Jack Hardcastle

Why do we have this notion today that the media is somehow different than it was in the past? Is it because large corporations have taken over, turning the news business into a real business? Perhaps that could explain why stories like this can be so dumb — nobody bothers to investigate them properly because that would cost money.

An 8-year-old student in Modesto, California stole his teacher’s minivan and drove it home. Not only did he drive it home, he adjusted the seat, steering wheel, and mirrors. He also successfully navigated a traffic light at a busy intersection and undoubtedly some stop signs, etc. I think for an third grader, that’s an impressive display of situational awareness. My sister has trouble with some of those things.

What’s more impressive is the lengths reporters will go to drag Grand Theft Auto into the story. Yes, what the child committed was technically grand theft auto, a felony, but that’s not the point. Men like Jack Thompson have made it so that Grand Theft Auto (the video game) is perceived as the sole cause of deviant behavior in children today. I know he was in it for the money, but the blame-it-on-videogames syndrome predates him. Everything from school shootings to cooking accidents have been blamed on the video game culture. Like rock and roll in the 50’s and 60’s, video games are “destroying” today’s youth.

I digress, however. My original complaint lies with CBS13. If you watch the video clip, they show a 9-year-old boy at a go-kart track driving around with his family and playing video games in the arcade. At the end of the piece, the reporter asks the boy if he would consider doing the same thing as the suspect. “That’s ridiculous,” he says. “Why would anybody do that? It sounds kinda fun, but you’d get in really… trouble, and….” Pardon his lack of sentence construction, but the thread is there. A kid that spends time with his parents immediately says, “That’s a really dumb idea. Why would anybody do that?” The 9-year-old plays Grand Theft Auto (which really, despite the title, has less to do with stealing cars and more to do with shooting cops and beating hookers to death). That doesn’t make him a deranged killer. I played Carmageddon as a kid, where you accrue points by running over pedestrians and smashing into oncoming traffic. Does that make me a homicidal maniac?

This story has nothing to do with video games. The kid stole the car because kids want to be grown up and do grown up things, like drive. When I was maybe 12, I stole my mom’s keys while she was taking a nap and drove her car out of the garage into the driveway, and then back into the garage. I wanted to see how different driving a car was from driving a tractor. Turns out they’re not that different. Kids have been doing similar things since long before there were grand theft auto video games, and they’ll still be doing it long after GTA is collecting dust in a drawer next to Pong. If the reporter had spent any time actually thinking about the content of the story and the issues in the piece, she might have said that. Instead, she went for the easy “what sells” angle. If it bleeds, it leads. Nobody wants to hear that what the kid did isn’t really all that unusual. That doesn’t pull enough attention for the 24-hour cable news world.

Nobody’s talking about how the kid’s increased hand-eye coordination made him a better driver.