Beth Winegarner's Open Salon Blog

In Ridgeway death, “goth” is scapegoated again

Sun, 4 Nov 2012 17:11:31 -0500

Sensationalist media have had a field day with Austin Reed Sigg, Jessica Ridgeway’s alleged 17-year-old killer.

Is Austin Reed Sigg a goth who was infatuated with death? Did he hang out in the “goth corner” with the “metal heads” at school? Was he a Nazi wizard (whatever that is)? Did he play World of Warcraft and Call of Duty?

Over the past week, plenty of news has come out about the demise of 10-year-old Colorado girl Jessica Ridgeway and the 17-year-old boy who led police to human remains, which were underneath his house. He has allegedly confessed to killing her, and a prosecuting attorney has said there is DNA evidence against him.

It’s almost funny how many different tropes the media have tried to pin on Sigg: goth culture, heavy metal, violent video games.

Did Sigg do it?

If so, what would his choice of clothing, school hang-out spot, video games, music, or even speculation about a cross found at a crime scene have to do with it?

Whether or not Sigg committed this horrible crime is for the court to decide, and let’s hope that he has a fair trial, with competent people working both sides of the case and a jury that is capable of setting aside its biases. And let’s also hope that, if Sigg did kill Ridgeway, that he gets more than locked in a hole for life, because a 17-year-old (or anyone) who commits such a crime needs help, not isolation and abuse.

I say that because while I was away, I was lucky enough to see a press screening of West of Memphis, Amy Berg’s new documentary about the West Memphis Three. It is such a stark, vivid reminder of what happened to Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Miskelley, who were jailed for 18 years on charges of killing three 8-year-old boys in Arkansas. Their case has some of the same hallmarks as Sigg’s: a gruesome crime against a child, a community hungry for justice, a teenage boy whose interests are less-than-socially-acceptable; a confession. Yes, there are differences, particularly the fact that Sigg turned himself in, had body parts under his house, and the DNA evidence (if the prosecuting attorney can be trusted); there was no such thing as DNA evidence when the WM3 were convicted, and there’s now ample DNA evidence that they were not involved.

Still, my point is that mistakes can be made this early in the game — mistakes that can send the wrong person to jail for a long time, while the killer may walk free.

My point is that a community starved for a scapegoat will sometimes land on whoever’s most convenient, particularly if he looks different or just never fit in. If something seemed “off” about him. There’s a big difference between someone who makes you uneasy and someone who’s guilty of murdering a child. One is a personal feeling. The other is for a judge and jury to decide.

My point is that calling this kid a goth doesn’t make him any more guilty than he may already be. Calling him a “Nazi wizard” doesn’t, either. All it does is imply that somehow the simple act of being a goth, or even a neo-Nazi, means you might as well be a murderer. And that’s an awful thing to say about a group of people, no matter how you feel about their beliefs.

Goths, understandably, are concerned. In that forum, “CallaWolf” said, “This, to me, almost felt like scapegoating. I wear all black on almost a daily basis (and as I’m writing this, I’m actually wearing a Slayer shirt), and while I do not know any fellow goths outside of this site, I still kinda consider myself a part of it in one way or another, but the very idea of doing these things is apalling to me.”

“Nephele” said, “This happens periodically: The news media confusing sociopaths with goths.”

And CanCanKant said:

Even if the perpetrator does consider themselves a goth, I don’t necessarily think that it was his “gothic” tendencies that caused him to commit heinous crimes. The overwhelming majority of people I’ve met that are goth are very cerebral, calm, introspective types. Hardly the kind to do anything harmful to another human being, especially on this scale.

It’s the tendency of the general public to equate dark, or especially black, clothing, band paraphenalia, tattoos and piercings with the word “goth” that causes this confusion. So many music and art related subcultures use these things, but not all of them would be considered goth. You notice how it’s used to shock. It’s quite sad.

Do video games make teens aggressive, or do aggressive teens like aggressive games?

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 15:10:22 -0400

A new study finds that teens who play violent video games are more aggressive than those who don’t. Or does it? Photo by Flickr User soleface23.

A new longitudinal study of 1,492 teens at eight high schools in Canada looks at those who play violent video games regularly, and those who don’t, and asks them questions about their behavior. Here’s what Brock University researchers Teena Willoughby, Paul Adachi, and Marie Good say they found:

Sustained violent video game play was significantly related to steeper increases in adolescents’ trajectory of aggressive behavior over time. Moreover, greater violent video game play predicted higher levels of aggression over time, after controlling for previous levels of aggression, supporting the socialization hypothesis. In contrast, no support was found for the selection hypothesis. Nonviolent video game play also did not predict higher levels of aggressive behavior over time.

Right now, there’s no way to access the full study without paying for it, and the writeups in the Telegraph and Kotaku don’t shed a lot of light on the study’s details. Importantly, though, Kotaku did ask:

However, the study leaves open the distinction between correlation and causation. Publicly available materials leave unclear in which direction the link might actually go: do the games cause teenagers to act aggressively, or are teenagers with aggressive dispositions more likely also to play violent games?

(In that light, it’s important to note that the Telegraph’s headline, “Violent video games make teenagers more aggressive, study finds/Teenagers who play violent video games over a number of years become more aggressive towards other people as a result, a new study has found” is misleading.)

At any rate, I do wonder how this study went down, and that’s partly because I’m familiar with the work of Jonathan Freeman. In his book Media Violence and Its Effect on Aggression: Assessing the Scientific Evidence, he points out that when study subjects are given permission to be more aggressive, they are more likely to be. (If you click through to that link, you can see some examples of what he’s talking about.)

Now, not all the kids in the Brock study were aggressive. The researchers found that only the teens playing violent video games became more aggressive; the ones playing nonviolent games weren’t aggressive. But here’s the thing: did the kids know what was being studied? Do they know, by now, that many people think violent video games make you violent? If so, wouldn’t that seem like a kind of permission, at least to a teenager? At the very least, maybe they are unconsciously living up to some kind of expectation.

It’s also a concern that kids are self-reporting their actions, without any objective measure to back up what they’re saying. Maybe those who play violent games are more comfortable with aggressive behavior, and with reporting it. Or maybe they think it’s cool, so they brag about little incidents, or exaggerate and say they were aggressive when they weren’t. Teens are trustworthy plenty of the time, but there could be enough in a study like this, who may not take it seriously, to skew the results.

Or, as Kotaku points out, it may simply be that kids who are more aggressive in general are also drawn to video games where aggression is okay. Which brings us to another question: How much more aggressive are aggressive kids who don’t play violent video games? That’s worth studying, too.

By the way, Backward Messages may be taking a little vacation over the next couple of weeks. I’ll post if I can, but things may not be back to normal until early November.

How RPGs make you more confident & successful

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 16:10:02 -0400

In light of Monday’s post about the negative flak directed at Maine Senate candidate Colleen Lachowicz and her WoW alter-ego, I thought it would be nice to end the week with his video from the PBS “idea channel” on the benefits of role-playing games — and how they can make you a more confident and successful person.

It gets into all kinds of good stuff, from Martin Heidigger’s concept of thrownness to how gaming can help players overcome shyness, disorganization, and other attributes that don’t fly so well when you’re trying to succeed. Not to mention how to cope with the random chance that life tosses your way.

Remarkably, many of the comments on the video’s YouTube page are thoughtful and coherent (something YouTube comments aren’t known for). Most of them bolster the idea that RPG builds skills that are useful and important in everyday life. What do you think?

Is World of Warcraft good training for politics?

Mon, 8 Oct 2012 11:10:50 -0400

Maine candidate Colleen Lachowicz, left, and her WoW alter-ego, Santiaga.

Politics is dirty business; everyone knows that. It doesn’t have to be, but that’s how it is. As an elections draw near, rivals have the choice to debate each other on the issues, and set themselves apart from their opponents based on stance, or they can begin attacking every angle they can think of.

In Maine, social worker Colleen Lachowicz is running for a seat on the state senate this November. Her opponent is the incumbent, Republican Tom Martin. Over the past week, the Maine GOP sent out a mailer attacking Lachowicz for playing World of Warcraft. In it, the party questioned the candidate’s “disturbing alter-ego” and “bizarre double life.” The mailer quoted her saying in an online forum that she “likes to stab things”; a CBC report called her gameplay “violent.”

The GOP also paid for and is maintaining a blog related to her WoW gaming at colleensworld.com.

Here was Lachowicz’s response:

“I think it’s weird that I’m being targeted for playing online games. Apparently I’m in good company since there are 183 million other Americans who also enjoy online games. What’s next? Will I be ostracized for playing Angry Birds or Words with Friends?”

Oddly, while some of the comments the GOP quotes over at colleensworld.com focus on her (obviously joking) violent retorts, others focus on her politics. In one comment, she says she is “slacking at work” in order to call her Congressperson everyday (which proves what? That she’s a politically involved constituent?), that she considers her guild progressive or even socialist, that she calls conservatives “teabaggers.” She criticizes other politicians’ campaign tactics. She talks about protesting fundamentalist churches. Sure, she’s not the most tactful, but it’s not like she said she didn’t care about half of her electorate. In fact, many of these comments are from several years ago — likely well before she knew she’d run for public office.

It would be a grave mistake to think that someone who enjoys roleplaying in a video game would somehow bring any violent aspects of her gameplay into her daily life. It would also be a mistake to take someone seriously who thought this would actually happen.

It’s been a long time since role-playing has been shamed in such a public way. Long enough that it seemed like we were past this kind of misrepresentation of people’s hobbies. Back when people thought games were causing kids to commit suicide, it was understandable, even if it was false hysteria. This, however, is simply a smear campaign — and it says a great deal about the incumbent. Is he so insecure in his ability to win re-election that he has to drag his opponent through the mud on such irrelevancies? Are there no legitimate issues on the table in Maine this year? Like, say, same-sex marriage?

Meanwhile, Lachowicz has worked to the very top of World of Warcraft, and has done so as part of a team; arguably, this proves her ability to work alongside others to get things done. At least one commenter on a WoW forum thought so, too:

“I actually think being an Orc Assassination Rogue is great preparation for diving into American politics.”

Kids keep telling us that heavy metal is good for them. So why don’t we listen?

Thu, 4 Oct 2012 18:10:19 -0400

Heavy metal: it’s good for your kid. Photo by Flickr user rolle-.

Lately, there’s been a spate of commentaries on heavy-metal music, particularly from young fans who want to sing its praises. On this, my 200th post for Backward Messages, I wanted to share some of those perspectives. After all, it’s not like, in 2012, America is suddenly celebrating metal music as a teen passion.

The first comes from Ivan Maheca, writing for MyHighSchoolJournalism.org:

It is time for people to see and appreciate the beauty of this music because it does have it. Metal musicians, according to people who have studied music appreciation and who know about music, have more talent and are capable of playing almost any other genre and style of music there is. Musically Metal has been underestimated as merely “noise” but in reality it is harmony and melody that simply defies the logic and laws of music, therefore under-seen as just noise by those who close their mind to a whole new world of expression.

When I researched my book, many of the kids and adults I talked to said one of the top misconceptions about metal is that it’s just noise, or that it takes zero skill to play. On the contrary, its virtuosity appeals to many young fans — and inspires some of them to take up instruments, and even form bands.

Another common misconception is that metal makes kids depressed or angry. Actually, many find that it brings them out of such moods, to a place of calm. It gives them what they need to feel like they can tackle the world again. Here’s Claire Martens, talking about how that happened for her:

I clung to music in my deepest moments. It was a constant in my life, something I depended on when nothing seemed certain or predictable. Even today, when I really don’t want to do something, I put on a good hard-kicking, air-punching album, very loudly, and allow it to invigorate me or cradle me, or be whatever it is I need it to be.

(Full disclosure: Claire links to Backward Messages in her post.)

Claire suggests that parents introduce young kids to metal, in order to broaden their budding musical palates: “Not only will your kids develop discerning musical tastes and an ear to make any music producer proud, but will live to be well-adjusted creatures.”

Amen.

With so many articulate teens and former teens singing heavy metal’s praises, why don’t more people listen to them?