Last month, I learned a very valuable lesson about talking to the press. It all started during one my family's seasonal ski trips to Mammoth, when I was contacted by a friend of mine as I was getting on the lift for a last run. She told me that one of her mom's friends was a columnist and wanted to find -year old males to interview about the controversial nature of a recently released video game. I immediately thought, "Wow, an interview – an great opportunity for me to showcase my eloquence and share my opinion with everyone who reads the article." I was excited. I understood that I was to be contacted by the columnist later that day while I was driving back to my home in ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Los Angeles. All I knew about him was that his name was Joel. ..:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
About a week later I was rudely woken up by my mom, who seemed extremely upset about something. Evidently my friend Joel, who seemed like a nice guy on the phone, wrote an article about me in The Los Angeles Times. The first problem was that the article was negative and made me look like a complete idiot – this was not what I intended. The second problem was that I was misquoted and had my words taken out of context. The third problem was that it was in the Los Angeles Times. I immediately realized the fault in my incredibly naïve assumption that the article, assuming it ever got published, would end up in some publication that I had never heard of, which meant that there was no risk in being interviewed. Wrong. I could not have been more wrong, in fact. I felt the article deserved an immediate response from me, which unfortunately wasn't immediate enough, as it wasn't printed in the The Times. So now you get to see both sides of the discussion. I'm going to put the article first, but you better not read it without reading my response, because I can guarantee you that the article would not be here without the response to go with it.
Sex, boys and video games – Joel Stein - Los Angeles January 31, 2006
I've always been scared of 17-year-old boys. Particularly when I was 17, but even now I have learned to avoid their hormone-amped, hostile glances, figuring every one of them is in some kind of dangerous gang. Especially if he's wearing red or blue, or making any kind of complicated shadow puppets when there is no nearby wall or light source. But it turns out I have nothing to worry about. Los Angeles is now so safe, the city is looking not to protect society from 17-year-old boys but to protect them from society. On Thursday, the city sued the firm that makes the videogame "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" over a hidden sex scene that can be unlocked by hacking into the computer coding. The city believes that parents who simply wanted to buy their boys a wholesome cop-shooting, hooker-killing, car-stealing game were unfairly duped. Because if the ratings board had known about the scene, the game probably would have been bumped up to an "Adults Only" rating (restricting it to those 18 and over) instead of "Mature" (which keeps it away from anyone under 17).That means that all across Los Angeles, innocent 17-year-old boys with advanced computer skills were being exposed to moderately rendered, computer-animated soft-core pornography. And City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo wants to make sure someone pays for doing this to our kids. Because if these teen computer geniuses are given the opportunity to unlock a video-game sex scene, then they'll be just one step away from breaking the code that allows them to type dirty words into Google. Although I wish a teenage boy's world were as full of innocence and wonder as Delgadillo does, I wondered if consensual animated sex was really the kind of thing that would offend a 17-year-old male who grew up in Los Angeles. So I tracked one down and asked him if this was the kind of thing that would warp his impressionable mind. Harrison Schaaf, a junior at Oakwood High School, turned 17 last month, placing him among the most vulnerable and malleable 17-year-olds in L.A. Schaaf has played "GTA," but he has avoided the sex scene you have to unlock because it sounded hard to do. "But I'm sure it would be hilarious," Schaaf said. "I'm absolutely certain." He has, however, gotten the game's main character to chase after women with a baseball bat. It can be frustrating, remember, to be a 17-year-old boy. Crossing "chasing women with a baseball bat" off the list of things that offend a 17-year-old boy, I pressed him for what he did find offensive. Schaaf spent a lot of time thinking — and came up empty. None of the sex he's seen on the Internet bothered him. At first he had thought "Kill Bill" did, but then he decided to watch the movie again and thought it was "awesome." When pressed, he admitted that really racist stuff, such as the 1915 movie "Birth of a Nation," was kind of obscene. And when I asked him if a column about not supporting the troops was offensive, he immediately said, "Yeah, that's kind of bad. That's offensive." So I'm thinking that even though Delgadillo's heart is in the right place (namely, shoring up easy votes for his run for attorney general against Jerry Brown in June's primary), he's fighting a losing battle. As the documentary "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" points out, all our rating systems are arbitrary and ultimately ineffective. Though XXX, while completely made-up, is still kind of exciting. Now that kids can surf the Web, rent movies through online retailers, watch hundreds of cable channels and download gangster rap, it's impossible for society to restrict the flow of information to them. And even though they're a lot more jaded and harsh, it hasn't made them any more violent or sexually active. I understand that we wish a prelapsarian childhood for our kids, because, in our daily stresses, we long for simplicity for ourselves. But when you're a kid, you want the opposite: You're desperately curious about the world and excited for all the information you can get. And no lawsuit is going to keep 17-year-olds away from that. Besides, the more time they're playing video games, the more time they're away from me.
Here is what I had to say about that -
TO THE EDITOR, Los Angeles Times, January 31st, 2006
I am writing to you with the purpose of taking issue with the way I was portrayed and quoted in an article by Joel Stein called Sex, Boys, and Video Games, published in the editorial section of the January 31st issue of the Los Angeles Times. In Stein's article, his central thesis is that 17 year old males are a demographic that is difficult, if not impossible to offend, due to the fact that they are terminally jaded by today's lack of censorship.
However, I disagree. I consider myself an example of how this is not true. As the 17 year old who was "rounded up" and quoted, you could say that I am offended by reporters who obtain my contact information and interview me without introducing themselves, telling me who they work for, or revealing their agenda in interviewing me. Little did I know, that in fact, the interview was being conducted by Joel Stein, the Los Angeles Times reporter whose work I am familiar with. One can imagine my surprise when I opened up the editorial section this morning and saw my name in print.
During the interview, Stein asked me if I would find an article about how someone did not support the troops to be offensive. I said "yes" and that was what ended up going into the article. But if Stein had quoted further, your readers would have learned that my support for the troops does not translate into support for the Iraq war. Stein, in a very Bush fashion, is taking how I feel about the troops in Iraq and using it to make it look like I support the Republican administration agenda, which I definitely do not. Stein did this in a way that reminded me instantly of Bush's line of argument for the troops presence in Iraq as well as the war itself, which is that you can't support the troops without supporting the war and its cause, and if you don't support the troops, you're not a patriot, and if you aren't a patriot, you are not a decent human being, and you don't deserve to live in America.
The other issue I had with the article was that I came off as a person who enjoys the simulation of violence against women with the use of baseball bats. Again, this is not true. The question I was answering was, "What is the most extreme thing you can do in the video game?" to which I answered, "Probably chasing women with baseball bats." I never said anything about actually doing that within the game. This fact serves to undermine some of the most important corroborative evidence in Stein's piece, which is that 17 year old boys are not offended by the thought of hitting women with baseball bats. I cannot speak for others, but I can definitely tell you that I am offended by such a thought, which is precisely the reason it was my answer to the question.
So what does a 17 year-old learn from this? Stein and I do agree on one point: video games pose a minimal threat to the "malleable" minds of 17 year old males. Nobody forces me to play them; I can take them or leave them, and I don't even own a video game system. It is unlikely that I will wake up some morning and find that a video game has desensitized me to senseless graphic violence or poorly animated sex. That is not dangerous. Talking to the media might be though.
So here's the jam: Don't talk to anybody without knowing who they are, what they do, who they are writing/working for, and what their agenda is. In fact, if you're talking to a complete stranger over the phone, (why did I do this?) there's probably some other stuff you should know about them too. Now that I think about it, there's no real fault at all in just not talking to the press.