The War Between Effects and Meaning – Jenkins

Jenkins opens his paper referencing a court case held on April 1, 2002, in which 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 justified his ruling saying that “unless all games expressed ideas, then no game should be protected.” Limbaugh’s decision stemmed from the fact that “[he] did not 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. Limbaugh’s decision had mixed reactions within the community. According to Jenkins, “gamers have expressed bafflement over how Limbaugh can simultaneously claim that video games do not express ideas and that they represent a dangerous influence on American youth.” “Reformers, in turn, are perplexed that the defenders of games can argue that they have no direct consequences for the people who consume them and yet warrant constitutional protection.” Jenkins argues that “to understand this paradox, we have to recognize a distinction between effects and meanings. Limbaugh and company see games as having social and psychological effects (or, in some formulations, as constituting risk factors that increase the likelihood of violent and antisocial conduct). Critics of this concept argue that gamers produce meanings through gameplay and related activities. Jenkins explains that “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.” Although reformers in the effects tradition argue that children are particularly susceptible to confusions between fantasy and reality, one should consider the meanings argument. “A focus on meaning, however,” Jenkins argues, “would emphasize the knowledge and competencies possessed by game players, starting with their mastery over the aesthetic conventions that distinguish games form real-world differences.”

  Jenkins states that “[he] does not come at this debate between the effects and meanings models as a neutral observer;” he cites that “based on his research into the place of video games in boy culture, he testified before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee about “marketing violent entertainment to youth.” Jenkins 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. Moreover, Jenkins claims that he was 1 of more than 30 scholars from different disciplines who filed an amicus brief and helping to overturn the Limbaugh decision.

Jenkins asserts that he wants to consider the claims about education that are being made about video games. Jenkins adds that “both sides talk about games as “teaching machines,” but what they mean by learning, education, and teaching differs dramatically. With regard to the effects model, Jenkins references a man named Grossman, a retired military psychologist and West Point instructor. Grossman argued that video games are teaching kids to kill in more or less the same ways that the military trains soldiers. He identified “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 suggested, have their parallels in the ways players interact with computer games. Grossman adds that kids are “brutalized” by overexposure to representations of violence at an age when they cannot yet distinguish between representation and reality. Grossman believes that they are “conditioned” by being consistently rewarded for in-game violence. I agree with this viewpoint because inf one is exposed to a game that imitates life much in the same way that first-person shooter games do, it is not hard to see how easy the lines between fiction and reality can blur. I remember growing up going through high school and hearing about school shootings and the debate that some games violent games are desensitizing the students that carry out these acts of violence.  

Jenkins adds, “soldiers in boot camp rehearse what they are going to do on the battlefield until it becomes second nature. Jenkins continues, referencing Grossman, who claims, “every time a child plays an interactive point-and-shoot video game, he is learning the exact same conditioned reflex and motor skills”(n.p.). According to Grossman, such practice helped prepare school shooters for the real-world violence they would commit.” Well, where does meaning, interpretation, evaluation, or expression feature in Grossman’s model? Grossman assumed almost no conscious cognitive activity on the part of the gamers, who have all of the self-consciousness of Pavlov’s dogs. He reverted to a behaviorist model of education that has long been discredited among schooling experts. Grossman saw games as shaping our reflexes, impulses, and emotions almost without regard to our previous knowledge and experience. In conclusion, “it is precisely because such conditioning escapes any conscious policing that Grossman believed games represent such a powerful mechanism for reshaping our behavior.