Culture Clash Jun09

(June 2009)

Ignoring Occam
When blame goes bad
By Matthew Sakey


The Bangkok Post reports - and Slashdot picks up - that Thailand has ordered 72 gaming websites (apparently online gambling sites) shut down in the wake of a 12-year old boy's suicide. It would seem the lad flung himself off a building after his father banned him from playing computer games.

It took Slashdotters four minutes to connect the Dots of Irony in their comments on the article: father bans child from games > child kills self > Thailand bans entire country from games, assumes no one will kill self. Are we, as a people - and by "people" I mean as a species, not, like, just the Thai people - really this fundamentally broken? We don't even know if the games the kid was playing were on these sites. Sometimes it seems it might be time for us to leave the planet to a superior race, like walruses. Walruses just lay there all day and don't worry about anything. We worry about everything, and it gets us into trouble.

I am not one to roll my eyes when a 12-year old commits suicide, and I'm not one to make fun of tragedy either. The reaction deserves mockery, though. Let's play this out scenario-like. Imagine the police come upon the scene of a gory murder: a person has been shot and stabbed and bludgeoned to red hamburger. The gun, knife, and bat are all lying next to the ruined corpse. They still have tags on, in fact… JoeBob's Gun, Hittin' Stick, and Cleaver Shack - All Ages Served! say the tags. The murder took place at, say, a Laundromat.

Three detectives, hardened by years witnessing the appalling capacity of humanity to do ill to itself, look down at the body.

"Yep," says Detective #1.

"Yep," says Detective #2.

"Better get the mayor on the horn," says Detective #3.

Two days later, the news media of the world blare the headline: U.S. COURTS BAN LAUNDRY, WASHING CLOTHES NOW ILLEGAL; "CAUSE OF GRISLY KILLING," SAYS OFFICIAL

The theatre of the absurd in which we live, where Germany considers banning paintball after the Winnenden massacre, where Thailand actually does ban gaming websites after a troubled kid with a shitty father commits suicide, it really makes one wonder.

My job here is to write about how games impact culture. And I've gotta say that games have a very positive impact; they bring joy, they bring people together, they entertain and educate, they inspire. Oh sure, I'm concerned about how nongamers perceive the medium, and how today, 15 years after the United States Congress first looked into the hideous dangers of Mortal Kombat and Night Trap, lawmakers are still obsessing over content in games. But all in all the whole "writing about games and culture" gig is a good one because games are good for culture, and always have been.

But our culture is messed up. We are a world of blamers, people who observe a tragedy and flail about frantically, seeking something, anything, culpable, never once examining the circumstances and realities behind the occurrence. People ask why, but they never ask it right. "Why oh why did that isolated, neglected, ostracized kid with little supervision, documented psychological problems, and access to guns shoot up that school?" people ask. "It must have been the video games."

Did you know there's actually a whole science devoted to the proper asking of why? It's called Root Cause Analysis, and it's used all the time in business and manufacturing. It features dozens of tools and mechanisms to help users systematically identify causes of problems. It's quite mathematical, full of charts and tables, because when looking for causes, it is crucial that you not inadvertently isolate a symptom as a root cause. Fixing a symptom almost never fixes the problem. Similarly, it's important that you don't carry your analysis back too far and overshoot the root cause (I mean, the root cause of everything that's ever happened is the Big Bang, but that's not practical to correct). Properly informed Root Cause Analysis can do wonders for processes and identify long-standing issues.

There's the story of a kindergartner who only drew in black crayon. This concerned his teacher, who alerted his parents to these one-color drawings. It's a morbid color, they thought, so they took the kid to a psychologist, who probed the child's feelings but found nothing wrong. A neurologist was consulted, but a CAT scan revealed no physical abnormalities in the brain. Finally someone just asked why he always drew with black crayon. "It's all there is left," he said.

Turns out his teacher always passed the box of crayons around the same way, and by the time it reached this child's assigned seat, all the other colors were gone. Root cause.

Tragedy is endemic to life, but senselessness is not. The entire universe is built upon systems that, while complex, are to a certain degree predictable. Human emotion is less predictable, and the emotional reaction often takes lead in response to tragedy or perceived chaos. People fear things they don't understand and things they can't control, but the society we have built has plenty of both. Rather than accepting this as part of the natural order of civilization, many people possess an almost pathological need to combat what they fear with tools like blame and censorship. So when a supposedly "senseless" act of violence takes place, people immediately cast about for a connection - however tenuous - to something they don't understand or can't control. And they do this often ignoring much more obvious and relevant causal artifacts.

When a government chooses to ban an entire entertainment medium because one child committed suicide, or because one distressed teen went on a shooting rampage, it is nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction in order to appease a public that wants one. Why make the effort to discover the true causes of things when no one's interested in the actual reason and it's so much simpler to just put on a blindfold and throw a dart? In the mad rush to shield our children from anything even potentially undesirable, we have produced a generation of fear and blame, a circular throwback of finger-pointing rather than just figuring out the true problems and solving them.