Video games — A Moral Panic

Recently we’ve seen another wave in the media on how video games are making us all violent killing machines. I thought this was very intriguing because I remember such waves like this happening before but now I have more hands on experience in the industry, a lot more knowledge across more types of games and part of what I am studying looks at these ideas and concepts. What I hope to cover in this piece will be briefly what a moral panic is and some examples, the current wave we are in at the moment with some discussion around that and finally why this is sometimes a little ridiculous and nothing to worry about.

Moral Panics –

Put simply a moral panic is societal response to something viewed as a threat to existing social values and often are focused around themes of sex, language, drugs and violence. The reason these types of things occur come about because people are fearful of changing order in society and would rather see things maintained. More often than not we see that these are focused on young people, but on the flipside they also fade away over time and phase in and out. A notable example would be when Dungeons and Dragons was particularly popular during the 1980s. The game was supposedly responsible for turning players into demonic/satanic, violent and unstable people, obviously not true and there was no such evidence. However, the idea of the moral panic suggest that people will put their emotional response above their reason in order to fight the problem at hand — so the media continued to fight D&D until it eventually dissipated and became a mostly accepted thing.

Current Panic

Currently what we’re going through is one of these ‘moral panics’ surrounding how video games are driving those who play them to become violent and commit violent acts. This has been something that we’ve seen in the media before, and usually stems from an issue with the First Person Shooter (FPS) genre, but has also come up in many other genres. Obviously the link between how this insights such violence comes from these games allowing you to kill other players. Despite no evidence to suggest videos games in the long term make people more violent or more likely to do violent things people side with the argument; see Donald Trump in 2012 in his tweet, where he shows that he agrees with the arguments put forward with no scientific evidence.

And this is indictive of moral panics where as referenced before, people are willing to put their reason aside and opt for a more emotional response. This is how a lot of the misconceptions and myths around video games became so rampant; they are violent, addictive, only played by kids/teenagers, by boys, makes people anti-social, unhealthy and lose touch with reality. We as a community know these just aren’t true and misrepresent us. But at the moment what we are fighting in the media is a massive uproar and at its core is ‘Fortnite’. Fortnite has taken the world by storm and has captured the hearts of many being an overall well made game that is widely accessible and a lot of fun to play. Additionally there is a lot of content around it at the moment and its wide popularity will all kinds of people, even celebrities such as Drake and Travis Scott.

Despite this wide audience the game actually has, because of all of the younger children and teens playing this game it has given the argument for video games and violence some fuel. With news outlets and reporters describing the game as a hunger games style challenge where the only goal is to kill, painting it to be excessively violent and cruel due to its last man standing objective.

Those who’ve actually played the game understand it’s very comical and cartoon style, which lends itself to not being as serious as other games like it. They understand the level of strategy around a Battle Royale, the landscape and zone. The teamplay and working together, flanks, resource management and the general competitive fulfilment which along with some other things mentioned (like teamplay and strategy) are a part of traditional sports. But these aspects seem to be lost amongst all the complaints against the games.

What next?

But really, should we be worried about all the panic? Of course not! We know already that there is no definitive research that suggests video games result in people being more violent. And to settle all the accompanied misconceptions, we know very well more than just teenage boys play video games and we know that video games are not making us unhealthy. Lots of things can make us unhealthy, such as reading books and studying for extended periods, if anything some research is now suggestion the stimulation from video games is quite positive for the mental state.

We must be mindful that perhaps video games are being used in unrelated circumstances to represent other events and incidents which are actually completely unrelated. There are still problems around video games but its about understanding what they are and allowing things to get into a state like we see now with Fortnite.

To conclude, we should not be worried. Like D&D, this will not be something that lasts because the basis of the argument against video games is just too flawed, it may come up again but will eventually phase out.

If you want to look into this more I would highly recommend checking out whatever you can about it. Personally, I would suggest giving some time to looking through some of the videos on Richard Lewis’ YouTube channel on this. As well as that I’ve attached some videos that I think really gave some good points and put a comedic element into the debate, highlighting its more ridiculous aspects.

AU News Piece on Fortnite and Analysis:

Looking at violence in Fortnite: