angremlin-deactivated20250312:
I rly hate the Satanic Panic & the moral panic surrounding violence in video games in the 90s, coz it’s now impossible to talk about the social implications of violent video games in a realistic sense.
No, violence in video games does not create serial killers in the way most people imagine it would.
However, it’s very important to notice how after 9/11, a lot of violent video games pivoted their content from silly gratuitous cartoon gore to more realistic military shooters set in the Levant from a US American lens. It’s also important to notice the connection of these games & their toxic online multi-player voice chats to Gamer Gate in 2014.
It’s obviously not as black & white as it was presented in the 80s & 90s, I dont think everyone who played early Call of Duty games is a white supremacist who wants to join the military to kill people in the middle east, but I think it’s dangerous to pretend like video games or any media can’t have an impact on the way people think about violence.
I think what makes all the difference here is how that violence is portrayed, what the message behind it is, what the motives are behind the people who crafted that message, who the victims of that violence are, how they are portrayed & the greater cultural context that surrounds it.
Let me pass on something important someone else said, though I forget who:
Video games do not cause social problems by being interactive or letting you have a gun. But video games are still stories and ALL stories have the capacity to affect people’s world views. Very rarely do they do so on an individual level, though they can, but in aggregate they’re a large part of what a culture IS. You do not develop an unthinking hatred for people of color and willingness to commit violence by playing Modern Warfare or Resident Evil 5, but they’re still CONTRIBUTING to a culture where these are DOMINANT NARRATIVES about people of color and sending Americans overseas to kill them.