Video Games STILL Get Blamed For America’s Woes, But the Rot is Coming From Inside

We live in a violent culture. Are we seriously still scapegoating video games decades after game devs had to testify in front of Congress?

I was reading this brilliant essay by Jade M. on a lazy Sunday morning not that long ago, suddenly having this epiphany in the comments section when I’d barely scarfed down the lovely pitaya bowl I’d just made.

She got into how there’s still not much visibility of women who play games and it plays into the overall demonization of gamers. This is definitely familiarity blindness on my part, since my social and news feeds are FULL of women who play and make games: I’ve been into indie games, namely computer ones, most of my life but didn’t find my peers until my mid-twenties after hanging out on the AGS and AGDI forums. This later led to my forming a company with one of its progenitors prior to founding my own, and the rest is history.

I began writing this essay as I awaited the publication of another piece about my experience as a woman developer and entrepreneur in Business of Business, which you can read here.

Because games as a medium, a business, and cultural force have come an incredibly long way from when I was playing black and white Hypercard games on a Mac SE. An era when no one knew what the hell I was talking about at school upon excitedly rambling about how satisfying it was to play Apeiron and what an injustice it was that I couldn’t play Space Quest V because the Mac port never came. (I didn’t get to play this game til I was 22.) I was an extremely passionate 9-year-old who’d proceed to have that passion, among others, shit on for years to come until adulthood.

Where I once had no one to talk about games with, I’m now surrounded by people of all genders, ages, and backgrounds who live for weird indie games and I couldn’t be happier.

But while such incredible strides have been made, we still got a long way to go. And I can’t believe that at the time of writing, we’re coming up on 30 years since those infamous Congressional hearings on the link between video games and violent crimes and people are still spouting this line that Jade talked about: that people who love games are painted as lazy bums, or violent criminals.

Games are not making us violent, lazy, and antisocial. America’s incredibly isolating and violent society is.

We live in a violent culture that worships all agents of violence, and kids see this from an early age.

First up, you ever noticed how much jingoism is present in American culture? “Greatest country in the world” that has infrastructure rotting like a carton of moldy strawberries, and won’t even adopt universal healthcare after a pandemic that has now killed more people than the 1918 flu catastrophe?

There’s also the insistent glorification of war and imperialism. Think about how public servants like teachers and firefighters don’t get a “thank you for their service” the way people in the military do. For teachers specifically, they get quite the opposite.

People in other countries think it’s batshit insane that kids say the pledge of allegiance in school. I didn’t find this strange until I was 16 and met kids from France and Egypt on an exchange program, they were equally horrified and baffled.

Military recruiters set up shop in low-income neighborhoods on purpose, and in high schools. If you’re going to critique Call of Duty for encouraging violence, consider its ties to the US military rather than your average disaffected high school student who’s facing the prospect of stagnant wages and being a climate refugee before they’re old enough to rent a car.

What about the violence our children have been subjected to throughout the COVID age, where they’re being warehoused into schools with no remote learning option so they have no choice but to risk their own deaths and that of their parents and other household members? All while they’re given absolutely ZERO support with their parents and other loved ones dying en masse, and expected to just keep going to school as if everything after February 2020 never happened?

Violence against children by the police, literal children shot to death like Tamir Rice, plus the countless children whose parents were taken from them by police violence?

You can get a gun more easily in the US than an education, a job, clean water, birth control, even FOOD if you’re starving.

But it’s so much easier to blame PUBG just like how lawmakers blamed Mortal Kombat and even freaking Night Trap back in those hearings where America’s “moral guardians” frothed at the mouths about consoles. (Seriously, Night Trap. NIGHT TRAP. Say what you will about Mortal Kombat’s gore, but Night Trap was cheese on a CD-ROM!)

Game historian Kevin Impellizeri did a deep dive of the factors that converged into people blaming video games for rising violent crime, to the point that it escalated to Congress. There’s still no real link between gory video games and high crime rates. But because video games in that era didn’t carry content ratings akin to film and TV, a bill was introduced that later died in the Senate once the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) was created in 1994 to provide content-based ratings for video games sold through retail channels.

Even if you look gun violence in particular aside, where are young people learning violent behaviors?

I’m not going to let all forms of media completely off the hook, it DOES play a part in reinforcing views and stereotypes. I’m also going to preface the following statement as a child abuse survivor, that parents simultaneously get too much credit and too much blame for how their children turn out. The household you were raised in plays a massive part, but there’s always outside influences.

Look at the everyday aggression that kids witness from their own parents. It’s partly in things that are directed at the kids themselves, like yelling at them constantly. But look at road rage, kids see their parents and strangers constantly doing it and think this is okay. They watch their parents go apoplectic over the waiter forgetting their ranch dressing, because we live in a culture that treats service workers like shit. This is in addition to all the daily violence and disregard for life, and children’s futures, that I described earlier.

A video game is an enclosed virtual space where, assuming you’re not in a multiplayer game with chat options, you’re otherwise effacing with a bunch of pixels or an AI. We have things like “rage rooms” nowadays where you can throw plates or smash a beater car with a baseball bat: games have LONG been this kind of cathartic outlet for people, yet the stigma persists. I’d go on a limb and even say that games help decrease violence in real life because of this. Games definitely provided me with escape and catharsis when I was abused at home and bullied and traumatized at school.

Now, let’s get down to business: I’ve been in the games industry for a decade. I waited since the late 1980s to enter when Mac shareware and the Sierra classics put those dreams in me.

There were no game design programs in schools then. It was this new and experimental field, and more emphasis was placed on technical specs than storytelling by the time I had to start thinking about how I’d make a living. I became incredibly disillusioned with going into games and general tech by the time I reached “college age”, upon learning from Usenet groups that you’d basically be out of a job every six months and it was so hard to land ONE as it is.

This was a move I would later be thankful for given that I’ve only been in the games industry as an owner or independent consultant/general shitposting free agent, and the Newgrounds era gave way to the “golden age” of indie games at the dawn of the 2010s and now we have a much larger indie game ecosystem. There’s still problems on both the industrial and distribution levels. But believe me when I say that making it in indie games under the old model was a double-edged sword, and things are simultaneously better and worse today.

(Look, a lot of things don’t make sense in my strange and tiny industry.)

Then if you read my Business of Business piece, you saw how hard it hit to suddenly lose the shield of a white male business partner when I started my own venture. So, I don’t want to dismiss the toxicity found in Steam communities and Discord servers. There’s a reason that a stigma exists behind the “gamer” label.

And I’m not going to do what some certain Medium writers did regarding a systemic problem like sexual harassment and unwanted advances women get in public, and say “Please don’t make GENERALIZATIONS about gamers!” Even though ironically, this is a situation where that sentiment actually fits better.

Game-making isn’t just about programmers, artists, designers, writers, and testers though. We live in a different culture and landscape now than we did in the 1990s when Mortal Kombat was seen as this radicalizing force, just like the Satanic Panic a decade prior. Then when goths were blamed for school shootings as the millennium turned (alternative folk have our own trash to take out, but we’re still more likely to BE the victims of violence, K?)

Game-making is also about community management. And unfortunately, many AAA games have done a shitty job at keeping toxicity to a minimum. There’s hard-working community managers trying their best to keep it out, but assholes evade the ban hammer more often than you think. Then looking at what’s been happening with Twitch hate raids, you have the very top of the heap monetizing that toxicity while developers and content creators bear the brunt.

The same exact things could be said about movies, bands, and TV shows being cases of “I love this thing but I hate their fans”, but video games get choked with those barbs about laziness and misanthropy because your engagement can last far longer than movie runtimes and there’s this pre-existing stigma.

Games are also a medium with SO many ways to play them: by yourself, with friends in the same room, something that’s actually two or three player, or online multiplayer. Yet enjoying music or watching a movie by yourself is indulgent and therapeutic, playing a game by yourself is seen as pushing people away.

If I hadn’t played games by myself, I probably wouldn’t be alive right now because they put dreams in me throughout my shitty childhood, then reignited those dreams as a severely depressed grad student.

Our society is an inherently isolating one that robs people of their communities and wants you to have anemic friendships, so blaming video games for anti-social behaviors is such a cheap copout.

Our urban planning on a grand scale fosters isolation and keeping people from congregating with one another. Suburbs are realms that slow-cook fear and manufactured loneliness. While cities make it easier to constantly meet new people, the proliferation of chains and those insufferable private-public partnership spaces keep taking away “third places” from us, manufacturing a different brand of alienation that entails being surrounded by millions of people.

Public policy, institutions, and culture placing such a strong emphasis on the nuclear family doesn’t help any. You’re not encouraged to give your friends the same significance you’d give a romantic partner. It indeed takes a village to raise a child, but people don’t admit how the endless vaunting of the nuclear family actually fosters this overt alienation from people outside of one’s nuclear family (extended family as well, if you’re lucky to have any you’re on good terms with).

The suppression of community formation and bonding, unless it’s for some capitalistic purpose, is the entire point. Yet the onus for everything falls on the individual.

But people find community in games nowadays. It’s not like how it was in 1995 when I seriously thought I wouldn’t stop sobbing tears of joy when I met another girl who also played Sierra games. People of all ages, genders, cultures, and walks of life play all different types of games and found friends, even spouses, and it kept them socially fulfilled during the pandemic which at the time of writing, IS STILL NOT OVER. Game communities aren’t all toxic trolls shitting up Discord servers and making CS:GO incredibly inhospitable.

Factors like gentrification and large companies buying up entire blocks, destroying communities that were there, are more to blame for why people are becoming socially withdrawn, not video games. Not to mention that we live in an extremely individualistic society that also encourages ghoulish behaviors like exploiting others’ labor to the point that a few billionaires had a pointless space race while people are crowdfunding for insulin and life-saving surgeries.

All these things contribute to making people more isolated, whereas games can actually bring people together. Yet it’s somehow more socially acceptable to go to some corporate job that you hate then come home and binge-watch the latest Netflix shows by yourself.

It’s just interesting that we live in an age where we can palpably see what Fox News did to our parents’ generation — the people who first pushed the idea that video games were creating violent, unstable kids with no friends — and a significant number of them are eating HORSE PASTE.

But sure, spending a few hours playing Minecraft is the real problem here.