By December of 1993, U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman was declaring that Mortal Kombat and Night Trap were "no mark of a civilized society," and the Senate was holding hearings into the sales of videogames.
Preempting the hearings - and wary of the effect similar hearings had on the comic book industry 50 years beforehand - the game industry formed the Entertainment Software Rating Board rating system. With the benefits of hindsight, it's hard to believe how anyone could be shocked by what is now such blatant cartoon violence in Mortal Kombat. While part of that stems from our continual desensitization to violence, by any objective view, the worst thing about Mortal Kombat was it wasn't a very good game.
Panic on the Streets of London
Once Lieberman and the media got their claws into the videogame moral panic, they were reluctant to let it go. And so with every modern tragedy committed by young people, games inevitably factor into news reports, regardless of their relevance to the incident.
And never have facts stood in the way of a good story - from the Manhunt hysteria, in which the Rockstar game was initially blamed as the inspiration for the murder of 14-year-old Stefan Pakeerah, to the U.K.'s Sky News, a key player in the missing girl stories that consume the British media once a year, reporting that the 9-11 terrorists "could" have used Microsoft Flight Simulator to help them train.
And it's not just the English-speaking world that is affected by this phenomenon. Rule of Rose famously caused ripples right across continental Europe last year, particularly in Italy, where European Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini declared the game had "shocked me profoundly for its obscene cruelty and brutality," thus turning an obscure, rather dull Japanese title into one of the best-known games of the year.
The online version of the Times report on the story tellingly opens with the words "have computer games gone too far?" linking to an online vote. One can scarcely imagine an editor of the lowest gutter-press tabloid, much less of the Times, daring to write the words "have books gone too far?" but the comparison seems to be lost on some. Trapped in a campaign of misinformation, the publishers of Rule of Rose set a worrying precedent - choosing to leave the game unreleased in the U.K. due to the moral panic that surrounded it.
Germany, long famous for making blood green and turning humans into robots, has tightened up its regulations in recent years, refusing to rate (and thereby effectively eliminating any German versions of) games such as Dead Rising, Crackdown and Gears of War.
In China, the speed at which the country's male youth are taking to MMOGs in internet cafes has delighted developers and spooked the Chinese government. In April, the government instigated new regulations that required makers of online games to initiate a system to penalize players under 18 for playing longer than the state-mandated three-hour limit. More disturbing, it also required all players to register their real names and identity card numbers in order to play. There are also a growing number of reports about "treatment centers" for addicted players which, judging by reports, more closely resemble lunatic asylums.
Even Japan, usually thought of as one of the main sources of questionable material in gaming, is not immune: Kanagawa Prefecture choosing to restrict sales of Grand Theft Auto, even before a 15-year-old murderer was linked in the media to being a fan of the game.
Sense and Sensibility
All over the world, the media faces one major problem with moral panics: the law of ever-diminishing returns. Play the same message over and over again, and eventually people start to get bored, which is why new folk devils need to be created to keep interest piqued.
