the waistband of his tight bluejeans was a pistol. Irma had peeked around the bedroom curtain at him until he was out of sight and then had scurried downstairs to the barricaded spare room as if she had been released from a malign spell.
     They were not all dead. If there was one hippie man left, there would be other hippie men. And they would all be rapers. They would rape her. Sooner or later they would find her and rape her.
     This morning, before first light, she had crept up to the attic, where her father’s few possessions were stored in cardboard boxes. Her father had been a merchant seaman. He had deserted Irma’s mother in the late sixties. Irma’s mother had told Irma all about it. She had been perfectly frank. Her father had been a beast who got drunk and then wanted to rape her. They all did. When you got married, that gave a man the right to rape you anytime he wanted. Even in the daytime. Irma’s mother always summed up her husband’s desertion in three words, the same words Irma could have applied to the death of almost every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth: “No great loss.”
     Most of the boxes contained nothing but cheap trinkets bought in foreign ports—Souvenir of Hong Kong, Souvenir of Saigon, Souvenir of Copenhagen. There was a scrapbook of photographs. Most of them showed her father on ship, sometimes smiling into the camera with his arms about the shoulders of his fellow beasts. Well, probably the disease that they were calling Captain Trips out here had struck him down in whatever place he had run off to. Not great loss.
     But there was one wooden box with small gold hinges on it, and in this box was a gun. A .45 caliber pistol. It lay on red velvet, and in a secret compartment below the red velvet were some bullets. They were green and mossy-looking, but Irma thought they would work all right. Bullets were metal. They didn’t spoil like milk or cheese.
     She loaded the gun under the single cobwebby attic bulb, and then went down to eat her breakfast at her own kitchen table. She would not hide like a mouse in a hole any longer. She was armed. Let the rapers beware.
     That afternoon she went out on the front porch to read her book. The name of the book was Satan Is Alive and Well on the Planet Earth. It was grim and joyful stuff. The sinners and the ingrates had gotten their just deserts, just as the book said they would. They were all gone. Except for a few hippie rapers, and she guessed she could handle them. The gun was by her side.
     At two o’clock the man with the blond hair came back. He was so drunk he could hardly stand up. He saw Irma and his face lighted, no doubt thinking of how lucky he had been to finally discover some “pussy.”
     “Hey, baby!” he cried. “It’s just you and me! How long—” Then terror clouded his face as he saw Irma put down her book and raise the .45.
     “Hey, listen, put that thing down… is it loaded? Hey—!
     Irma pulled the trigger. The pistol exploded, killing her instantly. No great loss.

And it Tore Pieces Out of My Heart, As it Always Does

Excerpt from the novel The Golden Compass icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 by Philip Pullman icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12

     “Why en’t you cold, Serafina Pekkala?”
     “We feel cold, but we don’t mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn’t feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the Aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It’s worth being cold for that.”
     “Could I feel them?”
     “No. You would die if you took your furs off. Stay wrapped up.”
     “How long do witches live, Serafina Pekkala? Farder Coram says hundreds of years. But you don’t look old at all.”
     “I am three hundred years or more. Our oldest witch mother is nearly a thousand. One day, Yambe-Akka will come for her. One day she’ll come for me. She is the goddess of the dead. She comes to you smiling and kindly, and you know it is time to die.”
     “Are there men witches? Or only women?”
     “There are men who serve us, like the consul at Trollesund. And there are men we take for lovers or husbands. You are so young, Lyra, too young to understand this, but I shall tell you anyway and you’ll understand it later: men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. We bear their children, who are witches if they are female; human if not; and then in the blink of an eye they are gone, felled, slain, lost. Our sons, too. When a little boy is growing, he thinks he is immortal. His mother knows he isn’t. Each time becomes more painful, until finally your heart is broken. Perhaps that is when Yambe-Akka comes for you. She is older than the tundra. Perhaps, for her, witches’ lives are as brief as men’s are to us.”
     “Did you love Farder Coram?”
     “Yes. Does he know that?”
     “I don’t know, but I know he loves you.”
     “When he rescued me, he was young and strong and full of pride and beauty. I loved him at once. I would have changed my nature, I would have forsaken the star-tingle and the music of the Aurora; I would never have flown again—I would have given all that up in a moment, without a thought, to be a gyptian boat wife and cook for him and share his bed and bear his children. But you cannot change what you are, only what you do. I am a witch. He is a human. I stayed with him for long enough to bear him a child….”
     “He never said! Was it a girl? A witch?”
     “No. A boy, and he died in the great epidemic of forty years ago, the sickness that came out of the East. Poor little child; he flickered into life and out of it like a mayfly. And it tore pieces out of my heart, as it always does. It broke Coram’s. And then the call came for me to return to my own people, because Yambe-Akka had taken my mother, and I was clan queen. So I left, as I had to.”
     “Did you never see Farder Coram again?”
     “Never. I heard of his deeds; I heard how he was wounded by the Skraelings, with a poisoned arrow, and I sent herbs and spells to help him recover, but I wasn’t strong enough to see him. I heard how broken he was after that, and how his wisdom grew, how much he studied and read, and I was proud of him and his goodness. But I stayed away, for they were dangerous times for my clan, and witch wars were threatening, and besides, I thought he would forget me and find a human wife….”
     “He never would,” said Lyra stoutly. “You oughter go and see him. He still loves you, I know he does.”
     “But he would be ashamed of his own age, and I wouldn’t want to make him feel that.”
     “Perhaps he would. But you ought to send a message to him, at least. That’s what I think.”
     Serafina Pekkala said nothing for a long time. Pantalaimon became a tern and flew to her branch for a second, to acknowledge that perhaps they had been insolent.
     Then Lyra said, “Why do people have dӕmons, Serafina Pekkala?”
     “Everyone asks that, and no one knows the answer. As long as there have been human beings, they have had dӕmons. It’s what makes us different from animals.”
     “Yeah! We’re different from them all right…. Like bears. They’re strange, en’t they, bears? You think they’re like a person, and then suddenly they do something so strange or ferocious you think you’ll never understand them…. But you know what Iorek said to me, he said that his armor for him was like what a dӕmon is for a person. It’s his soul, he said. But that’s where they’re different again, because he made this armor hisself. They took his first armor away when they sent him into exile, and he found some sky iron and made some new armor, like making a new soul. We can’t make our dӕmons. Then the people at Trollesund, they got him drunk on spirits and stole it away, and I found out where it was and he got it back…. But what I wonder is, why’s he coming to Svalbard? They’ll fight him. They might kill him…. I love Iorek. I love him so much I wish he wasn’t coming.”
     “Has he told you who he is?”
     “Only his name. And it was the consul at Trollesund who told us that.”
     “He is highborn. He is a prince. In fact, if he had not committed a great crime, he would be the king of the bears by now.”
     “He told me their king was called Iofur Raknison.”
     “Iofur Raknison became king when Iorek Byrnison was exiled. Iofur is a prince, of course, or he wouldn’t be allowed to rule; but he is clever in a human way; he makes alliances and treaties; he lives not as bears do, in ice forts, but in a new-built palace; he talks of exchanging ambassadors with human nations and developing the fire mines with the help of human engineers…. He is very skillful and subtle. Some say that he provoked Iorek into the deed for which he was exiled, and others say that even if he didn’t, he encourages them to think he did, because it adds to his reputation for craft and subtlety.”
     “What did Iorek do? See, one reason I love Iorek, it’s because of my father doing what he did and being punished. Seems to me they’re like each other. Iorek told me he’d killed another bear, but he never said how it came about.”
     “The fight was over a she-bear. The male whom Iorek killed would not display the usual signals of surrender when it was clear that Iorek was stronger. For all their pride, bears never fail to recognize superior force in another bear and surrender to it, but for some reason this bear didn’t do it. Some say that Iofur Raknison worked on his mind, or gave him confusing herbs to eat. At any rate, the young bear persisted, and Iorek Byrnison allowed his temper to master him. The case was not hard to judge; he should have wounded, not killed.”
     “So otherwise he’d be king,” Lyra said. “And I heard something about Iofur Raknison from the Palmerian Professor at Jordan, ’cause he’d been to the North and met him. He said…. I wish I could remember what it was…. I think he’d tricked his way on to the throne or something…. But you know, Iorek said to me once that bears couldn’t be tricked, and showed me that I couldn’t trick him. It sounds as if they was both tricked, him and the other bear. Maybe only bears can trick bears, maybe people can’t. Except… The people at Trollesund, they tricked him, didn’t they? When they got him drunk and stole his armor?”
     “When bears act like people, perhaps they can be tricked,” said Serafina Pekkala. “When bears act like bears, perhaps they can’t. No bear would normally drink spirits. Iorek Byrnison drank to forget the shame of exile, and it was only that which let the Trollesund people trick him.”
     “Ah, yes,” said Lyra, nodding. She was satisfied with that idea. She admired Iorek almost without limit, and she was glad to find confirmation of his nobility. “That’s clever of you,” she said. “I wouldn’t have known that if you hadn’t told me. I think you’re probably cleverer than Mrs. Coulter.”
     They flew on. Lyra chewed some of the seal meat she found in her pocket.
     “Serafina Pekkala,” she said after some time, “what’s Dust? ‘Cause it seems to me that all this trouble’s about Dust, only no one’s told me what it is.”
     “I don’t know,” Serafina Pekkala told her. “Witches have never worried about Dust. All I can tell you is that where there are priests, there is fear of Dust. Mrs. Coulter is not a priest, of course, but she is a powerful agent of the Magisterium, and it was she who set up the Oblation Board and persuaded the Church to pay for Bolvangar, because of her interest in Dust. We can’t understand her feelings about it. But there are many things we have never understood. We see the Tartars making holes in their skulls, and we can only wonder at the strangeness of it. So Dust may be strange, and we wonder at it, but we don’t fret and tear things apart to examine it. Leave that to the Church.”
     “The Church?” said Lyra. Something had come back to her: she remembered talking with Pantalaimon, in the fens, about what it might be that was moving the needle of the alethiometer, and they had thought of the photomill on the high altar at Gabriel College, and how elementary particles pushed the little vanes around. The Intercessor there was clear about the link between elementary particles and religion. “Could be,” she said, nodding. “Most Church things they keep secret, after all. But most Church things are old, and Dust en’t old, as far as I know. I wonder if Lord Asriel might tell me….”
     She yawned.
     “I better lie down,” she said to Serafina Pekkala, “else I’ll probably freeze. I been cold down on the ground, but I never been this cold. I think I might die if I get any colder.”
     “Then lie down and wrap yourself in the furs.”
     “Yeah, I will. If I was going to die, I’d rather die up here than down there, any day. I thought when they put us under that blade thing, I thought that was it…. We both did. Oh, that was cruel. But we’ll lie down now. Wake us up when we get there,” she said, and got down on the pile of furs, clumsy and aching in every part of her with the profound intensity of the cold, and lay as close as she could to the sleeping Roger.
     And so the four travelers sailed on, sleeping in the ice-encrusted balloon, toward the rocks and glaciers, the fire mines, and the ice forts of Svalbard.

Custom Had Not Reconciled My Mind to It

Excerpt from the novel The Sign of the Four icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 by Arthur Conan Doyle icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12

     Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.
     Three times a day for many months I had witnessed this performance, but custom had not reconciled my mind to it. On the contrary, from day to day I had become more irritable at the sight, and my conscience swelled nightly within me at the thought that I had lacked the courage to protest. Again and again I had registered a vow that I should deliver my soul upon the subject, but there was that in the cool, nonchalant air of my companion which made him the last man with whom one would care to take anything approaching to a liberty. His great powers, his masterly manner, and the experience which I had had of his many extraordinary qualities, all made me diffident and backward in crossing him.
     Yet upon that afternoon, whether it was the Beaune which I had taken with my lunch, or the additional exasperation produced by the extreme deliberation of his manner, I suddenly felt that I could hold out no longer.
     “Which is it to-day?” I asked,—”morphine or cocaine?”
     He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. “It is cocaine,” he said,—”a seven-per-cent. solution. Would you care to try it?”
     “No, indeed,” I answered, brusquely. “My constitution has not got over the Afghan campaign yet. I cannot afford to throw any extra strain upon it.”
     He smiled at my vehemence. “Perhaps you are right, Watson,” he said. “I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.”
     “But consider!” I said, earnestly. “Count the cost! Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process, which involves increased tissue-change and may at last leave a permanent weakness. You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth the candle. Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed? Remember that I speak not only as one comrade to another, but as a medical man to one for whose constitution he is to some extent answerable.”
     He did not seem offended. On the contrary, he put his finger-tips together and leaned his elbows on the arms of his chair, like one who has a relish for conversation.
     “My mind,” he said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession,—or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.”