Violence

Violence in video games has been controversial from their earliest days. Death Race, an arcade game released in 1976, encouraged drivers to run over stick figures, which then turned into Xs. Although the programmers claimed that the stick figures were not human, the game was controversial, making national news on the TV talk show Donahue and the TV news magazine 60 Minutes. Video games, regardless of their realism or lack thereof, had added a new potential to the world of games and entertainment: the ability to simulate murder.

The enhanced realism of video games in the 1990s accompanied a rise in violent games as companies expanded the market to target older demographics. A great deal of controversy exists over the influence of this kind of violence on children and over the rating system that is applied to video games. There are many stories of real-life violent acts involving video games. The 1999 Columbine High School massacre was quickly linked to the teenage perpetrators’ enthusiasm for video games. The families of Columbine victims brought a lawsuit against 25 video game companies, claiming that if the games had not existed, the massacre would not have happened.^[1] In 2008, a 17-year-old boy shot his parents after they took away his video game system, killing his mother.^[2] Also in 2008, when six teens were arrested for attempted carjacking and robbery, they stated that they were reenacting scenes from Grand Theft Auto.^[3]

There is no shortage of news stories that involve young men committing crimes relating to an obsession with video games. The controversy has not been resolved regarding the influences behind these crimes. Many studies have linked aggression to video games; however, critics take issue with using the results of these studies to claim that the video games caused the aggression. They point out that people who enact video-game–related crimes already have psychopathic tendencies  and that the results of such research studies are correlational rather than causational—a naturally violent person is drawn to play violent video games.^[4] Other critics point out that violent games are designed for adults, just as violent movies are, and that parents should enforce stricter standards for their children.

The problem of children’s access to violent games is a large and complex one. Video games present difficult issues for those who create the ratings. One problem is the inconsistency that seems to exist in rating video games and movies. Movies with violence or sexual themes are rated either R or NC-17. Filmmakers prefer the R rating over the NC-17 rating because NC-17 ratings hurt box office sales, and they will often heavily edit films to remove overly graphic content. The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), rates video games. The two most restrictive ratings the ESRB has put forth are “M” (for Mature; 17 and older; “may contain mature sexual themes, more intense violence, and/or strong language”) and “AO” (for Adults Only; 18 and up; “may include graphic depictions of sex and/or violence”). If this rating system were applied to movies, a great deal of movies now rated R would be labeled AO. An AO label can have a devastating effect on game sales; in fact, many retail outlets will not sell games with an AO rating.^[5] This creates a situation where a video game with a sexual or violent scene as graphic as the ones seen in R-rated movies is difficult to purchase, whereas a pornographic magazine can be bought at many convenience stores. This issue reveals a unique aspect of video games. Although many of them are designed for adults, the distribution system and culture surrounding video games is still largely youth-oriented.

Video Game Addiction

Another controversial issue is the problem of video game addiction. As of the print date, the American Medical Association (AMA) has not created an official diagnosis of video game addiction, citing the lack of long-term research. However, the AMA uses the term “video game overuse” to describe game use that begins to affect other aspects of an individual’s life, such as relationships and health. Studies have found that socially marginalized people have more of a tendency to overuse games, especially online role-playing games like World of Warcraft. Other studies have found that patterns of time usage and social dysfunction in players who overuse games are similar to those of other addictive disorders.^[6]

Groups such as On-line Gamers Anonymous have developed a 12-step program similar to that of Alcoholics Anonymous to help gamers deal with problems relating to game overuse. This group is run by former online gamers and family members of those affected by heavy game use (On-line Gamers Anonymous).^[7] This problem is not new, but it has become more prevalent. In the early 1990s, many stories surfaced of individuals dropping out of college or getting divorced because of addiction to MUDs.^[8] In addition, heavy video gaming, much like heavy computer use in an office setting, can result in painful repetitive stress injuries. Even worse are the rare but serious cases of death resulting from video game overuse. In the early ’80s, two deaths were linked to the video game Berzerk. The players, both in their late teens, suffered fatal heart attacks while struggling to achieve top scores.^[9] The issue of video game addiction has become a larger one because of the ubiquity of video games and Internet technology. In countries that have a heavily wired infrastructure, such as South Korea, the problem is even bigger. In 2010, excessive game use was problematic enough that the South Korean government imposed an online gaming curfew for people under the age of 18 that would block certain sites after midnight. This decision followed the death of a 3-month-old baby from starvation while her parents played an online game at an Internet café.^[10]

Another side of video game addiction is told well by Jim Rossignol in his book This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities. The book describes Rossignol’s job as a journalist for a financial company and his increasing involvement with Quake III. Rossignol trained a team of players to compete in virtual online tournaments, scheduling practices and spending hours afterward analyzing strategies with his teammates. His intense involvement in the game led to poor performance at his job, and he was eventually fired. After being fired, he spent even more time on the game, not caring about his lack of a job or shrinking savings. The story up to this point sounds like a testimonial about the dangers of game addiction. However, because of his expertise in the game, he was hired by a games magazine and enjoyed full-time employment writing about what he loved doing. Rossignol does not gloss over the fact that games can have a negative influence, but his book speaks to the ways in which gaming—often what would be described as obsessive gaming—can cause positive change in people’s lives.^[11]

Sexism

It is no secret that young adult men make up the majority of video gamers. A study in 2009 found that 60 percent of gamers were male, and the average age of players was 35.^[12] While the gender gap has certainly narrowed in the past 30 years, video gaming is still in many ways a male-dominated medium.

Male influence can be seen throughout the industry. Women make up less than 12 percent of game designers and programmers, and those who do enter the field often find themselves facing subtle—and not so subtle—sexism.^[13] When Game Developer magazine released its list of the top 50 people in the video game industry for 2010, bloggers were quick to note that no female developers appeared in the list.^[14] In 2007, scandal erupted over a pornographic comic featuring Jade Raymond, current managing director of the French video game publisher Ubisoft, that surfaced on an online forum. The motivation behind the comic was to allege that Raymond did not deserve her position at Ubisoft because she earned it based on her looks, rather than on her abilities and experience.

Sexism in video games has existed since the early days of the medium. The plot of the infamous Custer’s Revenge, released for the Atari 2600 in 1982, centered on the rape of a Native American woman. Popular NES games such as Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda featured a male figure rescuing a damsel in distress. Both the protagonist and antagonist in the original Tomb Raider game had hourglass figures with prominent busts and nonexistent waists, a trend that continues in the franchise today. In 2003, the fighting series Dead or Alive released a spin-off game titled Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball that existed to showcase the well-endowed female characters in swim attire.^[15] The spin-off was so popular that two more similar games were released.

Some note that video games are not unique in their demeaning portrayal of women. Like movies, television, and other media forms, video games often fall back on gender stereotyping in order to engage consumers. Defenders point out that many male video game characters are also depicted lewdly. Games such as God of War and Mortal Kombat feature hypersexualized men with bulging muscles and aggressive personalities who rely on their brawn rather than their brains. How are men affected by these stereotypes? Laboratory studies have shown that violence and aggression in video games affect men more than women, leading to higher levels of male aggression.^[16] While sexism is certainly present in video games, it seems sexual stereotyping affects both genders negatively.

In recent years, game designers have sought to move away from these clichéd representations of gender. The popular game Portal, released in 2007, features a female protagonist clad in a simple orange jumpsuit who relies on her wits to solve logic puzzles. Series such as Half-Life and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney star male heroes who are intellectuals instead of warriors. Other games, like the Mass Effect series and Halo: Reach, allow gamers to choose the gender of the main character without altering elements of the plot or game-play. However, despite recent strides forward, there is no doubt that as the video game industry continues to evolve, so too will the issue of gender.

Piracy, Live Service, and the Software They War Over

If you’ve worked with computers before and participated in discussions of them, you’ve probably heard of software, hardware, and firmware. These terms are used to help mark different parts of a computer on a scale of how easy they are to edit and adjust. If you’ve played a lot of video games and participated in discussion of them, you’ve probably heard of the term shovelware – this is a slang term based on the same naming convention, used to describe low-effort games or other software that are notable more for the quantity of data being offered rather than the quality of it.

You may not know that between the coinings of these terms, there were many other types of -ware, mostly used to describe different methods of software distribution rather than specifically video games. Shareware describes software that is offered at no cost, but only for trial use. Typically the software has certain functions removed, or is only offered for a limited period of time. When the user sends the creator payment, they are then given access to the full version of the software.

If this sounds a lot like a demo for a video game, that’s because it is; demos (short for demonstrations) are essentially video game shareware, serving the same purpose of letting a consumer use some of the product before deciding if they want to pay for the full experience. This makes it interesting that the very first instance of Shareware was actually called by the term freeware, despite functioning differently. The term “freeware” is loosely agreed to mean software that is distributed in full and for free, to no expected monetary gain, but experts disagree – many cases of supposed freeware are actually shareware, due to there being no strict legal definition for the terms.

Freeware is also not to be confused with free software, which is also software distributed for free, but with the crucial difference of being open-source: the software’s source code is freely available to anyone who wishes to modify the program or make use of its code for another project. With how similar the terms are, it’s quite easy to see why the Free Software Foundation suggests retiring the word “freeware” entirely.^[17]

Lastly, there is abandonware, which is possibly the most complicated of all of them. To quote criminologist and video game enthusiast Ross Scott, “The difference is that this used to be a commercial game that you’d pay for, but then the company shut down or got bought out, and none of the people involved with the original game are still involved with the intellectual property. The company that does own the intellectual property usually doesn’t care about a game made 20 years ago that they had no involvement in and are no longer collecting any money on”^[18] due to there being no legal way to purchase it from the source. So, while illegal copying of the game is still piracy by definition, pirates will “test the waters” (no pun intended) by putting the software somewhere it can be freely acquired and seeing if they receive threats of legal recourse. If they do not, it is assumed that the original creators do not care, and the software is considered abandonware.

Abandonware is a tricky subject; ask a lawyer, and they’ll tell you it doesn’t exist and is only wishful thinking on the part of pirates. While that is true by strict definition, critics of current copyright law will point out that the only reason certain games still exist in any playable state is thanks to pirates who wanted to keep playing it after it became impossible to legally and directly purchase the software. After all, if copyright holders are simply sitting on intellectual property of media that used to be purchasable, and they don’t care enough to keep it so, then functionally they are losing no profits to pirates who change that. To put it simply, many pirates say it simply isn’t stealing if the copyright holders are not losing anything – or rather, it shouldn’t be, and our copyright law needs to change.

It goes beyond games simply being forgotten in the past, too. Games as a service is a term that refers to games which require a direct connection to a central server in order to function, which the player does not have access to even if they paid money to play the game. Not all live-service games cost money, but the ones that do are becoming the subject of increasing scrutiny and anger from the gaming community – especially ones that only require a one-time payment, rather than a consistent subscription fee.

Imagine if after you paid to use Microsoft Word, a few years later, Microsoft announced they were no longer offering purchases of the software. As a direct result of that decision, your already-purchased copy no longer functioned, and Microsoft was not offering any refunds. Now imagine that after you file a complaint, you learn that this is not only completely legal, but has become standard practice for the entire industry while you weren’t looking – to the point that dozens if not hundreds of paid-for pieces of software were being silently killed every single year without offering any refunds. Worst of all, you’re in the miniscule minority for thinking this shouldn’t be allowed. You’d think the entire world had lost their minds!

Luckily, there is legal precedent that the very idea of “games as a service” is fraudulent. The reason for this is that the vast majority of supposed games as a service are being sold as goods, not services. To quote a more in-depth discussion by Ross Scott, “If you only have to pay once, and it’s not a subscription fee for your game, then by definition it’s being sold under a perpetual license. Under most countries’ laws, that means it’s a good and not a service.”^[19] So, while some piracy is undoubtedly harmful and takes money away from people who worked to earn it, keep in mind that other pirates are only cracking and sharing software that’s been forgotten and left to rot or has even been outright destroyed by its original creators after it was paid for by consumers.

Drawing on Communication Theory

Communication theory can potentially help us understand games at a deeper level and may offer tools that allow us to dig deeper into the controversial issues noted above.

Games and Behavior

Most of us who play video games enjoy a certain level of control. Video games are different from most forms of mass entertainment. Films, popular television shows, books, and other works of creative fiction (besides the choose-your-own variety) tell you who the characters are, where they are located and what their capabilities and limitations are. In video games, you control your avatar. In role-playing games (RPGs) such as Dragon Age, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Divinity, players’ choices directly and deeply influence the narrative. Because these games offer a wide array of narrative paths, your choices create a varied gaming experience. While it is true that your choices in RPGs are always drawn from a finite set of options, the results of your in-game behavior give you a measure of power.

There are game worlds where cultural norms within the game are quite close to those most people experience in the physical world. There are other games where most of your actions, even negative ones, are without consequences. It is not clear that consequence-free video games create a real-world culture where people do not care about ethics or values. Time and time again, research has shown that violent video games have no direct correlation with violent behavior in the physical world.^[20] Games like the Grand Theft Auto series are usually considered an escape rather than an example of how to live. Additionally, many social science and health studies suggest that we do not take cues from violent video games and practice those same behaviors in our real lives. Some studies show correlations between gameplay and short-term thoughts of violence, but this type of research only addresses temporary changes in mood. Direct impacts on long-term behavior from specific video games do not appear frequently enough in sample populations of gamers to suggest that games cause violent or other antisocial behaviors.

Then again, the long-term social influence of deeply immersive, violent games may not be fully understood. Many researchers who work with cultivation theory think there is a long-term social effect of this type of media content and behavior, even if limited experiments, surveys, and other research tools have failed to capture it. Following a researcher named George Gerbner, cultivation theory scholars often suggest that changing perceptions can change cultural values over time and that those changes can lead to long-term behavioral changes. The concern is that society, over time,  has changed to become more accepting of anti-social behaviors. Historians might argue, but there are scholars who contend that based on our mass media environment, we might expect, perhaps, to reap what we sow.

Behavioral Theory

Developed by Albert Bandura, Social Learning Theory looks on its face like a “monkey-see-monkey-do” theory, but it goes deeper than suggesting we imitate the behaviors we see in the mass media.^[21] Bandura posits that our behavior creates an environment that then helps determine group and individual behavior. In other words, Social Learning Theory seems to support the big-picture concepts behind cultivation theory. Bandura’s argument is that the social environment shapes actual behavior and that messages in the mass media over time create the environment; however, the argument is not that media influence must shape behavior. Media influences often moderate or influence other behaviors that were already occurring.

Following Social Learning Theory, we can imagine a dynamic where behavior shapes our social environment and, at the same time, our environment provides limits for acceptable behavior. The mass media dynamic is part of this bigger dynamic of social influence. If the idea of this dynamic is difficult to grasp, try thinking about a sports team. A team shapes each individual player’s behavior to some degree, but the players as individuals, pairs, and other groups within groups also influence the team, its mood, and the outcome of contests. Team influence and the environment of the group can set limits on individual behavior, but individuals are always free to excel or fail.

What does that leave us with? How do we reconcile the concepts of limited media effects with these ideas about how mass media — including many video games — shape the social environment? We have to place media effects in the broader context of the social sciences. In the study of social behavior, many factors, including parents, friends, school, church, our neighborhoods, income level, opportunity, and romantic relationships, may influence our behavior, but they do not have to. It is not likely you will ever pin down a single cause for a certain behavior or set of behavioral trends. Instead, consider that there are many complex and sometimes chaotic social influences rather than causes. If you stop looking for causes, you can begin to look at which influences are stronger than others and how different social influences might act together to influence people. You might also consider your media environment and your own behavior as objects under your control and try to take responsibility for your consumption, your behavior and the relationship between the two.

Video Game Narratives

Besides social influences, video games make a cultural impact as well. One way that culture is influenced by video games is through the narratives they tell. All sorts of video games create stories. Whether you are playing as a plumber trying to save a princess, building a world out of blocks with little backstory, or going on an epic quest in a realm where distinctive characters have their own motivations, there are commonalities between good video games and the narratives of classic literature and film. In narrative storytelling, there are elements such as setting, characters, plot and themes that combine to make meaning for readers, viewers or users. Video games deserve credit for crafting narratives often as intricate, emotionally gripping and revealing as other forms of creative production.

Here are some questions to ask about a given video game narrative: How much control does the design of the game exert over the player and the gameplay? Are you a single character or part of a team? What is your mobility within the game, and is that a feature of gameplay?

Game design sets the stage. The narrative is the story. The two work together, and, depending on your interests, one may interest you more than the other. If you view a video game with a critical eye, you can appreciate worlds, characters and plot twists and the effort that goes into game design. If you view a game primarily as a player would, you might only see it at face value as boring, fun, immersive, and so forth. You can use almost all of the terms you use to describe great films and novels to describe contemporary video games.

Often, game design is where technological genius comes into play. The way a game environment is built matters almost as much as what you do in a game; however, we have all seen a special effects movie that was only a special effects movie. If the story falls flat, we will probably not recommend the film to our friends. Conversely, video games that start with compelling stories but have poorly executed design and functionality may be almost unplayable. The best works create compelling worlds and stories.