This book is about video games and violence. Video games, or computer or electronic games as they are also known, represent a major source of entertainment for millions of players around the world. These games—as mass entertainment products—became popular during the late twentieth century. The initial products made for home consumption had very simple formats when they entered the marketplace in the 1970s. Playing games on computers, however, can be traced back to a period about 20 years before the introduction of home gaming when computer enthusiasts used keyboards as programming tools.
The aim of this book is not to provide a general history of video games and game playing or to examine all aspects of this subject. Video games can take on many different forms and cover a range of content themes. The level of sophistication of these games can also vary widely, and so too can their production quality. The earliest games were crude in terms of the complexity of game play, as well as in the way they were made. They were underpinned by relatively simple levels of programming, by twenty-first century standards, and comprised unsophisticated play narratives embedded in basic presentation formats. The games that characterise the video game market of the twenty-first century offer much more complex game-playing scenarios involving on-screen characters and settings that have come to increasingly resemble real people and real environments. The increased ‘realism’ of these games has, in turn, led to growing concerns about the impact of game-playing experiences on regular players because video games are believed to draw players in cognitively and emotionally and to create both short-term and lasting psychological effects, not always of the sort that should be welcomed.
The backdrop to this book is the wider public disquiet that has arisen over several decades about unwanted and socially undesirable side-effects of consuming violence in the mass media. Debates about media violence have mostly revolved around the most popular mass electronic media of their times, such as motion pictures and television. The earliest concerns, however, pre-date even these media and can be traced back to complaints made about Victorian novels that dealt with sensitive themes and issues that people did not usually air or like to have discussed in public. Many early popular books targeted at children, most especially in the fairy tale genre, had scary, threatening and violent themes (Tatar, 1998). Once popular media began to achieve mass circulation, which was catalysed by developments in printing technology and transportation networks, they attracted more attention, became wider sources of conversation, and were feared by authorities for feeding ideas to the masses that might undermine common standards of decency and decorum in the way ordinary people might behave towards each other.
Themes of crime, violence and sex were regarded by critics as being openly flaunted by the early mass media. As the motion picture industry took hold in the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century, these themes were presented more explicitly by being visually played out, rather than simply described as they were in novels. The main benefit of novels in this context was that much was left to the imagination of the reader. With the onset of audio-visual entertainment, much less was left to the imagination, and much more was actually shown.
Many of these themes were integral aspects of children’s, and especially boys’, play and were encouraged by toys with war and other fighting themes that were marketed throughout large parts of the twentieth century (Goldstein, 1998). Indeed, there were often resonances between movie themes, settings and characters and toys that took their inspiration from screen narratives played out at the cinema and on television (e.g., Captain America, GI Joe, Rambo). Eventually, these themes surfaced again in video games.
By the 1920s, the concerns of governing authorities about what people could see at the cinema had reached a pinnacle, leading to the launch of the first large-scale social scientific inquiry into the effects that films might have on cinema-goers. The advances in social science methods at this time also facilitated this research as social scientists developed tools that enabled them to conduct systematic analyses of the contents of movies and of the audience reactions to them. The first big investigation of its type was funded not by government in the United States, however, but by a philanthropic organisation, called The Payne Fund. Findings from this programme of inquiry revealed, among other things, that one in four motion pictures had crime as a prominent theme and that these films visually depicted numerous criminal acts (Dale, 1935).
The initial concerns about movies spread to another source of entertainment that was highly popular and widely consumed by children and also by many adults, and that was comic books (Wertham, 1954). At the same time, television had begun to achieve widespread penetration in the economic boom years that followed recovery from the Second World War. On directing their attention toward the emergent new medium, social scientists again reported that crime, violence and sexual themes also pervaded many television programmes Smythe, 1954). Across subsequent decades, crime and violence were acknowledged to be all pervasive in the peak-time television dramas that held so many people in thrall (Gerbner & Gross, 1976; Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, & Signorielli, 1986; Gunter & Harrison, 1998; Gunter, Harrison, & Wykes, 2003; Smith, Nathanson, & Wilson, 2002).
During the 1960s, behavioural psychologists turned their attention toward film and television and went in search of scientific evidence that violent portrayals shown in these media could cause people to become more aggressive as individuals. Assuming this effect was true and occurred commonly enough opened up the possibility that media violence might be a significant contributor to levels of violence in the general society. Some researchers at this time proposed that children, for example, could learn how to behave in an aggressive way simply by observing other people doing so. It was not necessary to observe real people in the same physical setting for this effect to occur. Learning to behave aggressively could take place by watching a person display violent conduct on film. Children were found to copy violent behaviours they had seen performed by a grown-up in short films. This imitative learning seemed to be especially likely to occur if the filmed role model received benefits or rewards for his or her behaviour (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1961, 1963).
Further research revealed that it was possible to trigger non-imitative aggression in young adults by showing them violent scenes from motion pictures or television drama shows. In this context, it was theorised that normally socialized inhibitions against behaving aggressively in person could be weakened by watching others behave aggressively with apparent impunity. This effect was especially likely to occur among individuals who were already in a state of annoyance with another person and if the violence they saw on screen was presented as being justified (Berkowitz, 1965; Berkowitz & Alioto, 1973).
Later psychological research not only confirmed these early findings, but it also extended them to demonstrate other effects that could occur from watching violence played out on screen. These effects included a loss of empathy for victims of violence, combined with a greater acceptance of violence as an appropriate problem-solving mechanism, once initial emotion reactions to it had subsided through a process called desensitization (Cline, Croft, & Courier, 1973; Drabman & Thomas, 1974, 1975). In addition, there was a view that watching violence on screen was arousing and that this arousal could remain activated after viewing had finished, creating a psychological condition that might render viewers more likely to behave aggressively if put in a setting in which they were intimidated or angered. Such arousal did not even necessarily have to derive from watching violence on screen for this effect to occur (Zillmann, 1971).
Media violence as a genuine social problem was confirmed by a number of major government-backed national inquiries launched in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. The investigations were triggered by pubic reactions to several assassinations in the 1960s of high profile political figures and activists, including President John F Kennedy, his brother Senator Robert Kennedy, Martin Luthor King and Malcolm X. In addition, during this decade, there had been widespread civil unrest and disturbances linked to race issues in the southern states and, more generally, in college campuses among young people campaigning against the Vietnam War (Comstock, Chaffee, Katzman, McCombs, & Roberts, 1978).
An initial inquiry explored a range of potential causal factors underlying the occurrence of social violence, among which the mass media featured (National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, 1969). Although media violence was not the focus of this inquiry, sufficient evidence was gathered to indicate that it could play an active part in promoting violence in individuals and social groups, and thus it deserved closer attention. This evidence triggered a follow-up inquiry that placed television centre-stage as a possible agent of influence over the social behaviour of people in general (Surgeon General’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior, 1972). The latter inquiry produced a five-volume report based on a wide array of studies conducted mainly in the United States, and it concluded cautiously that there was scientific evidence to support the assertion that television and film violence could affect the aggressiveness of viewers.
Not everyone agreed with the conclusion reached by the Surgeon General’s Committee. The major US television networks commissioned their own studies during the 1970s, which produced varying degrees of support for the media violence effects position (Belson, 1978; Milgram & Shotland, 1973; Milvasky, Stipp, Kessler, & Rubens, 1982). Further research emerged over the next decade, mainly focused on televised violence, that generally concluded that it could contribute toward the development of individual aggression and create a climate that promoted the occurrence of crime and social violence across societies (Andison, 1977; Comstock & Fisher, 1975; Hearold, 1986; Stein & Friedrich, 1975).
The influences of media violence were believed to start among children by providing demonstrations of how to behave aggressively, offering justification for doing so and then providing a stimulus to react with aggression when antagonised by someone, with diminished concern for the consequences or outcomes. In other words, the use of violence was inserted through the media into the day-to-day early socialisation of children, and it could, in turn, counter the effects of more positive social conditioning provided by parents, teachers and other responsible sources of social influence. For some researchers, early media experiences with vio...