Print Screen: "Grand Theft Childhood"

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It is important to note that Kutner and Olson are not entirely dismissive of the effects of sustained game exposure on 13-year-olds. The sub-subtitle of the book is "And What Parents Can Do," and the final chapter is a list of recommendations on how parents should deal with the issue. If there wasn't any problem at all, then this chapter would certainly not be necessary, and the recommendations are as much about media literacy and product awareness as they are about violence. The authors spend time on how corporations use games to target children as consumers. They talk about racial and gender stereotypes in games. Obesity is, naturally, a concern. You could sum up the book's argument as "Games can be part of a balanced diet." Their concern isn't games as games, but games as part of an unstructured media consumption lifestyle. That is where parents can and should intervene.

The book isn't perfect. It repeats the now tired and inaccurate story that the Christian-themed Left Behind game is primarily about gunning down non-believers. The authors conclude that the ESRB is the best we've got, in spite of all the criticisms that they concede are accurate and relevant. And the shift from a discussion of violent games to one of gaming in general for the closing chapters is so abrupt, the studies of media violence are examined with a fine-toothed comb while the studies on advertising or racial imagery and children are passed over without comment.

"Grand Theft Childhood" is, overall, a valuable contribution to the public debate over the consequences of new media on children. More importantly, it's a valuable contribution to scientific literacy, going into great detail on how social science research works. It is also a great relief to have someone on either side of the debate put gamer arch-nemesis Jack Thompson in proper perspective; he is relegated to two brief mentions. In the big picture, he's just not that important.

As valuable as Kutner and Olson's work is, it is very unlikely to make any difference whatsoever. As they demonstrate in their historical chapter, attitudes towards new media are shaped by cultural conservatism, fear and demographics. Violent youth crime declined as games became the pastime of choice for most young men, but this has done nothing to halt the efforts to find that magic law that both restricts access to violent games and passes constitutional muster. Psychosocial science has, in general, been a sideshow at moments of imagined crisis; two Harvard psychologists can't turn the tide of sensationalist cable news hypochondria.

In Other Words

David Hadju's "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is the perfect companion piece to "Grand Theft Childhood." In America's postwar period, media hysteria over crime comics was fueled by pseudo-science and forced comics into the realm of juvenilia, a ghetto they would not escape for decades. Hadju does more than simply repeat the familiar tale of how Fredric Wertham's "Seduction of the Innocent" alerted parents to the homoerotic overtones in "Batman" and "Wonder Woman." He talks about how the comics industry was unable to defeat the push for self-censorship and what the fight against comics tells us about mass culture.

Most importantly, Hadju tells the story of Wertham, an educated man with good motives who saw something he did not understand or appreciate and convinced himself of its inherent wickedness. "Grand Theft Childhood" tells this same story in a couple of pages; "The Ten-Cent Plague" gives you the complete account.