Video Games

A video game is a form of interactive entertainment that involves a human user or multiple users and a user interface to produce visual information through an electronic device, such as an oscilloscope or a computer. Patented on December 14, 1948, the first commercial video game was available for sale in 1971. Since that time, video games have become a major cultural icon, influencing young and old alike. It is this influence that is cause for celebration as a source for enhancing visuomotor skills and perhaps even educational reform; video games also are subjected to intense public scrutiny.

Like other forms of entertainment, such as comic books, motion pictures, and even music and dancing, video games have been the target of both praise and controversy. The release of Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV) in April 2008 was greeted with waves of hysteria and hand-wringing by politicians, pundits, and some antimedia scholars concerning the effects that this game and games like it might have upon players. Much of the controversy surrounding GTA IV stems from its heavy and graphic use of violence and death-related themes. Although the actual impact of such games on players' behavior appears, in fact, to be negligible, the cultural unease that surrounds violent video games arguably stems in part from our fascination with and revulsion toward death, particularly human-precipitated homicide. Although GTA IV may be an unusually brutal video game in its portrayal of human violence, the theme of death in video games is hardly new, nor is the controversy surrounding death, and particularly violent death, in video games.

Death in Early Games

The first commercially successful video game was Pong, a simplistic, nonviolent, tennis-like game released by Atari. Pong was something of an anomaly because not even a hint of violence or death existed in the game. Even previous game designs with less commercial success, such as Spacewar!, involved battles of machine-on-machine violence that was ultimately won with the destruction or death of one of the players. Although nonviolent games like Pong retained a place in the video game industry, and continue to do so through the present day, games that included an allusion to death became more common and popular. Indeed, following Pong, most of the video games that reached surging popularity during the 1970s involved some form of cartoon-quality violence and death. Notable examples include Space Invaders and Asteroids, which featured machineon-machine violence, as well as Pac-Man and Centipede, which involved nonhuman critters of various sorts attempting to shoot or eat each other. Other contemporary games, such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, started to show primitive versions of human-on-human violence.

The first major controversy over violence and death in video games occurred with the release of a game in 1976 entitled Death Race. Based on a movie of the same title, the game featured the player driving a car who would score points by running over screaming gremlins. Unfortunately due to the primitive graphics of the time, the gremlins looked too much like humans. Setting the stage for decades of panic, pundits began to [Page 977]discuss the possible negative effects of playing video games, partially in response to the controversy generated by Death Race. Sales of the game Death Race may have been harmed by the controversy, although this early controversy is credited as creating publicity for video games more widely, resulting in increased sales overall.

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