From Call of Duty to sexting, young people will always do things that perplex their elders – or pretend they are to their friends
Shhh! No one tell Keith Vaz. It turns out that, for years, China has forbidden its citizens from playing on video game consoles, claiming that they corrupt young people's squishy brains (the Labour MP, by contrast, only wants to outlaw "ultra violent" content, which he reckons is turning teenagers into rage-filled monsters).
Now, China is considering revoking its console ban. That seems sensible, because its "war on games" has been about as effective as America's "war on drugs". There are millions of black market consoles in the country, and the motion-controlled Kinect system is openly on sale, although Microsoft says that "it's not used for gaming". Much like most Kinects, then, which gather dust after two weeks when people realise their living rooms are too small to use them.
According to China Daily, the ban was originally enacted because of "fears of the potential harm to the physical and mental development of the young". Because, of course, the Chinese state thinks that spending hours every day playing with hi-tech gadgets, with inadequate breaks, is terrifying. Its citizens should be spending that time making them.
The console ban is only one example of China's angsty attitude to the medium. Stories regularly bubble up about Chinese teens packed off to "boot camps" for being addicted to online titles such as World of Warcraft and in 2011, it was even reported that one couple tried to sell their children to pay for their habit. I'm instinctively sceptical about such reports, because they are often exaggerated or distorted to serve the prevailing narrative – the idea that video games are addictive, destructive and encourage real-world violence.
That idea is not confined to China. After every gun massacre, I mentally start a countdown to the first headline pointing out that the shooter played violent video games. After the Sandy Hook killings, the Sun's front page proclaimed: "KILLER'S CALL OF DUTY OBSESSION". After Anders Behring Breivik's rampage in 2011, some stores in Norway took the title off their shelves when it was revealed that Breivik played it.
This isn't a recent phenomenon either. Looking back to 2001, a cultural movement blamed the Columbine massacre on the music of Marilyn Manson and the video game Doom, where "players take on the role of a lone space marine stalking corridors and shooting creatures with a variety of weapons". That's right, Doom, with its quaint blocky pixels and infuriatingly narrow corridors. The idea of holding it up as an example of a brain-warpingly violent game should be a useful corrective to anyone tempted to make the same argument about Grand Theft Auto.
In all this, perhaps what baffles me most is the fact that video games are still considered the blood-splattered playground of the inscrutable yoof. The age of the average gamer is now 30, according to the US industry body ESA. Some 40% of parents play games with their children at least once a week. Glyndebourne is putting on operas about people playing Second Life in a care home, for crying out loud.
This kind of scaremongering has all the symptoms of a classic moral panic. I'm nearly 30 now, and I can already begin to feel the pull of these generation-based alarms. Sexting? The horror! In my day, we drew filthy pictures of ourselves on rosewater-soaked vellum and taped them to a carrier pigeon. Daisy chaining – groups of teenagers having sex in each others' homes? Of course, that definitely happens and I am outraged by it. Slut-dropping – the alleged practice of drunk young male students picking up women in tarty clothing and driving them miles away before ditching them? Heavens to Murgatroyd! That sounds exactly like something young people would do. Thanks to the great wisdom that comes with age, I am disgusted by slut-dropping, and untroubled by the absence of anything other than third-hand reports and its inherent wild implausibility.
If like me, you are the age when being a top-flight professional athlete is now officially – rather than merely practically – impossible, try to remember this whenever you read a news story about the downfall of our society. Remember how university seemed like a place where absolutely everyone else was having wild crazy fun times.
Remember how, if asked, you would have said you were having wild crazy fun times too. And remember that, in fact, 2am would find you sitting in your room trying to finish an essay and trying to find something that rhymed with "unrequited". Don't suspend your logical faculties just because a story focuses on The Youth.
Young people will always do mystifying things the older generation doesn't approve of. That's what they're there for. It doesn't mean that they are necessarily in terrible danger, and a sense of proportion is required to distinguish real threats from moral panics.
Meanwhile in China, should the console ban be relaxed, the moral panic caravan will simply move on to something else. I wonder if the root of the government's fear of console gaming is that it wants to control the virtual experiences its citizens can access, and limit the conversations they can have while gaming online. After all, if parents worry about not knowing what their children are thinking, then how much more troubling is that to an authoritarian state? Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 hours ago.
Shhh! No one tell Keith Vaz. It turns out that, for years, China has forbidden its citizens from playing on video game consoles, claiming that they corrupt young people's squishy brains (the Labour MP, by contrast, only wants to outlaw "ultra violent" content, which he reckons is turning teenagers into rage-filled monsters).
Now, China is considering revoking its console ban. That seems sensible, because its "war on games" has been about as effective as America's "war on drugs". There are millions of black market consoles in the country, and the motion-controlled Kinect system is openly on sale, although Microsoft says that "it's not used for gaming". Much like most Kinects, then, which gather dust after two weeks when people realise their living rooms are too small to use them.
According to China Daily, the ban was originally enacted because of "fears of the potential harm to the physical and mental development of the young". Because, of course, the Chinese state thinks that spending hours every day playing with hi-tech gadgets, with inadequate breaks, is terrifying. Its citizens should be spending that time making them.
The console ban is only one example of China's angsty attitude to the medium. Stories regularly bubble up about Chinese teens packed off to "boot camps" for being addicted to online titles such as World of Warcraft and in 2011, it was even reported that one couple tried to sell their children to pay for their habit. I'm instinctively sceptical about such reports, because they are often exaggerated or distorted to serve the prevailing narrative – the idea that video games are addictive, destructive and encourage real-world violence.
That idea is not confined to China. After every gun massacre, I mentally start a countdown to the first headline pointing out that the shooter played violent video games. After the Sandy Hook killings, the Sun's front page proclaimed: "KILLER'S CALL OF DUTY OBSESSION". After Anders Behring Breivik's rampage in 2011, some stores in Norway took the title off their shelves when it was revealed that Breivik played it.
This isn't a recent phenomenon either. Looking back to 2001, a cultural movement blamed the Columbine massacre on the music of Marilyn Manson and the video game Doom, where "players take on the role of a lone space marine stalking corridors and shooting creatures with a variety of weapons". That's right, Doom, with its quaint blocky pixels and infuriatingly narrow corridors. The idea of holding it up as an example of a brain-warpingly violent game should be a useful corrective to anyone tempted to make the same argument about Grand Theft Auto.
In all this, perhaps what baffles me most is the fact that video games are still considered the blood-splattered playground of the inscrutable yoof. The age of the average gamer is now 30, according to the US industry body ESA. Some 40% of parents play games with their children at least once a week. Glyndebourne is putting on operas about people playing Second Life in a care home, for crying out loud.
This kind of scaremongering has all the symptoms of a classic moral panic. I'm nearly 30 now, and I can already begin to feel the pull of these generation-based alarms. Sexting? The horror! In my day, we drew filthy pictures of ourselves on rosewater-soaked vellum and taped them to a carrier pigeon. Daisy chaining – groups of teenagers having sex in each others' homes? Of course, that definitely happens and I am outraged by it. Slut-dropping – the alleged practice of drunk young male students picking up women in tarty clothing and driving them miles away before ditching them? Heavens to Murgatroyd! That sounds exactly like something young people would do. Thanks to the great wisdom that comes with age, I am disgusted by slut-dropping, and untroubled by the absence of anything other than third-hand reports and its inherent wild implausibility.
If like me, you are the age when being a top-flight professional athlete is now officially – rather than merely practically – impossible, try to remember this whenever you read a news story about the downfall of our society. Remember how university seemed like a place where absolutely everyone else was having wild crazy fun times.
Remember how, if asked, you would have said you were having wild crazy fun times too. And remember that, in fact, 2am would find you sitting in your room trying to finish an essay and trying to find something that rhymed with "unrequited". Don't suspend your logical faculties just because a story focuses on The Youth.
Young people will always do mystifying things the older generation doesn't approve of. That's what they're there for. It doesn't mean that they are necessarily in terrible danger, and a sense of proportion is required to distinguish real threats from moral panics.
Meanwhile in China, should the console ban be relaxed, the moral panic caravan will simply move on to something else. I wonder if the root of the government's fear of console gaming is that it wants to control the virtual experiences its citizens can access, and limit the conversations they can have while gaming online. After all, if parents worry about not knowing what their children are thinking, then how much more troubling is that to an authoritarian state? Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 hours ago.