Abstract
After the Parkland school shootings, Donald Trump decided video games, not guns, needed more controls in place, reports
The move is likely to be cited by those who want to censor video games for other reasons. US President Donald Trump, for one. Just this March, Trump hosted a sudden meeting with representatives of the video games industry to talk about violence in video games. In addition to industry insiders, the meeting was attended by a host of prominent outspoken critics of video games, including Dave Grossman, who described first-person shooter games as “murder simulators” and said that, in the future, experts who denied links between video games and youth violence would “be viewed as the moral equivalent of Holocaust deniers”.
Trump argued for more restrictions to prevent children from seeing or playing violent games.
The link between games and violence is hard to prove; less so is the link between games and politics. Trump’s roundtable was a last-minute initiative occurring in the wake of the Parkland school shooting in Florida, when pressure was high for Trump to discuss gun control. Instead, he chose gaming – perhaps an easier target.
In a statement following the meeting, the Entertainment Software Association said: “We discussed the numerous scientific studies establishing that there is no connection between video games and violence, First Amendment protection of video games, and how our industry’s rating system effectively helps parents make informed entertainment choices.”
This is not the first time video game critics and advocates of First Amendment rights have collided. In 2011, in Brown v Entertainment Merchants Association, the US Supreme Court ruled that a California law restricting the sale of violent video games to minors was unconstitutional. Video games were protected speech under the First Amendment, like other forms of media, the court said.
Justice Antonin Scalia, writing the majority opinion in that 7-2 decision, dismissed the California argument that violent video games were linked to aggression in children, pointing out that the expert who provided that evidence admitted there were similar effects discovered in children who watched Bugs Bunny cartoons.
“The links between video games and violence, as with any cultural artefacts, are extremely ambiguous,” said Sarah Ditum, a UK journalist with a background in gaming, who writes about both the industry and politics. Ditum believes that the gaming industry is singled out more than other media and is “subject to scaremongering”, although she said this wasn’t anything new.
CREDIT: Alex Falcó Chang/Carttoon Movement
“Around the time of Columbine [the US high school shooting in 1999], gaming was still a pursuit that hadn’t been engaged in by the kind of people engaged in public discourse and talking about things, whereas now I think most journalists have first-hand experience of games, even if they don’t have a console themselves. So there is a bit less room for scaremongering than there used to be.”
Just after the first computer emerged, so did video games. Early games included Noughts and Crosses and William Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two in 1958. In the 1960s came one of the most groundbreaking games, Spacewar. At this stage, games were all played on computers and, therefore, the reserve of just a few. The 1970s saw them move from the sidelines to the mainstream, with games played on television sets. The biggest breakthrough came in 1985 with the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Since then, video gaming’s popularity has only grown. Today, 65% of US households contain someone who plays video games regularly, according to the ESA.
Whilst their popularity has grown, so too have their detractors, leading to the introduction of a games ratings system in the USA in 1994.
Australia introduced its own ratings systems at the same time, provoked by a moral panic over the game Night Trap, and has continued to operate one of the stricter policies. Until 2013, games had to pass higher standards than other media, allowing only those suitable for 15 years and below to be sold.
Despite the contested links between violence and video games, the idea that they provoke violence has been hard to shift – and continues to provoke calls for bans. At the end of March, parents of children at a primary school in London received text messages warning against the current hit game, Fortnite. “It is unsuitable for primary pupils and needs to be banned at home,” it read.
In Germany, the relationship between gaming and politics is evident in the game Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, an alternative-reality game in which Adolf Hitler won the war. The game’s creators were made to shave off the former German leader’s signature moustache in order to comply with the country’s anti-Nazi laws.
Nowhere is the link more obvious, though, than in Uzbekistan, which banned 34 games last year, including harmless classics such as The Sims. Authorities said the games could be “used to propagate violence, pornography, threaten security and social and political stability”, as well as disturbing “inter-ethnic and inter-religious harmony”. They could also distribute “false information about Uzbekistan and the distortion of its historic, cultural and spiritual values”.
“They want to cultivate patriotism in the youth, yet the ban will only make things worse,” said a social media user named Danilakhaidarov in the ban’s wake.
Censorship of games has a major impact on what gets made and marketed. China, the world’s largest video games market, has ramped up control in recent years in line with a general increase in censorship, introducing a series of new regulations.
They are “part of a bigger movement to take control of the internet”, said Iain Garner, who works for Another Indie, a video game producer working in China.
All games must comply with various rules. Violence, sex and drugs are banned, “but it’s also anything that contains any kind of political messaging or anything that is perceived to be immoral”, Garner told Index.
The process of getting a game out in China can be long and tenuous. Garner says he worked on a game with a thief character in it “and we couldn’t have a thief be a heroic protagonist because thieves are bad, so we ended up having to change the thief to a jester”. Things that are the colour of blood can become a problem, he said, so the colour of a menu had to be changed in one instance.
What these hurdles have essentially done is not just drown out any alternative – and potentially political – voices in gaming; they have drowned out many smaller games companies. “Effectively, China killed its own indie game industry,” said Garner.
“Games don’t have a super-good profile politically at the moment as they stand, which I think is a shame as games also do incredibly ambitious, interesting things,” said Ditum. She spoke of BioShock, which incorporates ideas by 20th-century dystopian and utopian thinkers such as George Orwell, Ayn Rand and Aldous Huxley.
In an interview in Index from 2014, Mia Bennett, a games publisher working between the UK and Iran, similarly said: “Some issues are easily disguised in games – women in action, historical points of view, free will – and it is great that gamers can play around with these ideas.”
Yet Ditum does believe some monitoring of the industry is reasonable.
“There’s a whole branch of gaming that is essentially underage pornography. It kind of passes under the radar because it belongs to games,” she said.
“This is where you reach the negotiation point between freedom of expression and where the state should draw the line.”