Click. Bang. It's Only a Game. By Sharon Waxman Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, May 27, 1999; Page C1

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Another time, he brought his parents a copy of Sin, a cutting-edge "shooter" video he designed with heart-pounding music and multi-weapon massacres. The villain is a vixen in miniskirt and push-up bra; the point is to kill her. He took Mom and Dad for a quick visual tour. They gave him a blank look.

"It was like – reality check," he recalls glumly, perched on a folding chair in the lounge at the office, a poorly lit warehouse in downtown Dallas.

But such moments are rare. Most of the time, Atkins and his buddies at Ritual Entertainment, a leading design house for bloody virtual-killing games, just focus on the work: better graphics, cooler effects, more realistic and innovative ways to smash, pound, mutilate and outmaneuver the enemy.

Atkins and programmer Mark Dochtermann take a visitor through a sample of Heavy Metal, a work in progress that they presented at an electronic-games convention this month. The game stars "Julie," a barely clad warrior-babe who destroys bad guys trying to take over her planet, Eden.

Dochtermann points out of-the-moment software features, such as a ganja-smoking monster whose joint smokes up realistically. And the villain whose lips move when he threatens Julie in the dungeonlike hall. She dispatches him by slicing off his head with a machete. Splat! There is a Temple-of-Doom-ish dreamscape where massive female torsos adorn the walls and milk spurts, fountainlike, from the breasts. Dochtermann notes the realism of the milk flow.

"We make these games for ourselves," says Dochtermann, a pale, pudgy, proud-to-be-a-geek 27-year-old from Westchester, N.Y. "We're all about creating worlds, about creating a story you can interact with. It's like a cognizant dream where you're in control of your fantasies."

Heavy Metal is a tie-in to an animated film of the same name being released by Columbia Pictures this fall. It was a good fit for Ritual, a three-year-old company looking to make its mark, Dochtermann says. "We all grew up with Heavy Metal magazine. We loved the animated violence, the sexual content. We thought it would make a good game because it syncs well with our target audience, the 18-to-35 crowd."

But Atkins, 29, squirms a bit while showing the video sample. "Most of the guys in this industry stopped maturing at age 13. Which is good because we can appreciate what guys at that age enjoy," he says, a remark that implies a rather different target age group.

Neither Atkins nor Dochtermann sees any relationship between what they produce and the horrific violence at a handful of American schools that has shaken the country and sparked a national quest for explanations.

Says Dochtermann: "After Columbine, I wasn't all that surprised, but I was shocked that the gaming industry was fingered as a main culprit. It was funny to us."

Atkins agrees and points out the obvious. "It's not real. Those are polygon models that I saw someone create. That's an illusion – this is a key point. There are sick people out there who maybe can't make the distinction. That's unfortunate," he says. "But I just think it's entertainment."

Denying Responsibility

They note accurately that millions play first-person shooter games without picking up weapons and blowing away their peers. Blame poor parenting, they say. Blame the gun industry. Blame the media. Even blame movies, which are more realistic than the stiff graphics of video games (though that is rapidly changing).

Says Brett Combs, vice president of a company called Terminal Reality, based in suburban Dallas: "Violent games do not breed violent people." Otherwise, he says, our prisons would be full of video game players.

But beyond this simplistic response lies a more delicate truth, which is that the video game industry is an insular subculture that has precious little contact with or interest in the raging debate over the influence of violent media on American society. The small community of top-level computer talent based here – a colony of ultra-violent design – work long hours and socialize among themselves.

Their concerns are about overcoming the technical challenges of their craft and surviving in a young, cutthroat market. They are all hard-core gamers and tend to think the rest of the world doesn't understand anything about their universe. For the most part, they have not had to address hard questions about their industry.

The result is that when asked to dig deep on moral issues about violent games, many offer weak arguments and even contradictory ones. Often the questions elicit the vaguely panicked look of a teenager whose mother has suddenly opened his bedroom door and flicked on the light: "What? What'd I do?"

One designer posited that overly violent videos – videos that cross some undefined moral line – don't sell, offering as proof the unpopular game Postal. (As the title suggests, the game features a postal worker who goes on a killing rampage.) But the reason for that video's failure, as the designer knew, was not offensive content, but crude graphics and poor design.

Several designers point out that the games have "Mature" ratings (meaning for ages 17 and older), though that rationale doesn't stand up to scrutiny either. Virtually any teen who saves his allowance can buy a shooter game in any video store. The most popular ones – such as Doom, which Littleton shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold played – can be downloaded from the Internet for free. Most of the designers themselves have been playing shooter games since their early teens.

Another suggested that shooter videos may have a salutary effect, that the blood and gore is a safe outlet for natural violent impulses.

Among those who disagree are the parents of three murdered children in West Paducah, Ky., who have filed suit against 24 entertainment companies that have distributed violent fare. In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs claim that Doom, favored by gunman Michael Carneal, 14, taught him to shoot to kill. In the past, designers of violent games have bragged that Marines use Doom in training.

But here's a surprise: The video game designers in Dallas are, overall, a sober, conservative lot. Many are married with young families and express deep concerns about the violence in American society. They just don't see their own work as having anything to do with that problem.

"Are kids more exposed to violence nowadays? I'd say definitely yes," says Matt Hooper, 30, of video-game developer Third Law Interactive, who is designing the landscape for a new shooter game called KISS Psycho Circus – more creepy, adrenaline-pumping music and first-person virtual killing.

A quiet man with wire-rimmed glasses and carefully combed black hair, Hooper talks at length about his concerns for his children, aged 6, 4 and 2. Then he says: "As far as video games are concerned, it's almost a non-issue to me. We see graphic violence more and more – but I don't see any influence."

Combs's company is in full-throttle development of a gory shooter game called Nocturne. He, too, has children. Terminal Reality has programmers crammed into darkened rooms coming up with gory and very gory versions of the game. The hallways are lined with "Star Wars" posters. "I do agree that violent media in general desensitizes people," he says. "I won't let my kids watch cop shows."

Company President Mark Renchel, 29, agrees. "Negative, negative, negative – all the time."

"As a parent, I'm the gatekeeper of what my kids see," continues Combs, gathering steam. "How many times do you have to see the Kosovo crisis before you don't feel anything anymore? I've had it crammed down my throat so much, it no longer causes any feeling. We're desensitized to the point where it means nothing."

Well, okay. How did we end up in Kosovo? And – not to be rude – but doesn't that support the argument that violent games may have a negative effect?

Bizarrely, Combs seems to agree. "We are desensitized. And it depends on us as individuals and the moral fiber we raise our kids with." He describes how he was severely punished as a child in rural Texas for "shooting at things we shouldn't shoot at. There was discipline. Today's kids don't have to deal with the consequences of their actions."

Benefits to Society?

So success in the computer industry is sweet for him. "Our industry is the ultimate revenge of the nerds," he says. "I can only imagine the types of beatings Bill Gates took as a kid."

Dochtermann, the programming whiz behind Sin, grew up the son of middle-class German immigrants. His father was an art director at an ad agency. Dochtermann was overweight. He wasn't rich. He liked computers and almost nothing else. He can understand the experience of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as unpopular outsiders.

"I was more like those kids than not," he confesses. Today he is wearing a polo shirt, khaki shorts and white crew socks with leather shoes. (Computer-gaming companies are not magnets for the sartorially aware.) Cases of high-caffeine soda and junk food line the wall, fuel for work that stretches into the wee hours. "I was a definite nerd. High school was one of the most stressful, hardest times of life. You're coming to terms with sexuality, adulthood – and kids can be mean."

Dochtermann's wife, a Russian immigrant he met at college in Rochester, N.Y., suffered similar experiences when she was thrust into an American school.

"Children spit at her," he says. "No one ever spit at me, but people picked fights with me. I'm a very nonviolent person. When I do get angry, I just can't control the adrenaline. I just shake a lot, like I'm ready to explode, but don't have a way to," he says, breaking off. Pause. "One of my favorite activities is to play video games. That's a definite release. I un-stress myself by playing those games."

So what about Harris and Klebold? Does Dochtermann ever stay up nights thinking about them, about what influence he might have on kids?

"It occurs to me, but it's the same as organized sports or action movies," he says. "They tap into our aggressive tendencies. People are turned on by the portrayal of violence. There is a need for some sort of simulated, virtual violence which allows us to tap into our aggressive fantasies without acting on them."

He considers this. "Those kids in Littleton had personal issues. The environment they survived in, I can definitely visualize and sympathize with the things that happened to them."

The Founding Fathers

How they ended up in Dallas is a bit of a fluke. Two gaming superstars, John Carmack and John Romero, programming geniuses and the creators of Doom and Quake, led the way. Both were early computer gaming fanatics who found themselves working for one of the few companies in a fledgling industry, Softdisk, in Shreveport in the early 1990s.

With a group of friends at a lakeside cabin on weekends, they came up with a concept for a game to be sold on the Internet instead of by mail or in stores. An agreement with a distributor, Apogee Software, brought them to Dallas, where they founded Id Software, a legendary pairing in the gaming industry.

Together Carmack and Romero revolutionized video games with the first-person-shooter format – first Wolfenstein 3D, in which players shoot Nazis in dungeons, then Doom, which sold an incredible 1.5 million units in 1993, the year it was released.

Among the best-selling videos of all time, Doom and its subsequent incarnations have sold 2.7 million units. Since a limited version can be downloaded from the Internet for free, tens of millions of hard drives across the country are believed to have the game.

After Doom came Quake and Quake II, making the handful of programmers at Id rich; the twentysomethings bought themselves Ferraris. Then they began to fight. Romero split off to form Ion Storm, a company now on a financial precipice because of the delay of a much-anticipated shooter game called Daikatana. Many of his programmers left Romero to work with another refugee from Id Software, Mike Wilson, who a year ago founded his own distribution company called Gathering of Developers (whose acronym is GOD), based in a converted church in downtown Dallas.

Both Carmack and Romero declined to be interviewed for this article, citing the West Paducah lawsuit.

"The development community is a lot like the film community," Wilson says. "If you want to be respected by your peers, you have to introduce new elements, story lines, graphics, and impress the core gaming crowd. It's not that violence sells. People may say it looks real, but to us it's very cartoony."

For the young companies, there's plenty of financial risk. It takes about 18 months and as much as $2‚million to develop a new video game. So far, Gathering of Developers is surviving on sales of a strategic game called Railroad Tycoon and is about to launch a flight simulation game, Fly. But the company's real hopes lie with its plans to distribute Heavy Metal. Huge cardboard stand-ups promoting the game – black background with a skull in the center – adorn GOD's light, airy offices.

"Right now, all the good games are for sci-fi, geeky, Star Trekkie guys," Wilson says. "We all want the satisfaction of being a hero."

What Happens Next?

But the developers in Dallas don't believe this amounts to much. They have momentum. Interest from Hollywood is high. Last year's top-selling video game was Goldeneye 007, a shooter based on the James Bond movie. DreamWorks has released the shooter game Trespasser, in which the player hunts dinosaurs. With practically every major studio designating an "interactive" executive to forge links to software companies like those in Dallas, developers feel it's only a matter of time until the mainstream culture adopts their ethos, not the other way around.

Says Dochtermann: "I feel I'm in the right place at the right time. We created something out of nothing. We're continuing to grow, not dying down."

Says Atkins: "All we can do is rate these games 'mature.' Other than making it illegal, what can the industry do? I don't think that content will be curbed because of this."

He goes on, "In a perfect world, we could say, 'Okay, we'll stop feeding this hunger people have for violent stuff.' But it isn't going to happen. Hollywood will continue to make this stuff, and video gamers will continue. We're going to continue to make the games we want to play."

But Atkins himself may have to do all his playing at the office. When he recently boasted to his wife that their son would be the best Death Match player in the world by age 4, she set him back with a glare.

"Our kids," she told him, "aren't going to be playing your games."