The guys at GamePolitics have stumbled on another potential doozy involving everyone's favorite depilated doctor of pop psychology and inverted surnames, Doctor Phil, who's apparently taping an episode about either game violence or RPG addiction on Thursday. You may recall Dr. Phil's exchange with Larry King in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, in which McGraw took a wild, flailing shot at video games as one of two scapegoats (the other being film) for pushing marginal psychopaths, sociopaths, and the mentally ill (tinctured "with a dose of rage") over the homicidal precipice.
Here's the original exchange, my emphasis in bold. (I wish other sites would include that last "well said" from King -- it's as strong an example of media slobbering-over as anything I've seen elsewhere.)
KING: Why, though -- OK, you want to kill someone, you're crazed, you're a little nuts, girlfriend drops you, why do you kill innocent people?... Dr. McGraw, are they treatable?
MCGRAW: Well, Larry, every situation is different... They're usually dead after something like this happens because the police take them out or they take themselves out. The question really is can we spot them. And the problem is we are programming these people as a society. You cannot tell me -- common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they're on a mass killing spree in a video game, it's glamorized on the big screen, it's become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the suggestibility is too high. And we're going to have to start dealing with that. We're going to have to start addressing those issues and recognizing that the mass murders of tomorrow are the children of today that are being programmed with this massive violence overdose.
KING: Well said.
Apparently Dr. Phil isn't familiar with the chapter in Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World entitled "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection," because his statement is a confluence of anecdotal evidence, observational selection, and argumentum ad populum ("appeal to the people), i.e. it must be true because a given majority says so.
So what can we expect from Dr. Phil's show on Thursday? I'll tell you what we ought to.
1. Peer-reviewed scientific evidence of causal links between violent media and proclivity to engage in actual (real life) violence; the same for any purported links between RPGs or MMOs and game "addiction."
2. A dearth of maudlin, exploitive, anecdotal "true life" stories about John or Jane Whoever's "personal tribulations due to the impact of video game violence on this or that loved one." (I know, I know -- I'm pretty much soliciting the moon on a platter with this one.) Also, no misrepresentative zeroing in on the one in a gazillion kids who die while playing an MMO.
3. Accredited academics, scientists, and game experts, i.e. No (and I repeat no) Jack Thompson. Update: GamePolitics is reporting today that Jack Thompson is claiming he was "initially invited to be a guest on the program."
If any of those expectations aren't met, you can probably write the episode off (as if you're watching the guy anyway), and if you're really motivated, consider telling Dr. Phil what you think about his "professional" analytic standards.
I'm offshore at the moment, but I'll try to catch the episode online and weigh in tomorrow. Who knows, maybe he'll surprise us.
