Broadcast Media Spreading Video Game Addiction Moral Panic… Circa 1982

You’ve probably seen the headlines about video game addiction, but did you know the moral panic goes back a very long way?

You’ve probably seen the moral panic. Mainstream media outlets proclaim that video game addiction could become a massive problem. This as science continues to debunk the myths spread by mainstream media. Some of that coverage has been noted right here on Freezenet. Examples include Maclean’s Magazine in 2023 trying to scaremonger people and, earlier this year, 9News trying to do a similar thing by arguing that video games are completely at fault for poor diet – even though the evidence didn’t actually support that theory. Last year, we countered that disinformation by posting about research saying that video games boost your mood.

None of this is anything new, though. Mainstream media spreading disinformation about video games in order to scare people out of playing them goes back a long way. An interesting question, however, is how far back does this disinformation campaign go. Chances are, unless you lived during the earliest days of video games, it goes back a long way. Recently, a YouTube channel called “This Week in Gaming”, a channel devoted to digging up old archived video content, uploaded a news report from 1982 from CBS talking about how video game addiction could be a really big problem. The video can be watched on YouTube or in the embed below:

The video can be very eye opening – not necessarily for the fact that video game addiction is somehow a long warned about problem, but for the fact that this scaremongering has been around for a very long time.

One of the things that the report tries to push is the idea that it promotes being introverted. Having grown up in the 90s, I can say that this is something that has been pushed back in the day. The comment that video games will turn kids into unrelatable messes as other people their age will start to not understand them thanks to the “menace” of video games. In school, I remember one piece of school work involving a picture of a kid with a computer screen for a head being left out of a soccer game as the work warned that video games will make you isolated from society and that you should avoid video games at all costs because of it. The irony being that if the school felt that there were so many people getting into this to the point that they have to hand out assignments based on this theory, then how isolated are those kids if so many are playing those games in the first place?

Now, credit where credit is due, the 1982 report is nowhere near as bad as the moral panic in recent years. They had one guest say that video games are not like drugs where you would experience withdrawal symptoms by not using it. These days, media reports are more likely to refer to video games as similar to cocaine. Not an exaggeration, I might add.

What’s more, the media outlet actually bothered to ask the game manufacturers their side of the story (that doesn’t happen that often any more). The representative mentioned that it’s less addicting and more compelling and popular.

The report makes a pretty funny comment about how every generation has to have something to scare adults with and claims that video games are seemingly it for this generation.

The reality of the situation, even back then, is that the kids are simply having fun. You could tell that with how they respond to questions during interviews. Kids can have fun with traditional sports like swimming, floor hockey, or basketball. I doubt anyone is going to run around and proclaim that traditional sports are a menace to society because they are clearly highly addicting. People aren’t exactly going to say that people are addicted to sports because they keep going back to play more. Yet, they say the exact same thing about video games. Why? Because it just so happens to be a different (and newer) form of entertainment. Maybe it’s not so bad letting kids have fun?

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.