Too Violent for Kids?

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt.

/ Johnny Cage kills his victims with a bloody, decapitating uppercut. Rayden favors electrocution. Kano will punch through his opponent's chest and rip out a still-beating heart. Sub-Zero likes to tear his foe's head off and hold it up in victory, spinal cord twitching as it dangles from the neck.

Renegades from the Late Late Movie? No, these are characters from Mortal Kombat, America's top-grossing arcade game last year and the focus of a growing debate about whether violence in video games has finally gone too far. The issue came home for millions of parents and kids last week when Acclaim brought out four new versions of Mortal Kombat designed to play on the Sega and Nintendo systems found in some 50 million U.S. households.

To head off complaints, Nintendo chose to delete the digitized blood in its versions and replace the so-called finishing moves with less realistic endings, although the final product is still pretty brutal. Sega decided to use a warning label alerting parents that the game is not suitable for children under 13, but few expect that to have the desired effect. Peggy Charren, founder of Action for Children's Television, believes that the labels will actually make the game more attractive to kids: "It's a warning to the children that tells them, 'This is what I want.' "

Mortal Kombat is not the first violent video game -- or even the worst. In Night Trap, a controversial compact-disc game that plays on the Sega system, five scantily clad women are stalked down by bloodthirsty vampires who like to drill holes in their victims' necks and hang them on meat hooks. In both Night Trap and Mortal Kombat, live-action video technology makes the violence that much more realistic.

Are games like these bad for kids? There are no definitive scientific studies, in part because it is difficult to sort out the effects of the violent acts in video games from those of the mayhem seen in movies, TV shows and city streets. According to Parker V. Page, president of the Children's Television Resource and Education Center in San Francisco, preliminary research suggests that such games make children "more aggressive or more tolerant of aggression." That jibes with the experience of parents who will drag their kids away from a kick-boxing video game only to watch them start kick-boxing with each other in the backyard.

University of Southern California professor Marsha Kinder, who is a member of several video-game review panels, believes that the games are different ( from other media because they actively engage children in violent acts: "It's worse than TV or a movie. It communicates the message that the only way to be empowered is through violence." Enthusiasts counter that the games serve as a harmless way to let off steam. As one video-store manager put it, "You had a bad day, so you can go in there and rip a couple of heads off and feel better."

Of course, there are better ways to let off steam. As it is, American kids who have video-game machines already play, on average, nearly 1.5 hours a day. For many parents, the problem is not what their children are doing on their Nintendo systems, but what they are not doing while locked in Mortal Kombat -- reading books, playing outdoors, making friends. When the information highway comes to town, bringing with it a thousand new reasons to spend time in front of a video screen, that may be a growing problem not just for the kids, but for all of us.

With reporting by John F. Dickerson/New York