Despite the way I try to come across on this blog, I am quite the zealous gamer. In fact you could almost call me stereotypical in that I am also part of a robotics club and some of my favorite quotes aside from historical quotes are from Red vs Blue and such. Mind you that I pull all of this off while still retaining my good looks. Back to the point though, being the zealot that I am when I read the first article on game politics about him I sprang into action and wrote an email to him that basically made me out to be a total bastard. It was then that I learned firsthand that the reporter who had interviewed him had got it pretty wrong.

I received a reply barely an hour after I had sent my email which alone surprised me. I have tried to reach a couple of people in the past and usually I meet with failure by them not even replying to me. However, Dr. Hoechsmann did and abruptly so. Then(unlike me) he replied totally civilly and said to me,

"Believe it or not, I actually defend video games/gamers/gaming. I take serious Janet Muray's claims about the future of narrative in simulation, Jim Gee's points about learning in/and games, and Steven Johnson's arguments about games making us smarter. I also agree with many of my students who say that game themes/designs evolve with the tastes of gamers and that most/many games are no more violent than the average Tarantino flick."

I couldn't believe it at first and man was I surprised to hear that he actually defends games for the most part. There have been numerous examples that were pointed out to me but there is a big one in recent news. Hopefully you have all heard about the Bully controversy and how Teachers Unions are moving to have it banned. Well, the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail had a front page article on it where Dr. Hoechsmann commented as follows.

"But calling for a ban on the game is like "flailing at windmills" when it comes to actually confronting bullying, said Michael Hoechsmann, an assistant professor at McGill University and an expert on the role of violence in video games.

"As tempting as it may seem, I'm not so certain that banning this will somehow result in a more peaceful and more loving school population," he said, adding that he hasn't found any compelling evidence to suggest that playing a violent video game results in violent actions.

Furthermore, Prof. Hoechsmann said, the menacing and authoritarian school environment in Bully is so exaggerated that the protagonist is forced to act as a sort of vigilante.

"This young person being confronted with all that seeks the one remedy that he appears to have access to. If there was a peaceful schools committee at the Bullworth Academy, maybe Jimmy would have joined the committee.""

Which goes to my next point. Not only did he defend a game against a ban by a watchdog group, but he mentioned how he has never been convinced about the effects of game violence. Is it starting to sound like he isn't the bad guy that sites and gamer communities across the web have made him out to be. When I asked him to elaborate a little more he told me that he may have angered the teachers unions now as well.

But that is the purpose of this post! To show you to investigate the media! Dr. Hoechsmann was made out to be something he absolutely is not. Frankly it was quite ridiculous how many people attacked him like he was the next Thompson. There were at least 140 posts about how he was some kind of moron who had no idea what he was talking about. There were many who pointed him as to another blind follower of Craig A Anderson's less than gratifying studies. That in itself is an insult as one of the "studies" is just a tally of how many studies said violence was caused by game violence and studies that disproved that. Kudos to Mike that he joined the discussion on Gamepolitics and defended himself against us. It's proof to his character that he actually sought to join us to defend himself unlike other media heads who just ignore the anger they receive from us.

On that note I would like to say that I think this shows that he considers us an actual community and that alone should be enough.

With the truth aside, I would like to say that I do not agree with his original comment on Army of Two which landed him in all of this trouble. I do not think that it is a lack of creativity or originality on the game industries part that leads many games to be war oriented. It is a setting where from a story point of view the stresses of emotion and the extremes that characters have to go through are an amazing way with which to develop characters and in depth story lines. The problem is that you would be hard pressed to find a good game with a war theme that isn't a mature game, and therein I think lies the problem that many people take with it.

However, that isn't necessarily the problem that Mike takes with the game. From what I understand from our emails, the problem that Dr. Hoechsmann takes with games like army of two is the glorification of war and private army's. Mike alluded to his opinion by saying:
"I wonder how much is known on the gamer community about the role of mercenaries in various conflicts over the past 50 years or so?.Not a nice set of stories?.From mercenaries, the next awful leap would be in to the realm of torture in armed conflict?.."

Its easy to see that he takes games seriously and treats them as such. Its ironic that one of the few times we are actually taken seriously that we respond so negatively to him. In one of our emails he sounded almost confused when he commented about the comments people left on Gamepolitics:
"Btw, I?m not sure how I come off as ?mean.? It?s pretty freaky to discover over 130 posts, many of which call you an a**hole. I noticed that a whole bunch of people agreed with the creativity in game development theme though."


I've alluded to it many times that I think that we need to reign in our enthusiasm about defending our pastime and try to look at the news with a little more neutrality until we've learned the whole story.

Trust me, I learned that lesson the hard way as I was the first to send Dr. Hoechsmann an email with basically slander in it. Hate mail is not the way!

Mike is from what I can tell a very nice man who's willing to open up in an intelligent discussion provided you have the time and you take him seriously. I'm happy I got the chance to find out the other side of the story and learn that the reporter got it wrong.

I highly recommend that if you have any questions about them you should email people rather than just trashing them on the forums(as fun as that is)

Ichi