Moral Panics and the Video Game Debate

In April 1999, two students at Columbine High School in Colorado killed twelve classmates and a teacher before taking their own lives. Within days, journalists and politicians had identified the cause: both students had played Doom, a first-person shooter released in 1993 in which players navigate corridors shooting demons. Senators introduced legislation, retailers pulled games from shelves, and the attorney Jack Thompson spent years filing lawsuits claiming games were murder simulators and that the industry bore direct responsibility for the shootings, winning settlements before being permanently disbarred for misconduct. None of this was new. Moral panics about new media follow a consistent script. Dime novels corrupted working-class youth in the 1880s. Comic books produced juvenile delinquents in the 1950s, according to psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, which got comic books hauled before a Senate subcommittee in 1954 and led directly to the Comics Code…