Violent Video Games (Home Consoles & PC)

By the 1990s the video-game argument had moved out of the arcade and into the living room, with home consoles and PCs putting interactive violence on a screen in the house, and a fresh panic arrived to meet it. The flashpoints were two 1992 releases: Mortal Kombat, a fighting game with digitised blood and spine-removing "fatality" finishing moves, and Night Trap, a full-motion-video thriller in which the player tries to save teenage girls from intruders. These were the games dragged in front of senators Joseph Lieberman and Herb Kohl at the 1993 US Senate hearings on video-game violence. Under threat of federal regulation, the industry set up its own ratings system — the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) — in 1994, which is why American game boxes still carry those little E, T and M labels today.

The panic had its loud private voices too. The disbarred Florida attorney Jack Thompson made a career of filing unsuccessful lawsuits against game publishers and calling their products "murder simulators" (a phrase he borrowed from the former army psychologist Lt Col Dave Grossman). After the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, when it was reported — prominently and inaccurately amplified — that shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had played the first-person shooter Doom, the panic reached its peak.

Three decades of research have since undermined the whole premise. The American Psychological Association's 2015 task force on violent media found no evidence linking games to criminal violence, and a series of meta-analyses by the psychologist Christopher Ferguson and others have shown effect sizes so close to zero that they are indistinguishable from noise. The sociologist Karen Sternheimer and the media scholar Henry Jenkins have argued that scapegoating games had the useful political side-effect of pulling attention away from the structural drivers of youth violence — poverty, access to firearms, mental-health provision — and onto something that was easier to legislate about. The games sold. The panic faded. Today's worries about gaming have shifted onto microtransactions, attention, loot boxes and online safety, which is a reminder that each new panic is adept at finding its own framing, even when the thing it is panicking about has learned how to answer the last one.