When the RackaRacka Youtube channel released a short film last week showing Call of Duty players taking on Halo’s Master Chief, gamers around the globe went crazy on social media. But it was also notable how newspapers and other mainstream outlets were desperate to praise the “amazing”, “awesome”, “hilarious” skit. Take a step back and the video was actually just quite funny and, in its machine-gunning, wall-smashing, robo-coppish ultra-violence, very traditional.
A similar degree of hysteria seems to originate from the opposite camp – the detractors, who are either hyping new neuro-scientific “proofs” of addiction and grey-matter degeneration based on MRI scans, or claiming that Anders Breivik’s liking for World of Warcraft – the most successful Massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) to date – and Call of Duty demonstrates that video games inculcate violent tendencies.
In his recent book Man (Dis)connected, American psychologist Philip Zimbardo links video games to online pornography, making the case that gaming consoles “were not designed by the men who could get women, because those men were out chasing them”. He employs the term “arousal addiction” to describe the dopamine fix prompted by blasting away at virtual enemies or, equally, travelling through the myriad levels of internet porn holding the other, non-plastic joystick.
Recent Comments