Gaming and the Perceptions of Outsiders

Mon, Mar 31, 2008

Over at Escapist Magazine, Brenda Brathwaite wrote a lengthy feature trying to divine the source of the non-gaming population's antipathy toward video games. She polled a group of forty of her friends who do not play video games about their opinions of games and discovered that the mood was overwhelmingly negative with only two respondents expressing positive feelings about video games. Perhaps the most surprising result was that few of the respondents attributed their ill-will to negative media coverage.

It will come as no surprise to most gamers or to most people in the gaming industry that video gamers are perceived as anti-social creatures. The opinions uttered by Brathwaite's associates are bandied about in certain circles as though they were aphorisms:

Videogames are not good for you. Videogames are a waste of time. They isolate children. Kids never go outside to play. They just sit there and stare at the TV all day.

Embedded in those statements are the most common frets about video games that are aired in the media. At least in the eyes of gamers, it seems as though the media is constantly trying to incite those sentiments about games. The only positive coverage of video games arises out of the family-friendly gameplay of the Wii. That certainly combats the idea that all video games are passive affairs in which the child is force fed entertainment down their waiting gullets.

Of course, the primary source of fear with video games is the violence:

There is also a strange undercurrent: concerns about addiction and worries that games will make otherwise happy kids bloodthirsty killers. One mother of a 30-year-old son believes "there is an army out there of players, connected by the net, even an international one, and it has [led] to some relationships based on a shared interest." While this is true enough, I don't believe the WoW guilds or FPS teams are going to lead to what she fears: "a very mal-adjusted society."

Any reasonable gamer may start throwing up his hands at this notion. After all, what's the use of the ESRB if we can't point to them and at titles like Manhunt 2 and say, "Hey, look, not for kids. That is not a game for kids. It's a no no." Few people outside of the gaming subculture can come to grips with the fact that not all games are made for kids. That, in fact, video games may not be solely the province of children. The idea that video games are only made for children gives rises to myopic opinions like this one:

"I am a 180 degrees [in the opposite direction] of the videogames culture. Can't stand it. I will do everything in my power not to introduce my kids to that culture mainly because I am against any apparatus that suppresses individuality in kids. I also have the perception that it creates an addiction, and it takes them away from reality and the world that surrounds them contributing to obesity, laziness, and lack of imagination. Kids need to be exposed to more important things in life. They can have the rest of their grown up lives to do that if they want to, but I will do everything to make sure that their time under my roof is spent focused on better causes."

How is it that the only video games that get press are the violent games that are not meant for children and that non-gamers immediately jump to the conclusion that such games will corrupt the youth? Keep in mind that the point of this article was not to investigate people's opinions about children playing video games but to investigate people's opinions on video games in general. Inevitably the topics steers toward children. I've had this experience before while discussing my work with a friend's father. He stated, "Video games are a young person's business," and though he wasn't expressing the notion that video games were leading to the demise of society, there is a deeply-held belief in many people that one outgrows video games.

I could spend an entire series of articles disputed the myth that video games contribute to laziness and a lack of imagination, but this fundamental whiff of immaturity around video games, occasionally deserved, is what prompted my response. My first experience with video games was helping my mother play through Super Mario Bros. Growing up, I don't think I ever really worried about getting a new console because I knew that as soon as a video game came out that appealed to my mother arrived on the system, she would likely purchase it. My only concern was whether I would ever be able to get the controller away from her.

On Sundays, my family often sat together and watched rented movies. Or sometimes, we all sat and read books. We weren't interacting with one another, but we were with one another. But there came a period where everybody in the family had a Gameboy, and we all played different games and passed the systems around trying to help each other beat different parts of the games. We even played Mario 64 as a family.

It will take time before people outgrow their prejudices for video games. Maybe it won't happen until more of the population has grown up playing video games. All I know is that video games, long before the Wii ever came out, had the power to bring families together and to spark the imagination. To be honest, I have to think one of Braithwaite's interviewees hit the nail on the head:

"Parents always think kids are wasting their youth, and always have done [so] down through the millennia," says Tom Forsyth of RAD Game Tools. "'That Ug, always holding things. His front paws will develop in funny ways. Why can't he walk on all fours like normal proto-hominids?' And so, whatever the kids spend the most time doing, that's always what parents think is a waste of time, and what is corrupting their lives. It doesn't matter what that is. If all they did was homework, parents would be worrying that their kids aren't becoming well-rounded people. And, in fact, parents do this - enrolling math nerds in karate classes and the like. There is no way to win - parental paranoia ensures that kids are always doing the wrong thing."

There will always be a scapegoat. In some ways, I'm most fearful of all to see what our generation selects as its designated Pied Piper of the youths.