That’s hardly hyperbole. Jones’ friend, Ronika Owens-Clemons, was shot to death last summer at a West Dayton school playground when her boyfriend’s gun discharged in a confrontation with another teen.
That tragedy brought about a lot of soul-searching for Jones and her friends at Streetpeace, a youth anti-violence group based at Ruskin middle school. Her death was one of the inspirations behind an original play, “Playground Revolution,” about the impact of violent video games on young people.
The play takes a scathing look at the recent political debate over the sale of violent video games to minors, culminating with the recent Supreme Court decision giving retailers a very wide berth.
Courtney Cummings, another friend of Owens-Clemons, challenges the audience, “While you adults stand around and argue about whether video games cause aggression in kids and whether or not guns kill people or people kill people, I have a name for you. Ronika.
“Throw her into your research. How she ends up dead on a school playground. Her boyfriend shot her. He was arguing with another dude. Ronika was being herself, trying to be a good person, trying to break up the conflict between these two dudes ... Her last words were, ‘You shot me, baby.’ ”
Then the performers form a Greek chorus about the profound disconnect between teens’ “virtual lives” and real-life consequences:
“Maybe he thought in the next scene, she would wake up revived in front of the hospital.”
“Maybe he thought she had more than one life.”
The play was intended as a one-time fundraiser for East End Community Services, which runs the after-school Streetpeace program at Ruskin middle school.
It turned out to be an awareness raiser as well, and the students are eager to perform “Playground Revolution” at other schools. “We’d like to do a world tour,” joked Rachel Wilbur, 14, adding on a serious note, “The message is so important. We can’t play outside because it’s too dangerous, but then we’re getting virtually assaulted in our own living rooms.”
Janis James, development director for East End Community Services, marveled that “our young people, here in an inner-city school, from an impoverished neighborhood, are leaders on how the video games are affecting their reality and even more so, how big business is making millions by encouraging our children to adopt violence as a plaything.”
Streetpeace program director Julie McGlaun, a language arts teacher at Ruskin, began interviewing students last year about violent video games. Her research revealed that 89 percent of the sixth-to-eighth-graders interviewed played violent video games, averaging three hours a day. Many told her they “played all day, every day” when they aren’t at school.
Sixty-five percent of U.S. households play video games, and 26 percent of the gamers are 18 and younger, according to the Education Database Online. The median age is 32, and the average gamer spends 18 hours a week playing video games.
Given such statistics, it’s no coincidence that the Streetpeace motto contains the phrase, “If you’re up until 3 a.m. playing video games, you’re probably being remote controlled.”
When asked why the students don’t play outside more, Jones said, “The girls don’t go outside because the johns all assume we’re prostitutes and they solicit us every time we leave the house.”
When McGlaun asked the girls how many had encountered that problem, nearly every girl raised her hand.
It was a painful revelation, McGlaun said, but it’s the reason she stays after school every day to run the Streetpeace program. Two dozen teens make the commitment to stay after school for three hours every day, learning such skills as critical thinking and media literacy.
“We need to raise the level of consciousness in our students to think critically and to ask questions about the media they consume so they’re not being manipulated,” McGlaun explained.
Since joining Streetpeace, teens like Wilbur, Jones and David Betancourt, 13, have stopped playing violent video games. “When you’re exposed to that level of violence, what do you do in real life?” Betancourt asked. “The line between reality and virtual reality becomes really thin.”
Working on the play, and being involved with Streetpeace, in contrast, “made us feel empowered,” he said. “As kids we don’t get to express ourselves very often. This made us feel awake and in control of our lives. We acknowledged the problem and asked ourselves, ‘What are we going to do about it?’”
The Streetpeace kids dedicated their new play to “Ronika and all victims of gun violence.”
Owens-Clemons’ boyfriend, Bobby Lavel Moore, is serving 16 years in prison for involuntary manslaughter.
Wilbur reflected sadly, “Maybe he thought the game would reload. In video games, people who are killed reappear somewhere else. In real life, that doesn’t happen.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2209 or mmccarty@DaytonDaily News.com.
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