A Room Full of Doom

By DAVID S. JACKSON/LOS ANGELES

Morgan Hildreth, 24, jerks back from the keyboard as a loud burst of automatic gunfire erupts on his computer screen. "I got somebody!" shouts a nearby player, as a body explodes in a red mist. Around them, a few dozen spectators in baggy T shirts and oversize shoes watch in a trance as grown men with joysticks stalk one another through underground mazes, firing guns and blowing one another to bits. When chunks of bloody body parts thump to the ground, some of the onlookers laugh out loud. "This is gonna sell like hot cakes," chortles one.

It was as if Columbine had never happened. I came to the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo--the first E3 since the Littleton, Colo., massacre--expecting to find the video- game industry in a defensive crouch. After all, everybody from my wife to the President has made hay out of the fact that the boys who fired 600 rounds at their teachers and fellow students had nurtured their violent revenge fantasies, at least in part, playing splatter games like Doom and Quake. But on the floor of the Los Angeles Convention Center, where Quake III, the newest, bloodiest version, was on display, the only question on these guys' minds was "When can I play?"

Officially, of course, the industry shares my wife's concerns. But games that reward players for shooting, maiming or running over anything that moves represent a significant fraction of a total revenue stream that could top $7 billion this year--bigger even than the annual take from movie box-office receipts--and nobody is going to tighten that spigot without a fight. "Video games don't teach people to hate," said Douglas Lowenstein, president of the Interactive Digital Software Association, last week. "The entertainment-software industry has no reason to run and hide."

Yet inside the clamorous convention hall, that's just what the executives of the best-selling splatter games were doing--especially from pesky reporters. When I asked a designer for id, which makes Doom and Quake, if he would answer a few questions, he said sure. But when he heard that they were about violence in video games, he said I'd have to talk to his boss, id president Todd Hollenshead. When I headed off to find Hollenshead, I was intercepted by a public relations official who said that nobody from id would be available. Would I like to talk to someone from Activision, the company that distributes Quake, instead? O.K. But it turned out Activision didn't want anyone interviewed either.

If the gamemakers wouldn't defend their industry, their customers were happy to try. Paul Good, 30, an artist from Maryland with long pink hair and a half-shaved head, insisted that violent video games defuse, not provoke, violence. "When the world p_____ you off and you need a place to vent," he explained, "Quake is a great place for it. You can kill somebody and watch the blood run down the walls, and it feels good. But when it's done, you're rid of it."

Alexander Basile, 32, a California TV executive, believes the politicians are just looking for a scapegoat. "How many millions of people play Doom and don't go out and kill people?" he asked.

He's right. Most of them don't. But it's the impressionable ones I worry about, and the industry is getting better at getting across its own impressions of reality. The pounding rock music, the crashing sound effects, the shrieks and grunts that poured out of loudspeakers onto E3's crowded aisles could almost turn even a middle-aged father like me into a Doomer. Almost.

Meanwhile, over at the 4DRulers booth, president Joel Huenink is cheerily touting the virtues of his new game Gore, which revolves around a battle for scarce energy resources in a post-apocalyptic world. "There's kind of a bloodbath fighting over it, so that's why we call it Gore," he explains helpfully. Does it have a lot of, you know, gore? "It will." He beams. Then he notices the press badge.

"You're not one of those guys writing about what a bad industry we are, are you?" he says with alarm. I confess that I might be.

He laughs. "Well, then, let me show you this nice family game we've got called Joey the kangaroo." And with that he pulls out a brochure for Joey's Count 10, a teaching game for preschoolers.

In fairness, Gore isn't that gory--it'll probably get the industry's equivalent of a PG-13 rating--but Huenink, an affable Nebraskan with a breezy sense of humor, admits to having second thoughts about his game's title. "When we started it in 1996," he says, "violence wasn't such a big thing."

Violence has always been a big thing in the U.S., and there are good constitutional reasons why we can't legislate that out of our entertainment products. But the video-game industry makes only what it can sell. And as long as gore is what we're buying--for our kids and for ourselves--gore is what they'll give us.