The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee had hoped to hear testimony on Tuesday from the heads of gaming forums about “the radicalization of online forum users, including instances of open incitement to commit politically motivated acts.” The committee scheduled the hearings after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, which prompted a renewal of the half-century debate over the role of video games in acts of violence.
After the assassination, reports emerged that bullet casings recovered from the shooting contained references to internet memes and the video game Helldivers 2. That prompted some observers, like journalist Geraldo Rivera, to blame the suspect’s horrendous act on violent video games. A relative of the suspect told Fox News that he developed a powerful hate of conservatives and Christians thanks to video games. The suspect and a roommate were “big gamers, and obviously they have that group that influences them as well as others.”
The government shutdown at the very least postponed the hearings. But such claims aren’t new. Since video games’ first appearances in bars and arcades in the 1970s, some public figures have argued that they represent a dangerous, amorphous threat to our nation’s youths. Initially, critics derided arcades as dangerous environments, a cesspool of an expanding urban America where the mafia and gangs conned attendees into wasting their hard-earned money on pinball and pleasure machines. As video games moved into homes and mass shootings became a troubling recurring feature in American life, critics pointed at violent video games as the culprit. As in prior moral panics, the technology proved to be an easy and tangible scapegoat, which enabled Americans to avoid grappling with the complex social factors—like deindustrialization, urban decay, and disillusioned suburban children—that led to a combustible situation ripe for tragedy.
Video games first emerged in the 1970s as an embodiment of Cold War-era computer science achievements. Early games like Computer Quiz and Spacewar! highlighted these links and portrayed games as a healthy educational opportunity. Things began to shift in 1972, when Nolan Bushnell and the founders of the Atari gaming system combined their knowledge of amusement parks and pinball to produce Pong, a game played on giant cabinet machines in bars and popular hangouts in California. This fed into local fears that video games were the newest attraction to lure youths into a dangerous environment away from family and friends, thereby leading vulnerable members of society into crime and delinquency.
In 1976, Americans engaged in their first public conversation over the potential harm of violent video games. Emerging from an earlier game on demolition derbies, Exidy’s Death Race had players run over little gremlin sprites (which some people contended too closely resembled humans) to leave behind cross-shaped gravestones. Newspapers from Seattle to New York City began reporting on children congregating around arcades in order to kill pedestrians for points. The National Safety Council and family groups denounced the game. Exidy fielded letters from outraged people who had never played Death Race but associated video games with violence in popular entertainment. The letter writers contended that such carnage on screens negatively influenced vulnerable children. Less than half a decade after the debut of Pong, video games were becoming representative of Americans’ larger fears.
This trepidation only grew as the Pacmania craze took hold in the early 1980s. For gamers, Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man were two “cute” games with fun songs and merchandise complementing the games’ colorful characters and sounds. For critics, however, the games were the latest ploy to undermine the moral values of America’s youths. Talk shows, newspapers, and politicians warned that the Pac-Man titles led good children into video game addiction, drugs, and violence while abandoning their responsibilities and schooling.
In 1982, Ronald Reagan’s Surgeon General C. Everett Koop charged that video games were one of the top dangers to children, claiming the game Missile Command in particular offered “nothing constructive.”
This growing fear of games prompted towns, such as Mesquite, Texas, to issue ordinances empowering law enforcement to investigate arcades if operators had some links to “criminal elements.” The dispute over video games eventually made its way to the Supreme Court. In 1983, in Aladdin’s Castle v. the City of Mesquite, the justices deemed such ordinances unconstitutional. Nevertheless, the concerns about a seemingly boundless, dangerous technology persisted even as the nascent U.S. video game market crashed in the early 1980s.
An oversaturated marketplace of repetitive titles, inaccurate financial projections, and poor management temporarily overshadowed the debate over the technology’s social impact. Still, Nintendo and other companies focused on producing uncontroversial games as they rebuilt the industry. For example, in creating a game about hunting down vampires in a castle, Konami of America Vice President Emil Heidkamp rejected potentially fear-inducing titles such as “Demon Castle Dracula” and “Dracula Satanic Castle” and instead went with the more palatable title Castlevania.
But the rise of two controversial games in the early 1990s fueled the most publicized debate over the threat that violent video games posed to the nation’s children. Midway’s Mortal Kombat featured players’ characters tearing body parts off of opponents, with blood splattering everywhere. Digital Pictures’s Night Trap had players taking on a vampire-like cult stalking young women.
The games spurred public outcry, which prompted Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman to convene hearings on the topic. He shared clips of the violent games and compared games and accessories—including plastic revolvers and bazooka-shaped, shoulder-mounted light scopes—with actual guns and real-life dangers. Meanwhile, witnesses testified to the ways these games poisoned children’s minds, just as other modern entertainment did. Marilyn Droz of the National Coalition on Television Violence alleged, “The video industry has done the same thing that the movie industry has done.”
Instead of offering a ringing defense of their industry or pointing to other causes of violence, representatives for Nintendo and Sega tried to place the blame for violent games upon their competitors, which only affirmed the claims of game critics. This one-upmanship obscured testimony on how many games reproduced—rather than created—society’s sexist and racist ideals. That enabled legislators to avoid tougher questions and keep the spotlight on the violent imagery in the games.
Read More: Tyler Robinson, Suspect in Charlie Kirk Killing, Left Messages With No Motive
To stave off legislation and regulation, the video game industry established the Entertainment Software Rating Board to rate games. For a brief moment, Americans seemed content with a system that warned parents about the differences between supposedly harmless “E / Everyone” games to truly dangerous “AO / Adults Only” titles.
That changed with the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, which reignited public debate over video games. The perpetrators in the mass shooting had played id Software’s first-person shooter Doom, they had networked with an online community of gamers, and, most damning, they appeared to have incorporated the game’s imagery into their real-life plans for murder. Although Americans debated the roles of bullying and social isolation in the case, many observers blamed Doom for the murder of 13 children and one teacher. (The game’s co-creator later reflected that “we knew that we were not the cause.”)
The game, with its anonymous social world and violent imagery, neatly connected the many intangible dangers facing the nation at the time. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) warned that children “hook into the Internet and play video games that are extraordinarily violent.” Likewise, Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) labeled the threat posed by “gory movies, violent music, a burgeoning porn industry, grotesque video games, and sleazy television a cause for national concern.” For all of this bluster, Congress took no action.
The debate did launch a market in parenting books and social commentary suggesting that easy access to video games was the culprit for any child’s struggles.
Since then, violent video games consistently have been blamed after mass shootings, as the technology remains an outlet for our collective fears over extraordinary and inexplicable horrors. In 2005, then-New York Senator Hillary Clinton compared video games to “tobacco, alcohol, and pornography.” After the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newton, Conn., President Barack Obama had his then-Vice President Joe Biden meet with representatives of the video game industry to discuss whether their products somehow inculcated violence in society. More recently, in 2019, President Donald Trump blamed “the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace” for our social ills.
The Kirk assassination has once again rekindled the conversations about violent video games. If the hearings actually end up happening after the shutdown, they are likely to resemble those from 1993 and 1994. The committee invited the heads of gaming forums to testify—though it’s unclear whether they will willingly go—while ignoring those running social media sites such as Facebook or YouTube. Once more, violent video games will be summoned for a brief moment of soul-searching and hand-wringing by political leaders representing constituents desperate to find a simple solution to our nation’s complex troubles. And, once more, any results will be fleeting because the inquiry will ignore the ills plaguing the U.S. and instead focus on one narrow manifestation of them.
Aaron Coy Moulton is associate professor of Latin American history at Stephen F. Austin State University and on a research fellowship from the Center for History and Culture of Southeast Texas and the Upper Gulf Coast with Lamar University.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
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