Cruel Games: Why Video Games Were Blamed for Violence

When society faces cruelty, it wants a short and clear answer. Preferably one that can be banned, removed from the shelf, or marked with a red "18+" sticker. Video games fit the role of the culprit almost perfectly: they are new, incomprehensible to adults, and allow the player to pull the trigger themselves. Even if it's just a drawn one.

Every era had its own scapegoat

The fear of video games did not arise out of nowhere. It's just that other forms of entertainment had already served time on the defendant's bench before them. In the 1960s, adults worried about comic books. Later, suspicion fell on rock music, horror movies, and even tabletop role-playing games.

The logic almost always sounded the same: a child sees something scary, gets used to it, and then repeats what they saw in real life. It's a convenient scheme. It has a cause, an effect, and an object that can be taken away.

With games, everything looked even more convincing. A book reader observes the hero. A movie viewer watches another person shoot. But a player presses the button themselves. They choose a weapon, aim, attack, and get points for it.

This is where the word appeared that would migrate from newspaper articles to politicians' speeches for decades: interactivity. It seemed to be what turned a harmless entertainment into a rehearsal for real violence.

The first scandal was black-and-white

In the mid-1970s, games still consisted of a few moving shapes and sharp electronic sounds. No faces, dialogue, or believable blood. But the imagination was enough.

In 1976, the arcade game Death Race was released. The player drove a car and tried to run down figures running across the screen. Upon impact, a sound resembling a scream played, and a cross appeared in place of the target.

The developers called these creatures gremlins. Associated Press journalist Wendy Walker saw teenagers near the machine and described Death Race as a human-killing simulator. A scandal broke out—and what regularly happens to banned entertainment occurred: everyone learned about the game.

Sales increased. The arcade cabinet, which could have gotten lost among dozens of similar machines, achieved an almost legendary status. The outrage turned out to be the best advertisement.

Technologies grew—and with them, the fear

In the 1980s, microprocessors became cheaper. Games became colorful, consoles moved into living rooms, and developers began experimenting without much restriction. Sometimes the result looked not bold, but downright repulsive.

Custer’s Revenge for the Atari 2600 invited players to control a naked General Custer who had to reach a tied-up Native American woman. The game caused protests from human rights activists and later rightfully ended up on numerous lists of the worst projects in history.

Another game, Chiller, transported the user into a torture chamber. Defenseless people became targets, and points were awarded for hitting bodies. Many arcade owners refused to install the cabinet. Nintendo also did not grant an official license to release the game for its console.

Public anxiety here is understandable. It was no longer about space monsters or conventional toy soldiers, but about sexual violence and torture turned into entertainment. But another question remained: does the existence of a repulsive game mean its player will inevitably become a violent person?

Doom, Mortal Kombat, and the birth of ratings

By the early 1990s, pixelated violence had become much more convincing. The characters of Mortal Kombat looked almost like real people because they were created using digitized actors. After matches, the player could perform a bloody finishing move—the famous fatality.

Doom offered a different experience. The camera was placed at the hero's eye level, weapons occupied the lower part of the screen, and demons advanced directly at the player. Today, such a perspective surprises no one. Back then, it felt like an almost physical presence inside a firefight.

The last straw unexpectedly turned out to be Night Trap—more of an interactive movie than a violent action game. The player switched between cameras in a house and tried to save girls from attackers. US Senator Joe Lieberman presented the project as a dangerous entertainment capable of influencing teenagers.

Following the Senate hearings, the gaming industry created the ESRB age rating system. Familiar labels appeared on boxes: for children, teenagers, and adults. The state did not ban all violent games, but demanded at least warning buyers about the content.

This was a reasonable compromise. An eight-year-old child really does not need to see dismemberment, sexual violence, or realistic torture. Age classification does not solve all problems, but it helps parents understand what exactly is running on the home console.

After "Columbine", the culprit had already been assigned

On April 20, 1999, two students at Columbine High School in Colorado killed 13 people, wounded many others, and then committed suicide. America tried to understand how such a thing could possibly happen.

Computers with Doom and other violent games were found in the attackers' homes. For television and politicians, this turned out to be enough. The familiar formula worked again: teenagers played shooters, then staged a shooting—therefore, shooters were the cause.

The problem is that millions played Doom. The overwhelming majority of them didn't kill anyone, didn't prepare an attack, and didn't turn into criminals. Correlation between two facts does not yet prove that one fact generated the other.

Moreover, school shootings occurred long before personal computers appeared. In 1927, Andrew Kehoe blew up a school in Michigan. Dozens of people died. In 1966, Charles Whitman opened fire from the University of Texas tower. Neither Doom, nor GTA, nor online shooters existed back then.

What games can actually do

Denying any influence would also be strange. A game is capable of being annoying. Especially when the same enemy sends you to a checkpoint for the tenth time, and your teammate in voice chat seems to have made it their mission to test the limits of human patience.

After a loss, a person might speak louder, get angry, or sharply throw a controller onto the couch. Such excitement usually passes. Short-term aggression and the readiness to commit a real crime are not the same thing.

The risk increases when other circumstances are added to the game: severe mental health problems, social isolation, bullying, domestic violence, access to weapons, lack of support. But then the game becomes just one detail of a complex picture. Not the main explanation.

Here it is useful to distinguish between content and consequences. Some games really do relish violence. Parents have the right not to buy them for their child. Stores have the right to respect age restrictions. Developers can be criticized for the cheap exploitation of violence.

However, trying to explain mass shootings with a single hobby sounds about as reasonable as blaming kitchen knives for family conflicts. An object can be part of an event. The cause is usually deeper.

Why we are looking for a simple explanation again

Talking about gun availability, mental health, school bullying, and family dysfunction takes time. And money, specialists, and decisions that someone will definitely not like.

Banning a game is easier. You can hold a press conference, show a scary clip on a big screen, and solemnly announce that children are now protected. True, a child will find the banned project on the internet in five minutes. But the report has already been written, and the cameras are turned off.

Video games have also become a convenient target because generations speak different languages. A person who has never played shooters sees only shooting. A player notices competition, teamwork, map exploration, reaction speed, and an evening conversation with friends.

This doesn't make every game useful. It rather serves as a reminder: before passing judgment, it wouldn't hurt to figure out what is happening on the screen and around it.

Neither justifying nor demonizing

A violent game does not turn a calm teenager into a murderer at the push of a button. But handing a child any content with the words "these are just pixels" is also a questionable idea.

A working approach looks more boring than a loud ban. Checking the age rating. Occasionally watching what the child is playing. Asking not only about virtual victories, but also about how the day went at school. Paying attention to sudden changes in behavior, threats, and a morbid obsession with violence.

And most importantly—do not confuse a conversation with an interrogation. A teenager is more likely to talk about a disturbing game to an adult who doesn't start the chat by demanding the computer be turned off immediately.

Games can be crude, stupid, and unpleasant. Sometimes—magnificent. They are capable of making you laugh, scare you, anger you, or help you survive a hard evening. But they do not give us the right to close our eyes to the real causes of violence.

A convenient culprit was found long ago. Real answers still require work.