Up, Up, Down, Down: Part Two

Gaming has dramatically widened the growing cultural schism between the young and old. Historians and sociologists call the adult world's response to gaming a "moral panic," defined as a severe societal response to a dramatic development that elders and institutions can't control or understand, so therefore demonize and fear. Even before this, the young are increasingly coming to believe that older people have less and less to teach them. Second in a series.

In much the way the late anthropologist Margaret Mead predicted, the older generation and many of its leading institutions -- education, politics, media, education -- has unleashed a furious attack against gaming and its culture, so that the term has become synonymous with addiction, obsession, even violence.

Unlike any other cultural identifier, gaming is associated almost entirely with negative imagery in the non-virtual world, dividing notions of society and culture further. Gaming and its allegedly evil affects were central issues in the presidential election, and the notion of an amoral generation of thieves and narcissists crops up again and again in the public perception of computing and the Net, from hacking to free music.

The media cover technology poorly as a rule, but their shallow portrayal of gaming culture as destructive and profane is a particular scandal, more so all the time as gaming becomes sophisticated, creative and intellectually challenging.

This is the locus of the "moral panic," a severe societal response to some dramatic development that institutions don't understand and can't control, so therefore fear.

What characterizes a moral panic?

According to Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, authors of Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance, the concept is defined by at least five crucial elements: concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality and volatility: They involve:

• Heightened concern over the behavior of a particular group and the consequences of its behavior for the rest of society.
• Increased hostility toward the group believed to be engaging in questionable behavior.
• Agreement among a wide segment of society that the threat is serious, and caused by the group in question.
• Perceptions that the group is more dangerous than it really is, generating fear that's disproportionate to the threat.
• Sudden eruptions -- moral panics are by nature volatile -- that reappear from time to time and often, just as suddenly, subside.

On all five criteria, gaming qualifies as causing a moral panic. There is great concern about its consequences, sometimes said to involve everything from the violence of Columbine to distraction from schoolwork, athletics and other "healthy" activities. We see plenty of hostility towards gamers. The fear of gaming has always been wildly disproportionate to any real threat, and the panic over it is episodic, frequently triggered by incidents like school shootings or other media-transmitted scares.

The moral panic over gaming has also managed to obscure its growing social, cultural, even political signifance.

"Our toys, writ large, echo profound revolutions in simulation, the science of materials, and digital communication," author Mark Pesce writes in The Playful World, recently published by Ballantine Books.

"The technique of the Furby has been a hot topic of computer science for a dozen years; artificial life -- simulation of activity of living systems -- has taught us a lot about how we learn and grow into intelligence. Computers, which just a decade ago seemed useful only for word processors and spreadsheets, are now employed as digital gardens, where the seeds of mind grow into utterly upredictable forms."

Gaming has evolved far beyond play. Arguably the most revolutionary cultural force in the world right now, it's transforming the imaginations, attentions spans, reflexes and strategic thinking of an entire generation, perhaps even our neural systems themselves. Yet few people have bothered to study what this might mean.

With the release of Sony's PlayStation 2, writes Pesce, the founding chair of the Interactive Media Program at the University of California's School of Cinema-Television, "the machinery of infinite realities will be within the grasp of millions of children around the world. Unlike any videogame console released before it, the PS 2 will have the power to create realistic imaginings of breathtaking clarity. Million-dollar computers -- in l999! -- have only fractionally more power than the Play Station 2, which will challenge our ideas about simulation by making it look at least as real as anything else seen on a television screen."

But how many parents, business executives, educators, politicians or journalists recognize that so powerful and creative a force is now available to children? That future ideas about creativity, imagination, work -- and individual relationships to institutions -- will be shaped by such tools, just as they were by the PS2's more primitive predecessors, from the early Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) to game-playing computers? As pundits sound alarms about how videogames are ruining children's moral lives, as both major presidential candidates did repeateadly, during the campaign -- who in our culture is preparing for the radical changes in imagination about to be unleashed?

Pesce is right, of course. The PS2, designed to connect to the Net, is a window into a larger universe. It could easily simulate a Furby or Mindstorms, and it creates as well a million other interesting forms, if only for the eyes and ears. In fact, says Pesce, the PS2 could well be seen as a spaceship for scouring the universe of ideas.

The cultural gap between the young and the old first widened noticeably in the l960s, when younger people turned their generational backs against their elders. The explosion of the Net and the Web, which have triggered a revolution in the way information and ideas move, has exacerbated that division. The Boomers talked a lot about revolution but didn't quite make one; younger Americans are making one but don't always seem to realize it.

Our civilization hasn't begun to come to terms with this split. Panicked moralists, pundits and authority figures point to all sorts of reasons, from the decline in the authority of parental figures to the influence of new media to the lack of discipline in schools, but the truth is there is no real understanding either of this widening chasm in our politics, or in our social and cultural consciousness.

Part Three: How does gaming change people?

Comments

Moral Panic -- over VIDEOGAMES!?

[Seumas]

A "good christian mother" drives her car into a lake and kills her children, including an infant.

Middle-aged day-trader shoots up an office center.

More than half of marriages do not last.

Decades of enslavement of an entire race in America.

Decades of spousal and child abuse in America.

Blow jobs in the white house by an intern, with a married president.

And it's the VIDEOGAMES that are causing moral panic?! Holy shit . . . Talk about blind.
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seumas.com

A few points to take:

[Maeryk]

1) Gaming is not entirely viewed as bad.. Myst was never accused of being violent!

2)This was *NOT* central to the presidential election, anymore than the health concerns in Rwanda was. PLEASE Katz! Stop turning a single media reference into War of the Worlds! Liebermans crew want to stop TV.. and the "furor" during the campaigns was about movie ratings, and how they screened films, *NOT* about games. Basically, with the price of games and the price of game level systems, especially on the PC, (which are the *most* violent games) few people under 18 are getting them without their parents knowledge anyway, and anyone over 18 is out of the hands of the gubmint censors in that arena.

You are trying *WAYYY* to hard to tie this to hellmouth.. its not going to work.. I'm really starting to get sick and tired of "Waaah.. I'm a misunderstood genius, Waaaah.. they pick on me cuz I'm a geek, WAaaaah.. they are mean to me at school so I'm gonna blow it up" crap.. GET OVER IT! Most of us went through it.. and where are we now? In IT.. where are "they"? Would you like fries with that?

Cmon.. video games are *not* the world changer you are trying to make them be!

Maeryk

screwy math

[swagr]

Million-dollar computers -- in l999! -- have only fractionally more power than the Play Station 2

What, like 10000/1 ?

Holy Crap!

[Lazarus Short]

JonKatz actually followed up on one of his "first in a series" articles! The world as we know it is over!

Seriously, I think Katz is overstating both the severity of the "moral panic" that society has supposedly created over gaming, and the importance of gaming as a cultural force.

They're just games, people! Sure there are a few oddballs who are covinced that Doom et. al. are a tool of Satan, but most reasonable people recognize that games are just games.

Now, that isn't to say that there's no legitimate concern over things like desensitization to violence, couch potatoism, and other alleged societal ills that people associate with games. But a society that questions itself is the only healthy kind of society.

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