Protest Poster

Protest Poster Artist’s Statement

            Before starting my project, I was already somewhat knowledgeable about my chosen topic of violence and video games.  Last semester in my Writing 150 class, I did my research paper on the effect of violent video games on youth.  I argued that the effect of violent video games were not as drastic as popular reports were making it out to be, and I found a significant amount of research supporting my assertion.  The one thing I’d never looked into though, were media representations either in support of or against video games.  I researched these in preparation for my poster didn’t find that much surprisingly.  I found only one series of ads that showed close-ups of keyboards and game controllers with blood splattered all over them and a catch phrase like “He just got a headshot.” 

            Obviously these were villainizing games, and while I definitely agree that violent video games can have an affect, and that we should be concerned, I felt I’d argue in support once again.  It’s funny to me the degree in which some people will publicly bash media for our current level of violence.  Horrific violence has existed all throughout history.  Cain murdered his brother for starters, and we’ve had innumerable amounts of senseless wars and displays of violence.  In a fit of fear and despair, I think people are looking to blame something and violent media, specifically video games, is a prominent target.

            My protest poster plays on the above idea; that violence has been around for a long time and there’s no reason to blame video games as much as our society currently is.  So, I decided to attempt to bring up a humorous point rather than do something serious.  I contemplated various things, like showing video game characters being really sad with a catch phrase that we were going to blame them for everything, etc.  I settled on a sort of cartoon, drawing off a meme-type of style, except instead of doing impact font, I did speech bubbles and weird cutouts to make a historical painting look funny. 

 I’m not trying to say that violent video games have no effect at all, because they do.  Games have ratings for a reason, and no one under 17 years old should be playing M rated games, as the rating indicates.  However, like Chimamanda Adichie tried to point out, there is a huge danger in only having one story for any situation.  If people just accept the news reports that the most recent sick and twisted psychopath that went on a killing spree also played video games as a confirmation that games are the cause, then they are not seeing all the stories and all the sides of the issue.   

            I’m not huge on social media.  I have a Facebook account, but rarely post anything.  I only have a twitter account for Dean Duncan’s class, and a blog for this class.  And the few times I have posted something on Facebook, I don’t exactly get a huge slew of comments.  Nonetheless, I posted my poster, even asking people to comment, which is entirely unusual for me.  In all honesty I only got one comment that was helpful, or critical in any way.  It said, “Straight forward and funny.  Keep it just like that.”  The others said “Haha” or some smart-A comment like “I will comment here.”

            I think I got my message across as best I could in a poster.  That medium is meant to be short, quick and simple.  There are a hundred different arguments you could make for both sides of this argument, and some are pretty scientifically oriented, and would take awhile to explain.  But in just taking one simple argument and articulating it in an appealing way, I think I did alright. But I guess that's up to you.