Homo Ludens

This importance, perhaps, should not surprise us: game scholars and researchers often hark back to the work of Johan Huizinga, who famously named us Homo ludens – “[hu]man the player”. But, along the way, there have been casualties – or so, at least, critics claim. For example, the Columbine (Colorado) killings in 1999 were linked with the killers’ affection for violent video games. A long list of subsequent school shootings, both in the US and in Europe were likewise linked to heavy use of violent games. Similarly, in the event many Norwegians refer to simply as “22 July,” Anders Behring Breivik killed 74 people and wounded 242 others, including 69 young people simply shot down on the island of Utøya. Breivik acknowledged playing games such as Modern Warfare 2 and World of Warcraft, in part as “training”. By the same token, James Holmes, dressed as the Joker, killed 12 people and injured over 60 others during the premiere of a new Batman movie in Colorado: media reports were quick to allege the role of video games – even if in a somewhat qualified fashion, as the quotation from Pat Brown at the beginning of the chapter exemplifies. Not surprisingly, these claimed linkages are hotly contested – and not without reason – by those who want to defend such games against media tendencies to scapegoat both games and gamers. The issues we’ve examined above – specifically, how to determine causal linkages between consumption and use of such materials, and just what harms and/or liberations they may foster (if any) – thus emerge here as well. Nonetheless, more recent studies, including two “meta-studies” – studies that analyze a collection of specific studies – seem to more solidly demonstrate at least some causal effect – if relatively small. Utilitarians in particular will need to pay close attention to these studies – and the size and degree of effects – for their calculus.