Flying Rocks

I have a difficult time accepting a causative link between violent video games and violent behavior. I have not conducted scientifically valid experiments nor have I reviewed the recent literature on the issue. I don’t even consider myself an expert in the area. You see, my personal, and hence anecdotal, history confirms for me that the seeds of violence lie within us and we choose whether to act on those tendencies with or without video games.

While a young boy, our neighborhood used to set up rock fights; and we used real, hard and throwable rocks. Seriously, we were all friends and we would divide up in teams, set up boundaries and create basic rules of engagement. We set up our camps at a distance where it would be very difficult for someone to throw a rock from the enemy camp and actually hit you or one of your comrades. Even if the throw was on target you had plenty of time to step out of the way.  Each team had a prison area and if you were captured you had to remain in that area until freed.

As kids though, we wouldn’t just stand our ground, we would send scouts to go behind houses and jump over fences. We would try to kidnap the guards of the enemy prison and attack from the rear. We utilized every strategy at our disposal and concept our imaginations could conceive to try and win the game. During my childhood I threw hundreds, if not thousands, of rocks and I dodged a similar number.

I say similar because there was one time that I took a rock to the head. The crazy part about that; I wasn’t even playing. I had gone down to a friends house in the neighborhood just north of the rock fight. It was a little after noon and I was just walking home. I should have realized that a summer day with no kids on the street meant something was going on, but I completely overlooked that I was walking into the middle of a rock battle. I stood between two and three house from my home when I heard a shout, “There’s a Newton!” Hearing the cry I turned to the source of the shout and as I turned the rock hit me square on my left temple.

I dropped to the ground, blood gushing from the open wound. Immediately, the game ended. The allies and very enemies all ran to my aid. The boy who threw the rock apologized over and over. They carried me into my house and laid me on the table. Someone took off his shirt to stop the bleeding. A quick trip to the hospital, stitches, and a couple weeks of healing and I was back to normal. In fact, a couple weeks later I was the decoy setting up the attack on an enemy prison camp.

This was the mid-1970s. If video games had been invented, I had never seen one.