The Glorious History Of Video Game Panics
from the freak-out dept
We've talked in the past about the wonderful world of moral panics that typically show up anytime a new kind of entertainment and/or technology is introduced. Whether they revolve around Dungeons and Dragons, social media, now-accepted pagan holidays, or certain kinds of music, the hallmark of these moral whip-ups is that they rise suddenly with the introduction of the new whatever-we're-talking-about, reach a fever pitch, and then suddenly fall away once everyone realizes how stupid the whole panic thing was. That typically takes roughly a generation to cycle through, as the youth that enjoyed the horror of the new whatever-thing become adults and move on to demonizing something else. I guess it's something of a tradition, one whose history we've highlighted in the past.
Of course, the moral panic du jour for my lifetime has been video games, and that panic has been just as stupid and fact-deprived as the rest of them. If history is any indication, however, we should be entering the part of the cycle where the moral panic over video games starts to decline. As this somewhat comprehensive history of video game panics from Reason shows, adults have been at this for nearly half a century. It started with pinball arcades and, boy, does it offer some perspective on the current panics.
Video game arcades did not exist before the 1970s, but amusement arcades have been around for more than a century, giving people a place to play pinball and other coin-operated entertainments. They were tightly packed, anonymous environments filled with young people and working-class immigrants, a perfect recipe for middle-class anxieties. (There were even rumors of girls being kidnapped at arcades and sold into white slavery.) Throw in the fact that gambling was known to take place on the premises, and the venues' shady reputation was assured.Look, which of us can honestly say we haven't been desperate for a few quarters and sold a couple of girls into white (?!!?) slavery (which I assume is somehow supposedly different than other kinds of slavery, but I don't want to know how). It should be noted that many cities, including New York, didn't lift the ban on pinball until the late seventies. From there, once video game arcades made their appearance in the eighties, the ground was already laid for how to freak out about them.
The article goes on to describe all the other game-related panics: Death Race supposedly teaching kids how to run over real people on highways in real life, Custer's Revenge and other crappy attempts to put nudity in games, the couch-potato claims that fell away once Dance Dance Revolution and the Wii made them untenable, Joe Lieberman (the man who was apparently less fit to be Vice President than Sarah Palin) being Joe Lieberman, how Doom was directly responsible for the Columbine massacre, and, of course, Grand Theft Auto, which brings this whole panicky nonsense full-circle.
The series, which started to appear in 1997 but came into its own with 2001's Grand Theft Auto III, was praised in the gaming community for its pioneering open-world environments, in which players roam freely and choose their own goals rather than following a linear, pre-set sequence of tasks. But pundits pilloried it for its morally shaky content: The gameplay could include not just car theft but murder, bank robbery, and—shades of Death Race—deliberately running down pedestrians.And, with that, we're right back to games supposedly teaching roughly all the children to run over people in real life, despite the fact that that didn't happen the last time this nonsense was offered up as a prediction.
As always, there's good news and bad news here. The bad news is that we aren't out of the woods on the moral panic over games yet. The good news is that we probably will be soon. The bad news is that Jack Thompson is still making his noise about video games. The good news is that he was disbarred. The bad news is that the media still enjoys whipping up a panic amongst naive adults who will believe their squawks about the dangers of some of these games. The good news is that, every time they have in the past, it only resulted in higher sales for those games, which will only spur on the eventual decline of the panic. Then we can all move on to the next panic. It'll probably be, I don't know, sex robots or something.
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Filed Under: culture, moral panics, video games
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Sex Robots, you say?
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Re: Sex Robots, you say?
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"White slavery"
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Re: "White slavery"
Slavery is just slavery... sure apply a color to it... makes some of it just seem... better somehow?
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Re: Re: "White slavery"
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Re: Re: "White slavery"
The achiac middle-class model of the prostitute was of a woman somehow enthralled to work for a pimp or "trapped" in a brothel, wherein the fruits of her labor almost exclusively went to someone else, hence "slavery", with "white" affixed in the phrase to distinguish it from generic slavery in the euphemism.
And yes, there really used to be a social need for a euphemism for prostitution.
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Re: Re: Re: "White slavery"
And for the record "enthralled" is not really much different from slavery. the "to captivate" part of its definition is someone captivated them against their will so they can pimp them out.
Additionally keep in mind the context here. People were afraid their daughters could be kidnapped, in other words forcibly placed into the sex slave category. Saying White Slavery as a euphemism to cover that is incredibly... no down right cold hearted & ignorant.
A female willingly submitting to prostitution should not be lumped in with females that are slaves to human trafficking.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: "White slavery"
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/White-Slave+Traffic+Act
Oh look, here's the definition right here. The one that defines what 'White Slave' means. Huh, look at that, he was correct all along. Why it goes back 100 years even to the mafia days of Chicago.
Instead you chose to come here and tell us about how that phrasing 'offends' you instead of taking the four seconds it took to google it and find out why it's called that.
Like we somehow care about how common words and phrases of old offend the thin-skinned people of the internet.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "White slavery"
Words do mean something, do not diminish someone for trying to fight back against a bad euphemism.
Think about it. How do you think black people felt when someone used a euphemism to describe their existence or when they were classified as non-human!
I am willing to bet you would never publicly state that a black prostitute gang pressed into sex by a pimp is a "White Slave"
Dare you...
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Custard Ho'
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Re: Custard Ho'
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Re: Custard Ho'
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Re: Re: Custard Ho'
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Silly Article writer...
We never enslaved other whites, neither did we ever enslave the orientals, or even the natives...
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Re: Silly Article writer...
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Re: Re: Silly Article writer...
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Wait wait wait, Jack Thompson is still active?
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Re: Wait wait wait, Jack Thompson is still active?
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Mario jumps on turtles
*goes outside to throw fireballs from my hands*
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Elvis was going to ruin society, rock 'n roll was the devil and these idiotic claims persist today.
Probably the funniest video game freakout was the hot coffee mod. OMG it's the end of the world as we know it!
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Wasn't there similar outrage about an unlockable sex scene in "God of War", which again, is already rated M for the blood and violence.
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"I'm getting the new Wolfenstein game, because I want to fight NAZIs. You don't... You don't LIKE the NAZIs, do you? Why wouldn't you want me to fight them?"
I'm not sure if their means to an end is "no violent video games" or "only politically correct video games".
And that, my friends, is how art truly dies.
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Video games in moderation are OK
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Tommy
But he sure rapes a mean pinball.
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I always assumed the name came from the idea (fact?) that white women were purchased for the purpose of sex and not for the purpose of picking cotton in a field.
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Re: white (?!!?) slavery
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Re: Re: white (?!!?) slavery
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Sadly
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Michael Knight goes GTA
"I would not advise that, Michael."
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Just sayin.
Of course video games are not reality and don't make people act out the game IRL. That doesn't mean that some "deranged" people wont be influenced by them and act them out IRL.
Then again...I am bias. I used to play paperboy in the arcade. I was also a paperboy IRL... who on a few occasions threw the papers in the same way that I learned from the game.
I was meant to put them through the letterbox
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Re:
This claim has probably been debunked many times but I will not provide any references because that would be silly, just trust me on this on - k?
"Then again...I am bias"
Yes, you apparently are biased.
If I play Frogger - a lot - will I be uncontrollably jaywalking in and out of traffic?
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the media
The period in that sentence belongs just after the word "panic".
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Pacman
Sounds like a techno-party. And only Pacman is to blame!
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