In the previous essay in this series I discussed the culture war tactic of criticizing something by alleging it is a waste of time. This is perhaps the mildest culture war tactic with the stronger ones focusing on allegations of serious harm. During the 1980s culture war against gaming, there were such allegations.
While some people might see historical value in looking back at the 1980s gaming culture war, there is the question about why this matters today. The reason is that culture war never changes and culture war never ends. These same tactics are used today and will be used in the future, so discussing them is still relevant. It is also useful to see that culture wars and moral panics follow the same patterns, although it would be a mistake to assume without evidence that a criticism must be mere culture war nonsense or a moral panic. These alleged harms can be divided into three categories.
The first was that gaming would, crudely put, make people stupid. This was usually not applied to tabletop games but was used against video games. The second was that gaming would cause psychological harm. The third was that gaming would cause moral harm by corrupting people. In this essay I will focus on the claim that gaming would make people stupid.
While the 1980s might seem like a long time ago, the idea of attacking technology because it will make people stupid is truly ancient. As philosophers love to point out in debates about AI making people stupid, the Phaedrus includes Socrates expressing concerns about the negative effects of writing. Jumping ahead, people famously worried that television and calculators would make people stupid. Being a bit more specific, the accusation that technology will make people stupid usually takes one of two forms.
The first is general harm, that the technology will somehow cause a cognitive decline. This could be due to the technology distracting people from activities that would improve their cognition (like the waste of time argument) or inflicting cognitive damage. As an example of a distracting technology, when handheld video games appeared in the 1980s, my teachers were worried they would distract us from our lessons. One of my clever classmates learned to wire a switch that would turn off the sound of these devices, so kids could play them during class. These gave us a tiny taste of what smartphones would later bring to the classroom. There were also concerns about arcade games and computer games, with the worry that they would also distract people from their studies and thus make them stupid.
Alan Bloom (yeah, that guy) claimed the Walkman (really) would damage people, writing, “As long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf” (Bloom, 1987, p. 81). While he was obviously wrong, this does serve as an excellent example of the repeating unfounded moral panics over the danger of technology. There were also concerns that video games would cause, in addition to physical harms (“Space Invader’s Wrist”) various cognitive harms. I’ll discuss the alleged psychological and moral harms of gaming in later essays.
The second alleged harm is that using the technology will result in the loss of a skill or ability through atrophy as the technology does the work for humans. Socrates expressed this concern about writing and (since my dad was a math teacher) I remember people worrying that calculators would weaken people’s math skills. While they did put an end to slide rule skills, the fears proved unfounded. The slide rule example does show that while a new technology can render a skill obsolete, there is the question of whether this should be seen as harmful. That few people can use a slide rule today does not seem to be cause for alarm or concern. Jumping ahead to today, there is the fear that AI will cause skill atrophy and, as a professor, I am trying to sort out what skills we should preserve in the face of AI and which skills fall into the slide rule category. This is, as you would imagine, a matter much debated among academics.
While video games, like any activity, can distract people to a degree that is harmful, the culture war and moral panic over video games in the 1980s was proven to be unfounded. As Michael Z. Newman (2017) noted, the videos games of the 1980s did not ruin our lives. Which I already knew, having fought though that culture war and moral panic. In fact, video games are now claimed to various positive benefits for cognition, although any claims from people trying to sell you a game should be looked at critically.
As a takeaway, I’d like people to see that culture war never changes and never ends. When the next moral panic occurs, perhaps over VR, it would be wise to reflect on these past moral panics. But I would be remiss if I did not say that it would be a mistake to dismiss criticisms of technology as mere moral panic or just a culture war fight.
To use the obvious example, AI does present real dangers and although we should not fall into a panic, we do need to assess how it is impacting people—especially the youth. As an example, many students are using AI to generate their papers and thus not working on their writing skills. If a student does that in all their classes, they will not develop critical skills and will thus be harmed. But one could reply that writing skills are slide rule skills—skills that we will no longer need. I think that is wrong, but I am obviously aware I could be caught in my own unnoticed moral panic…think of the children! Seriously, we need to think about AI and its impact on kids. And the environment. And the adults. And future generations.
References
Newman, M. Z. (2017, May 25). Children of the ’80s never fear: Video games did not ruin your life. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/children-80s-never-fear-video-games-did-not-ruin-your-life-180963452/
Plato. (1995). Phaedrus (A. Nehamas & P. Woodruff, Trans.). Hackett Publishing Company. (Original work published ca. 370 B.C.E.)
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