Cynics Unlimited

Can a video game literally drive you to kill?

46 year old Toronto taxi driver Tahir Khan was killed on January 24th when his car was struck by one of two racing Mercedes cars, whose speeds topped 140km/h in a 50km/h zone. The impact of the crash wrapped his car around a pole, leaving little for rescue crews and police to do but clean up the mess afterward. The badly damaged Mercedes that hit Khan had a copy of Need for Speed in the passenger seat. Police and the media quickly concluded that the dueling Mercedes were street racing, with Need for Speed being the apparent inspiration.

The drivers of the dueling cars, 18 year olds Alexander Ryazanov and Wang−Piao Dumani Ross, have been charged with criminal negligence causing death – the heaviest charge that can be laid under this scenario. On paper it would seem to be a case of two young and irresponsible children whose poor judgment took a man’s life. Conventional wisdom says the two should be jailed as long as possible for their crimes, perhaps as an example for future wannabe racers. Alas, we live in an age where holding people responsible for their voluntary actions is no longer in vogue; thus something else or someone else must be to blame for this tragic event. The usual suspects for “root causes” (re: reasons for defense lawyers to argue for a lenient sentence) simply don’t make sense in this case:

• Poverty. The two 18-year olds are university students who graduated from the prestigious St Andrew’s College, a private school in the decidedly non-urban Aurora. One driver lives just north of the exclusive Bridle Path area of Toronto. As mentioned before, both teens were driving Mercedes cars – hardly the ride of choice for children of construction workers
• Discrimination. Khan, Ryananov and Ross are all of different backgrounds. The victim is a recent immigrant who could not have been a part of the “the system”. The accused are unlikely to have suffered much discrimination, given their wealthy backgrounds.
• Alcohol / Drugs. No alcohol or drug use has been reported thus far.

All that remained was Need for Speed, the racing game franchise that has spanned over a dozen incarnations since being first released for the 3DO video game console in 1994. The premise of the game has never changed: drive your car as fast as humanly possible without crashing into anything significant until you win the race. Earlier incarnations of the game featured racing in rural or designated race tracks; It was the 2003 release of Need for Speed Underground that initially embraced the “street racing” culture, and even then races were created to look like city-sanctioned events rather than illegal dueling. There were also video-based public service messages at the start of the newer Need for Speed games, warning players not to attempt street racing in real life.

Nonetheless, the first police officer to comment on the crash took direct aim at the video game and little else:

“[An] ultra-violent driving simulation, fighting simulation and criminal simulation”
-Det. Paul Lobsinger on Need for Speed

Fighting simulation? Ultra-violent? Even the (recent) addition of destructible environments seems lightweight next to the violence in recent movies like Sin City and Munich. The detective was probably confusing Need for Speed with the Grand Theft Auto franchise, which does allow the player to actually get out of the car and “interact” with the people in the streets.

The mischaracterization of the game didn’t stop the Canadian media from pouncing on the sensationalism, making mention of the video game at every turn. But can a video game be a significant factor in driving teens to criminal activity? There never has been a definitive scientific answer for this question. Common sense, however, suggests that if Need for Speed definitively turned players into dangerous, street-racing maniacs, Toronto should be experiencing these colossal accidents at least once per week. With the release of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as well as imitators like 25 to Life and Get Rich or Die Trying, Toronto’s 80 murders should number in the hundreds or even thousands. As I’m an avid player of Age of Empires 3, you should expect to see Cynapse on TV shortly, as I violently establish the colony of CynicLand (somewhere near cottage country).

But of course you won’t see any of these because video games –like Catcher in the Rye, Ozzy Osbourne and 50 Cent- are insufficient to explain bad behavior. The sales of each of these media sensations number well in to the millions, while criminal incidents directly attributed each of them (usually by defense lawyers and self-appointed media watchdogs) number less than a dozen. This is far from statistically significant. If you’re looking for a possible root cause in the unnecessary death of Tahir Khan, consider some of the comments made by friends and family of the accused following their arrest:

“It’s tragic, it’s horrible what happened. Now I am going to be worried about him staying in jail with criminals”
-An relative of one of the accused (January 2006)

“It could have been any of us in the same situation … Sometimes we get out of hand. We have fun. You know, a lot of us are just getting our new licenses now”
-Saron Ghebressellassie, friend of the accused (January 2006)

Note the absence of any sympathy for the victim or an acknowledgement that Ryazanov and Dumont are entangled in a mess of their own making. Perhaps the lack of accountability and lack of concern for the victim in these statements points to a more likely cause of this crash – the pervasive attitude among the upper classes that their children are somehow above the law and not responsible for the same actions that would land other children in jail. No excuses should be made for anyone who has the luxury to street race Mercedes cars on city streets.

• Barack Obama: Not a Muslim but Possibly a Martyr
• Deaths = 1, Arrests = 25, Lessons Learned = 0