The Proteus Paradox Read Online Free PDF Page A

WHY
    When arcade games appeared in bars and nightclubs in the 1970s, gaming was largely an adult pastime. In an analysis of three decades—1970 to 2000—of news articles on video games, Dmitri Williams, a professor of communication at the University of Southern California, has documented how media portrayal of gaming shifted dramatically in the 1980s. News and magazine articles began to associate gaming with male teenagers and to warn of the addictive and corrupting nature of video games: gaming was not only a gateway to deviance; gaming was deviant behavior. 1
    The reaction to gaming is not unique. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the introduction of every communication medium has caused a moral panic centered on teens—movies in the 1920s, radio in the 1930s, comic books and rock and roll in the 1940s and 1950s, and so on. Following the publication of psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s
Seduction of the Innocent
in 1954, the media widely reported his unsubstantiated claim that reading comic books turned innocent boys into delinquents and criminals. After all, alarmist headlines sell papers. Cultural theorist Angela McRobbie has argued that moral panics encourage people to “turn away from the complexityand the visible social problems of everyday life . . . or to adopt a gung-ho ‘something must be done about it’ attitude.” I would add that these panics are appealing because they reduce complex social problems into a simplistic model with one marginalized culprit. It’s easier to put warning labels on video games than to address all the very real social, cultural, and psychological factors that lead to gun violence. 2
    Much as with comic books and rock and roll when they first appeared, the unrelenting media association between video games and teenagers led to the stereotype that only teenagers play video games. According to the news media, moreover, gaming wasn’t just for teenagers: it was specifically for teenage boys. In addition, media reports repeatedly suggested that boys were biologically hardwired for violent video games. Williams quotes from a
Newsweek
article from 1989: “Nintendo speaks to something primal and powerful in their bloody-minded little psyches, the warrior instinct that in another culture would have sent them out on the hunt or the warpath.” This alignment of gender, age, and deviance produces a simple yet powerful sound bite: video games turn boys into violent criminals. And it concisely reinforces multiple stereotypes: only teenage boys play video games, and they play these games because they enjoy violence. Online games actually combine two separate moral panics—worry about video games and fear of the Internet. And perhaps the emergence of online games is what allowed the moral panic of video games to continue into its third decade.
    Even after thirty years, these stereotypes still strongly influence how we perceive gamers. In 2008, late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel played these stereotypes to great comedic effect when he cajoled actress Mila Kunis into divulging her
World of Warcraft
gaming habit: “I find it hard to believe . . . like, how fanatical are you aboutvideo games?” When Kunis asked Kimmel whether he had played
World of Warcraft,
his reply was, “I’ve not, but I’ve watched my son play it.” Kimmel reinforced multiple stereotypes: only teenage boys, not women or grown men, should be playing video games. 3
    Before we can understand what people actually do in online games, we first need to acknowledge and debunk the pervasive stereotypes around who plays video games and why. Teenagers are actually the minority in online games. More important, online games are highly social, and gamers are not a monolithic category.
Debunking the Stereotypes
    Despite common media portrayals, studies of thousands of online gamers—primarily English-speaking gamers in North America and western Europe—by