Game theory

Like the movies, videogames in Britain will now be classified by age, to protect children from what some people consider their morally corrosive, violence-inducing effects. The report, commissioned by the British prime minister, comes at a time when more and more people are gaming. In the United States, where gaming is much more entrenched, moral crusaders have blamed videogames for the high-profile incidents of school shootouts. Hillary Clinton has summoned up this paranoid vision about games, claiming that games represent 8220;a kind of contagion8230; a silent epidemic threatening long-term public health damage to many, many children and therefore society8221;. In fact, the rate of violent juvenile crime in the US is at a 30-year low, and the reason many young offenders have been gamers is simply that many young people are gamers.

But this moral panic that focuses on a technology8217;s supposed effects is not new or specific to games. Every emerging technology, from the phone to radio or TV or cinema, has had to contend with suspicion and hostility before it seeped in completely. Some have even attributed Bobby Fischer8217;s madness to the chessboard, just as massive online role-playing games have been blamed for Korean addicts keeling over with extreme fatigue 8212; as though the answer lay in the games they were playing rather than in the conditions of their lives they preferred to look away from.

Of course, many games contain elements that might disturb vulnerable children, and a rating system could perhaps alert parents; but no game is going to change a normal child into a psychopathic misfit. The funny thing about the media violence argument is that hardly anyone who had watched a violent movie would claim that they felt tempted to kill, but they remain convinced that others are susceptible to diabolical manipulation. So moral reformers, never having inhabited a gaming experience, freely generalise about its effects. Whether a film or a videogame, the media is most powerful when it reinforces existing behaviour or belief, not when it runs counter to them. And ultimately, increasing media literacy is the only way to get a handle on the situation, rather than falling back on dim, unreflective positions on the hazards and health-effects of technologies.