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

New Media Ambivalence

This pattern has been consistent and has maintained itself dating from the telegraph (Standage, 1999), and persisting through nickelodeons (Gabler, 1999), the telephone (Fischer, 1992), newspapers, (Ray, 1999), movies (Lowery & DeFluer, 1995), radio (S. Douglas, 1999), television (Schiffer, 1991), and now with both video games and the Internet. Each was at one time a new medium facing criticism from particular elements of society in a particular historical moment. An irony is that once the offending medium becomes acceptable, it becomes the new baseline for comparison.

Video games are simply the latest in a long series of media to endure criticism. As pure play, they might have been ascribed some social value, but as media, they became a source of contention. Movies, for example, were once widely thought to be a corrupting influence on children, and media researchers examined their negative effects extensively dating back to the Payne Fund studies (Lowery & DeFluer, 1995). The experience of the Payne Fund studies suggests that research and public perception work cyclically. The research plays a role in the public perception of new media, even as public perceptions often simultaneously influence the research agenda. Now, 70 years later, movies are as contested as any site of popular culture but are now considered enough of an art form to warrant their own academic departments and journals. Clearly, in the public mind, games have farther to go. The critic Jack Kroll (2000) wrote recently that games “can’t transmit the emotional complexity that is the root of art . . . movies can transmit the sense of this nuanced complexity where games cannot” (p. 64). Some years from now, the same will be said of some new medium in comparison to games. Partisans of particular media are parochial in the way they attack new competition and new forms, always forgetting that their medium was once under similar fire by pundits and researchers alike. In this vein, what could be more ironic than a television critic writing in a newspaper about the negative impact of games, as in the case of McDonough’s article “Gaming Hazardous to Social Life” (2003)?

At Play in River City

As Ofstein (1991) noted, those who seek to ban and control video games have taken on the role and the tone of the elders of mythical River City in the play The Music Man. In the story, a wily con man, sensing the paranoia and gullibility of the elders, plays on their fears for profit. He convinces them that they have got trouble, “right here in River City,” that stems from their children playing pool and reading cheap novels—in other words, they have wasted their educational free time and are at risk because of their choice of play forms and degraded media. The solution, this pied piper tells them, is to buy loads of expensive musical instruments. This high art will surely keep the truancy and corruption of the pool halls, comic books and dime novels away. The story is a morality play about gullibility, but it is also about finger pointing at the mass media rather than dealing with real issues. At the same time, it is emblematic of the Right’s patriarchal fears about delinquency.

In mainstream reactions to new media, the River City effect is as alive and well as it has ever been for previous media. One need only look at the discourses surrounding video games and the Internet to see that the same themes have been recycled. The same can be said for the research community, which continues to focus on truancy, addiction and the like among game users. For Internet use, the research is concerned with isolation, social breakdowns and deviancy, but the antisocial gist is the same. If there is a difference in the forms of antisocial behavior assumed in these two media, it is primarily an artifact of the age stereotypes that accompany them. For games, the focus is on children and teens, and for the Internet it is on teens and adults. Regardless, the actual source of the tension often lies not in the new media, but in preexisting social issues.

The tensions over new media are surprisingly predictable, in part because the issues that drive them are enduring ones such as intra-class strife and societal guilt. Communication researchers Wartella and Reeves have demonstrated that fears about new technologies inevitably involve children (Wartella & Reeves, 1983, 1985). They show that these fears consistently follow a regular cycle: First, fears emerge out of concern that the new medium might be displacing a more socially acceptable activity. Then fears of health effects appear, followed by fears about social ills.

What Lies Beneath

This cycle is not just about the particular technology in question, but about how society looks at all new media technologies and deals with social ills. Therefore, representations of the nascent medium are a touchstone for social issues and provide a window to view the sociopolitical climate. Understanding how and why the medium is assigned blame can tell us a great deal about the tensions and real social problems that are actually at issue. Often, focusing attention on the medium is a convenient way of assigning blame while ignoring complex and troubling problems. For example, the turn-of-the-century movement to censor and shut down nickelodeons was more about intra-class strife, nativism and immigration and social control than it was about the actual content of the films (Gabler, 1999). For news media covering the conflicts, driven by profit motives and with a need to entertain as well as inform, this can lead to fear mongering. As always, bad news sells. The discourse is further complicated by the intrusion of political interests.

The resulting mishmash of public debate and skewed media coverage generates a climate in which consumers of news media are thoroughly misinformed and terrified of phenomena which are unlikely to occur. Just as importantly, they are also guided away, purposefully or not, from complicated and troubling systemic social issues. In The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, sociologist Barry Glassner (1999) writes “One of the paradoxes of a culture of fear is that serious problems remain widely ignored even though they give rise to precisely the dangers the public most abhors” (p. xviii). Yet covering a spectacular single incident, or covering the supposed influence of a new factor such as technology, makes it possible to ignore the larger troubling issues. This is not a new trend, and not particular to America. Across a wide variety of cultures, the dangers most emphasized by a society are not the ones most likely to occur, but are instead the ones most likely to offend basic moral sensibilities or can be harnessed to enforce some social norm (M. Douglas, 1992; M. Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982).

For example, Glassner notes that a long-standing tradition of mainstream media is to annually hype the supposed dangers of tampered Halloween candy for young trick-or-treaters. As a result, in the 1980s polls showed that 60 percent of parents feared their children’s victimization from spiked candy or razor blade-laden candy apples ("The Goblins Will Getcha," 1985). The heroes of the news stories are the stay-at-home moms who organize supervised events and help check the candy. Such framing reinforces the conservative social norm of women staying at home at the same time that it distracts from actual issues around child welfare. The stories themselves are bunkum. Sociologists investigated every reported incident of Halloween candy problems from 1958 to 1985 and found that there had actually been no deaths or serious injuries as reported (Best & Horiuchi, 1985). Each had been misrepresented, exaggerated or falsified. The only two real incidents of death or injury from Halloween candy occurred at the hands of the children’s’ parents. Why then are there still annual stories about the dangers of Halloween candy? Glassner suggests that by projecting fears onto strangers or some outside force, we allow a comforting ignorance of a far more common and underreported danger to children—abuse from relatives.

The guilt over mistreatment of our children can manifest itself in a painfully unjust way by casting the children themselves as the source of the problem (see Figure A). By resorting to the trope of the “bad seed,” or blaming an external force like media, we give ourselves the excuse to ignore the primary risk factors associated with crime and violence, which are abuse, neglect, and above all, poverty (Glassner, 1999):

Our fear grows, I suggest, proportionate to our unacknowledged guilt. By slashing spending on educational, medical and antipoverty programs for youths we adults have committed great violence against them. Yet rather than face up to our collective responsibility we project our violence onto young people themselves. (p. 72)

C
Figure A. Ignoring tough issues three weeks after the Columbine incident (May 10, 1999), Newsweek instead implied a sinister double life, asking: “How well do you know your kid?”
rime in schools has steadily declined over the past 20 years. Meanwhile, child-committed crime is systematically over-reported, while the causes of that crime go uncovered. Of all of the news stories about children, 40% of newspaper stories concerned crime and violence compared to 4% on health or economic issues (Kunkel, 1994). And in those crime stories, children’s backgrounds are often ignored in favor of some more dramatic news frame. Writing prophetically before the Columbine High School incident, Glassner stated, “Particularly rare are kid criminals whose behaviors, given the rest of their lives, are very surprising” (p. 70). Yet after the grisly incident, news media were hesitant to blame the parents and focused instead on the killers’ use of Internet-based video games. As satirist Michael Moore asked bitingly, given that the killers bowled regularly, including that fateful morning, why hasn’t there been some investigation of the dangers of bowling (Moore, 2002)? The Senate hearings that followed the Columbine incident did not ask about bowling, and focused instead on media habits. The Senators glossed over the troubling issues of parental responsibility and the alienating culture at the high school.

If news coverage overstates some issues while ignoring others, what has happened with coverage of video games and why? What fears and hopes has the advent of video games tapped in to, and what can representations of games tell us about the time in which they emerged? Why have children been the focus of such intense fears over games? The reasons have little to do with games themselves, which are merely the latest in a series of convenient bogeymen. Instead, they stem from societal guilt and hand-wringing over the way we educate, house, nourish and care for our children. It is far easier to blame a new media technology than to deal with the disheartening realities of widespread poverty, malnourishment and the proliferation of guns in American households. These fears are no doubt strengthened by Americans’ concerns about our over-reliance on all media. Still, it is both ironic and tragic that the same public figures who ignore these childcare issues are the ones blaming children and video games.

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