Get real - gaming in the real world

New media, new danger

Every new medium meets its fair share of resistance. These days, most Westerners would be hard pressed to find anything described in a book truly offensive, but world history has been replete with banned tomes. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is the most well-known UK example, although it wasn’t actually banned, just (unsuccessfully) prosecuted for obscenity. The furore in the Muslim world over Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses is also legendary. Although special cases like Holocaust denial and The Anarchist Cookbook still remain, most Western countries will now allow virtually anything to be expressed in text form. The only exceptions are where other laws are broken, such as incitement to racial hatred or libel.

Similarly, films and TV have seen a slow relaxation of what is acceptable. Even the infamous Straw Dogs, which features a gruelling gang rape, was finally released on DVD in the UK in 2002 after nearly 20 years of being banned by the Video Recordings Act. Research since the 1970s has regularly shown that the amount of violence in films and TV is far in excess of real life, without an obvious direct effect on increasing crime rates. The violence operates on a different level, usually acting out a moral story where ‘good violence’ is ranged against ‘bad violence’.

Computer games bring something different to films and TV, however – a greater sense that you’re imagining yourself into a fantasy world, and this has clear precedents. People were already worried about non-computerised RPGs, particularly Dungeons and Dragons. Numerous stories permeate about D&D players losing touch with reality caused by gaming obsession, which led to the book Mazes and Monsters and a TV movie starring Tom Hanks. A woman called Pauline Pulling led a single-handed vendetta against the game, after her son committed suicide. Here, again, the blame has been squarely moved away from D&D since the initial reports, and there are virtually no proven cases of these non-computerised RPGs being linked to harmful behaviour.