Abstract Trouble in River City: The Social Life of video games by

Atari promotional materials for the maze game Gotcha (left) and Bally/Midway promotional materials for the Pong clone Winner (right), 1973 (Burnham, 2001).

The political climate and the media coverage had a direct and dramatic effect on research agendas. The most prominent figure in the U.S. health care system, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, was widely cited when he claimed in 1982 that video games were hazardous to the health of young people, creating aberrant behavior, increased tension and a disposition for violence (Lin & Leper, 1987). Although there was no science to back this assertion, researchers understandably went looking for it. When they did not find it, they were confused. The construction of games as malignant was (and is) a difficult obstacle for social scientists. Glassner’s theory about irrational fears appears to apply to academe as well as the general public. Researchers, however, were collecting data. As a result, the early research was remarkably consistent for both home and arcade game use: The literature reviews and hypotheses were presented with dire predictions about game use turning children into deviant, thieving, drug-addled, truant monsters. The research found no such effects, and the discussion section saw the researcher chastising preconceptions or troubled why he/she did not find an effect that so obviously must have been there. Nearly every study concluded with the finding that game play is an inherently social activity.

Mitchell (1984) studied 20 families from a range of backgrounds to see what the impact of adding a console game machine was to family life. She found that family and sibling interaction increased, that no detrimental trends were found in schoolwork (there was actually a slight improvement), that none of the children or parents became more aggressive, that boys played more than girls, that girls gained a sense of empowerment, and that all of the families saw games as a bridge to personal computers. She further concluded that home video games brought families together more than any other activity in recent memory, chiefly by displacing time spent watching television (Mitchell, 1985). Murphy (1984) found that homes with video games had similar family interactions with those that did not. After investigating the hypothesis that family members might become addicted, Murphy concluded that “contrary to public media speculation, none of the group of owner families in this study appeared to have become video game ‘addicts.’”

Survey-based evidence has yielded mostly positive findings. Gibb et al found no difference between high- and low-volume game players on self esteem, deviancy, hostility, gregariousness, or motivation (Gibb, Bailey, Lambirth, & Wilson, 1983). Lieberman (1986) found that arcades tended to attract grade-school children of a lower socioeconomic status than home computers, with boys playing more both at home and in arcades. Kestenbaum and Weinstein (1985) found that heavy video game use among 10-14 year old boys did not lead to increased neuroticism, social withdrawal or escape into fantasy. They concluded that much of the anxiety about video games was a parental issue, akin to parental overreactions to other adolescent outlets. McClure and Mears investigated the link between game playing and psychopathology, and found none. They instead concluded that game play is a highly social and competitive activity (McClure & Mears, 1984). Similarly, “the video game arcade functions as a place to meet people” and “possesses more positive attributes than has previously been assumed” (Wigand, Borstelmann, & Bostler, 1986) (pp. 289-290).

The one consistently negative finding for arcades and game effects has been the risk of game play for players who have a previously constructed addictive-prone personality. Funk concluded that although this is a very small segment of the population, the effect is real (J. B. Funk, 2001). One explanation for the susceptibility of addictive personalities around video games is their use of reinforcement schedules (Braun & Giroux, 1989). Games supply players with systematic reward cues that addictive personalities have less control over. Selnow (1984a; 1984b) concluded that for children who watched a great deal of television, games represented a chance to become more active. But he also suggested that game play, despite the social setting of the arcade, was a solitary, escapist activity.

This last finding is in stark contrast to three detailed ethnographies of arcades, which found highly social structures, norms and systems among young players. Ofstein (1991) found that the social life of arcades fits Huizenga’s model of sociology and sport. Much like on playing fields, social conventions and interactions within an arcade were separate from those of “real life.” Inside the arcade, gamers assumed roles separate from their outside personae and adhered to a strict set of rules governing game play. These included a ban on physical aggression and a recognition of the hierarchy of skill. Meadows’ ethnography (1985) of an arcade found that children had no difficulty separating fantasy from reality, and that game players demonstrated a delicate balance of emotion and rationality in their play. Over time, the players were found to use the games to develop sophisticated cognitive skills. Garner’s ethnography (1991) found that game players became more and more comfortable with not just game machines, but all computing devices after their arcade play. Arcade time was seen as a conduit into computer programming and general use through an increased comfort level with technology.

Did games cause children to neglect more important activities? This negative displacement hypothesis was tested repeatedly in the research, but the concerns were largely unwarranted. Creasey and Myers found no link between game play and either school activities or peer involvement, and concluded that children’s lives are not greatly altered for better or worse by owning a video game (Creasey & Myers, 1986). Lin and Lepper found that arcade game play had a small negative relationship with leisure reading, but that home game play did not. Game play was not found to be isolating, but instead supplemented children’s social activities (Lin & Leper, 1987). Biegen (1985) found that parental attitudes, not game play, affected school outcomes, and that game play did not present a substantial problem for children. In 1983, education researchers lamented the rise of games as squeezing out the role of real educators, and feared that game play would crowd out more important computer use ("TECHnically Speaking . . ." 1983). However, Lin & Lepper (1987) found that game use was a significant predictor of later computer use, suggesting that play was an important first step in technoliteracy.

In reviewing the literature on social ills, Funk concluded “Despite initial concern, current research suggests that even frequent video game playing bears no significant relationship to the development of true psychopathology. For example, researchers have failed to identify expected increases in withdrawal and social isolation in frequent game players . . . Frequent game players do not appear to have a characteristic personality profile” (Funk, 1992)(p. 53-54).

In nearly every case, links to deviant behavior were found to be linked to parental variables such as supervision and pressure for achievement. New research among religious groups has shown that parental guidance in video game play is related positively to more intrinsic thought, higher religiosity, and lower levels of physical aggression (Abel-Cooper, 2000). Generally speaking, most parents do not mediate their children’s game use as much as they do their television or Internet use (C. L. Phillips, 2000). In investigating youths in arcades, Ellis found that deviant behavior was linked significantly to parental variables, and not game play. Instead, game play was found to be associated positively with school performance (Ellis, 1984). More recently, others have found that when used appropriately, and with parental involvement, game technology can have a positive impact on student achievement (Blanchard, Behrens, & Anderson, 1998).
Finding Trouble in River City

Games have been identified consistently in public discourse as a cause of social ills, but the research does not support the assertion. The political climate and the tensions over families tell us why this happened. The next question is how it happened.

Certainly, one of the major instruments in the diffusion of knowledge about new technologies are the news media. An examination of the portrayal of a new technology should tell us what its public images were. Media theorists have long been aware of the ways in which news media can affect the portrayal of the news, and a rich literature suggests that we should consider the gate keeping functions (McQuail, 1994) of media elites (Lichter, 1986) and the practices and characteristics of the writers themselves (Gans, 1980; Hall, 2000; Schudson, 1978) as important influences in the dissemination of news.

Although the news media present facts and events in a particular way as both natural and as common sense, we cannot take this depiction of the world for granted (Gitlin, 1980). Gitlin demonstrated that media frames organize the world for journalists and audiences. Frames are “persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis, and exclusion, by which symbol-handlers routinely organize discourse” (p. 7). In looking at how something is presented to us—in this case, the portrayal of video games—we must ask “What is the frame here?” And why this one and not another? Frame analysis helps illustrate the power of reporters to “promote a particular problem, definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation” (Entman, 1993). The portrayal of science and technology is subject to media framing because audiences must rely on experts and journalists to make sense of new, and sometimes confusing, information (Nelkin, 1987). Nelkin notes that technology reporting is also particularly sensitive to issues of power and social norms.

The method used here and in the next chapter combines Gitlin’s qualitative frame analysis with the more systematic aspects of standard quantitative content analysis.¹¹ First, analytical categories and frame types were generated by reading through a sample of the news media coverage of video games. The frame categories covered dystopian and utopian visions of game use, as well as aspects of gender and age. These frames were then included on coding sheets and counted in the sample by two coders.

The sample was drawn from the U.S.’s three most widely circulated news magazines, Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. News magazines convey information and imagery “generally consistent” with other vehicles of popular culture (Nelkin, 1987).¹² For the years 1970-2000, all articles from the three news magazines cited in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature under the following key words were included in the analysis: video games, electronic games (until the mid 1980s), computer games, Atari, Nintendo, CD-Rom games, interactive multiplayer, Sega, and PlayStation.¹³ The sample contained 119 articles, and each was read twice for coding and once for a qualitative analysis. Scott’s pi (W. Scott, 1955) intercoder reliability scores for the coding were satisfactorily above generally accepted standards (Wimmer & Dominick, 1997): Of the 31 variables coded, the mean pi was .82, and the median value was .80 (See Appendix for all scores).

There are limitations to frame analysis. The presence of particular media frames is not proof of anything conscious among journalists. Nor is it the same thing as a direct and measurable effect on audiences. We cannot know if the utopian or dystopian frames resonated with readers, or if they reflect ambivalence. Still, for many people the news media were their first exposure to new phenomena. The news must have had an important influence, amplifying certain assumptions while minimizing others. As the next chapter will show, games have been coded as being “for” particular kinds of people and not for others. Because there is no gender, age, class or race inherent in media technologies, it is reasonable to infer that at least one way that such constructions persisted was through framing.

As studies of earlier media suggest, the vilification of video games was simply one more example of a long-standing phenomenon: an unrelated social tension was activated and superimposed on to the new medium. Political and academic elites then reacted accordingly. As noted in the Introduction, such concerns about new media technologies have become so predictable that there is a theory about the specific patterns they take. According to Wartella and Reeves (1983; 1985), media coverage and subsequent research has followed a three-wave pattern. First, fears emerge out of concerns that the new medium might be displacing a more “constructive” activity. Then fears of health effects appear, followed by fears of social ills. A complementary theory suggests that there is a conservative political component to these fears, especially the ones about negative displacement of children’s time. Ofstein (1991) has described this kind of thinking as the “River City” effect, referring to the fictitious townsfolk of River City in the musical The Music Man. As this thinking goes, if children weren’t wasting their time with the useless new medium, they would be doing something more valuable like reading classic literature.

Two hypotheses guide the following analysis: