Missing link: Has the end of the killer game debate been reached?
Gamers of the first hour have known it for decades: The debate about violence in computer games. Today, research has moved on. Time to end the debate.
Killer game from 1994: Mortal Kombat II.
(Image: Screenshot/Acclaim/Midway)
Someone brought them around the corner, wiped them off the screen, bam: The killer game debate is suddenly gone. Like a pile of pixels after the power has been switched off. Yet it is at the heart of the cultural and social legacy of digitalization. For years, the argument raged between gamers and researchers, researchers and other researchers, politicians and gamers: does gaming make people aggressive? It was a debate that shaped at least two generations.
Anyone who has come into contact with computer games since the 1980s will be familiar with this from concerned parents and even more concerned politicians. Does playing computer games such as "Doom", "Quake", "Duke Nukem", "Counter Strike" or "Call of Duty" blunt young people in particular? Does it lead to a normalization of violence? There was no shortage of professions of faith – and research was carried out diligently.
Off to the index
Three well-known letters from the early days of computer games were: BPS. Because, as befits Germany, an authority watched over the welfare of children's tender souls: the "Federal Review Board for Publications Harmful to Young Persons" (now the "Federal Agency for the Protection of Children and Young Persons in the Media"). It has always had a controversial reputation as the guardian of morals in the Federal Republic of Germany, placing a wide variety of media on the "Index".
Depending on the decision of the BPS examiners, anything that ended up on this index of media harmful to minors was not allowed to be made accessible to young people, advertised or distributed at all. In addition to computer games, this mainly concerned films (before the "killer games", it was mainly "horror videos" that caused outrage across Germany).
In 1987, for example, the fun band "Die Ă„rzte" released their album "Ab 18" in protest against the indexing of two previous albums. The indexing letter adorned the back cover of the album. To this day, the album is still on the index due to a single track on it, but the cover is no longer.
The practice of the BPS, later BPjS, then BPjM – the M stands for media – has often been controversial since it was founded in 1954. Does the practice of indexing make sense at all? Does it, like many other bans, make boring products exciting in the first place? "Strike before the BPS does" was the unambiguous review of a classic fighting game with too many red pixels in a computer magazine in 1994.
The game – "Mortal Kombat II" – was indexed by the BPS at the request of the Bochum Youth Welfare Office. And then confiscated by a Bavarian public prosecutor, just like the computer game magazine "Amiga Joker". The game's violence factor would hardly shock anyone today.
The killer games debate
On November 1, 1999, Germany is shaken by a shooting rampage. A 16-year-old Bavarian locksmith apprentice shoots several people and injures others in Bad Reichenhall. Just a few months earlier, two students in Littleton shoot 15 people at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. In both cases, easily accessible weapons play a role – and a special social position of the gunmen in their environment. And computer games.
The rampage at a school in Erfurt in 2001 further fanned the debate. The year before "Counter Strike" had been released. The main topic of discussion in the German media: Violence in computer games. For some members of the public, the issue was obvious. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung even claimed in 2002: "A computer program from Sierra Entertainment trained the Erfurt shooter". The newspaper received letters from horrified gamers.
The situation also seemed clear for some politicians. Lower Saxony's Interior Minister Uwe SchĂĽnemann (CDU) in particular made a name for himself with flaming pleas, as did Bavaria's Interior Minister GĂĽnter Beckstein (CSU). The following year, the Free State of Bavaria tabled a motion in the Bundesrat to ban killer games. It petered out after the excitement had died down a little. In legal terms, this means: "Declared as done."
Experiencing violence: what shapes whom and how?
Almost 20 years later, it is clear that this has not become a mass phenomenon. But the debate continued for a long time. One name came up more often than any other: Christian Pfeiffer, former Minister of Justice, who entered the fray with his private "Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony" (KFN) to great media effect.
Pfeiffer's views were sometimes more nuanced than it sounded in the battle of words at the time. Pfeiffer was a strong advocate of the theory that computer games containing violence could dull the senses and therefore did not belong in children's rooms. At the same time, however, he was not an advocate of monocausal explanations, as preferred in the political arena. According to Pfeiffer, it is not computer games alone that turn boys into violent offenders. Rather, a mixture of factors such as experiences of violence in the social environment, for example in the family, as a normalization of violence, experiences of rejection and other factors – and probably also ball games.
Pfeiffer called this a "crisis of the young". In any case, it was about more than just console or computer games – but how it was all connected remained questionable for a long time. The debates changed with reality. The main group of perpetrators of violence continues to coincide strongly with the main user group of games – younger men. And their use of violence – could often not be deduced from computer games, for example in the debate surrounding the New Year's Eve incidents in Cologne in 2015.
Computer science professor Tobias Breiner, a specialist in game engineering, also attributes part of the earlier debate today to socialization – but not that of the players, but that of the discussants. "In editorial offices and in politics, a generation was still predominant at that time that had not grown up with computer games themselves and therefore could not assess their influence on the psyche from their own experience," he says. "First-person shooters were a simple populist scapegoat for more complex grievances that lead to rampages: Over- or underachievement in education, disintegrating family structures, demographic change, over-prescription of psychotropic drugs et cetera."
