“Pac-Man is likened to a predator of children.”
January 28, 2019 6:43 AM   Subscribe

Mall Rats, Vidiots and Addicts: Anti Video Game Propaganda From The 80s by Cat DeSpira [Retro Bitch] “...despite the then negative perceptions of a new technology, 80s anti-video game graphics on video game related articles left an interesting impression of an era when parents were paranoid, even terrified, of not what they knew but only what they thought video games were doing to their children. These neurotic and often mean-spirited images give indication of just how widespread the fear was, and also why conservative coalitions were formed to ban or restrict the use of video games in arcades beginning in 1981.”
posted by Fizz (56 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
These are kinda a hoot. And some are beautiful. It's nice to remember that breathless media fear-mongering isn't a recent evil.
posted by es_de_bah at 6:51 AM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]


There are more in the actual blog post, but I pulled a fair number just to give everyone a bit of a preview. It's worth clicking through. They are both beautiful and depressing.
posted by Fizz at 6:53 AM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]


Gen Xer. My parents didn't let me go to arcades because of the 'people who hang out there', which they probably saw on the news or something as they never set foot in any.
I, of course, went anyway. It was my little rebellion in my pre-teen and teen years, maybe that's why I never felt the need to get into drugs or alcohol in a big way.
posted by signal at 6:55 AM on January 28, 2019 [7 favorites]


The hectoring may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy. The danger in video games wasn’t in the machines; it was in the deep sense of injury and rejection nursed by boys who were pressured about this hobby and decided to retrench and make that their identity. Would gamer culture today be quite so poisonous if video games had been accepted by everyone as a normal part of a healthy life? I don’t know.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:58 AM on January 28, 2019 [10 favorites]


That's letting every other male-dominated subculture off the hook.
posted by Space Coyote at 7:00 AM on January 28, 2019 [19 favorites]


Gen Xer. My parents didn't let me go to arcades because of the 'people who hang out there',

I'm Gen X but the tail end and it's interesting, looking back, my folks didn't view video-games/the arcade as evil, they viewed it as a financial black hole where money disappears into, and that is what kept me out of the arcade.

Towards the mid-90s my parents (the anti-video game fears reared its ugly head again at this time) did raise a few eyebrows when I asked for money to buy Quake and DOOM, but after some discussion about how the violence was cartoonish, they relented and allowed me to make that purchase.
posted by Fizz at 7:00 AM on January 28, 2019 [6 favorites]


Would gamer culture be so poisonous if it had been positioned as something for boys and girls both? I guess I'd say that gamer ressentiment isn't really about feeling rejected because of the rejection of video games; it's about finding video games as a site which provides a narrative that "legitimates" your childish grievances. If video games had been effectively marketed to girls and boys both, the games wouldn't be such a great proxy for "I"m doing very nicely but actually I'm the biggest victim of all" because anything feminized just can't carry that cultural message, plus gamer types would run a mile.
posted by Frowner at 7:03 AM on January 28, 2019 [8 favorites]


I notice that women and girls are also depicted as under the spell of video games in the cartoons. Which we were! It was a fairly equal obsession, IIRC, until middle school hit and all the girls had to be extremely Mature all of a sudden. Some days I was like that, too, but every day after school I had to have my Tetris.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:11 AM on January 28, 2019 [9 favorites]


Is it still the same kind of religious/conservative groups that drive today's anti-gaming fears? Because this is my memory of gaming fear from back in the day, that it was coming primarily from religious organizations who vilified gaming because of its association with violence.
posted by Fizz at 7:16 AM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]


Another Gen Xer here who wasn't allowed to go to the arcade in my hometown because it was full of older kids who smoked and whatnot. My parents were hardly anti-video games in general, though, as they bought us an Atari 2600 and also played it themselves (they really loved Kaboom! in particular, and I remember them playing it when they had friends over).

> my folks didn't view video-games/the arcade as evil, they viewed it as a financial black hole where money disappears into, and that is what kept me out of the arcade.

I also remember the Great Video Game Panic of the early '80s being as much about wasting one's money than anything else, and it did occur to me at the time that as much as I loved many arcade games, they were hard, and a couple of bucks I could be spending on, say, hockey cards, didn't last long at all if I poured it into Robotron or (god help me) Defender.
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:26 AM on January 28, 2019 [5 favorites]


I notice that women and girls are also depicted as under the spell of video games in the cartoons.

Video games were positioned as being for the whole family pre-Crash - there's an amusing Atari ad with a harried father buying a 2600 for his...insistent daughter. As for post-Crash, the orienting towards boys was due to the backdoor in the toy market Nintendo used to get into stores.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:58 AM on January 28, 2019 [8 favorites]


Old person. Loved playing analog pinball games (they were banned in NY). However, the most perceived danger back then was Rock 'n' Roll.
posted by Obscure Reference at 8:01 AM on January 28, 2019 [3 favorites]


Loved playing analog pinball games (they were banned in NY)

This boggles my mind. I mean wow. I've never heard of that being a thing.
posted by Fizz at 8:02 AM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]




From Wikipedia:
"Pinball was banned beginning in the early 1940s until 1976 in New York City. New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia was responsible for the ban, believing that it robbed school children of their hard earned nickels and dimes. La Guardia spearheaded major raids throughout the city, collecting thousands of machines. The mayor participated with police in destroying machines with sledgehammers before dumping the remnants into the city's rivers."
posted by Strange Interlude at 8:09 AM on January 28, 2019 [12 favorites]


There’s a really good 99PI about the legalization of pinball in nyc. I’m fairly certain there are other parts of the country where this is still true, but it’s likely not enforced. I think Chicago and LA both had rarely enforced bans that ended because of court cases in the late 70s? The precursors did pinball machines were games of chance, sonit kind of sort of made sense at the time?
posted by furnace.heart at 8:10 AM on January 28, 2019 [3 favorites]


PLAYLAND in Times Square was certainly a hive of scum and villany when I went there in the early 1990s. Every kind of vice was promoted there. And also there was Street Fighter II.
posted by 1adam12 at 8:12 AM on January 28, 2019 [4 favorites]


Remember the trope (now appearing in "Stranger Things") that a bad-ass arcade game high scorer would be revealed to be a . . . girl? And this was shorthand for being tough & capable? I think the marketing of games as "boy things" started early, maybe because of Reagan-fueled conservative social values and the gendering of violence, action, and skill as masculine.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 8:14 AM on January 28, 2019 [5 favorites]


Robotron or (god help me) Defender.

The two greatest games ever!!
posted by bwvol at 8:18 AM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


I never liked video games as a kid in the 80s but I thought it was a hoot that the people who thought donkey Kong and twisted sister would drive us to satanism were the same who thought global nuclear annihilation was a reasonable gamble if it meant we could own the reds. What a weird time that was.
posted by klanawa at 8:21 AM on January 28, 2019 [12 favorites]


Yeah, pinball was seen as subversive and vaguely criminal prior to the 80s. Partly because people who didn't play pinball thought it was a game of chance – i.e., gambling.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 8:22 AM on January 28, 2019


I think the marketing of games as "boy things" started early, maybe because of Reagan-fueled conservative social values and the gendering of violence, action, and skill as masculine.

The gendering of video games was in large part due to the 83-84 Crash and how the industry picked itself up from that. After the video game market collapsed and retailers took a bath in the process, nobody wanted anything to do with games in retail. To get their foot in the door, Nintendo wound up marketing their console as a toy, after the more entertainment electronics oriented AES design failed out at CES. The problem there is that toy sales have always been heavily gendered, and as such, they had to "pick a side", so to speak - and they went with boys.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:33 AM on January 28, 2019 [4 favorites]


I’m struck by how closely the conservative scaremongering arguments and the (in my view) legitimate, progressive public health concerns tracked on to each other during this era. It’s not easy to voice doubts about something kids really like without being branded a scold or anti-fun. I know very little about video game history, and i’d love to know who if anyone was working within the industry at this time to address issues like gender stereotypes, violence and video game “addiction” (I use scare quotes, but I strongly recall experiencing what I can only call Super Mario Withdrawal one summer in 1986). Now that games are on tablets in the homes of small children, I assume that some Fred Rogers-type figures are emerging but I have no idea who they are.
posted by ducky l'orange at 8:52 AM on January 28, 2019


I have a strong memory of reading a bizarre book in the early 80s that focused on the anti-arcade movement, it was your standard "Footloose" teens v. parents/preachers kind of plot, but it had a sex scene in the middle that was rendered with text made to look like it was appearing on a video screen. INSERT HERE, etc.
posted by Daily Alice at 9:05 AM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


Atari Age: The Emergence of Video Games in America by Michael Z. Newman
This is a great book and has a lot of examples of this, as well as covering the genderization of video games, with plenty of media examples.
posted by zabuni at 9:11 AM on January 28, 2019 [3 favorites]


Look, say what you want, but Missile Command taught us the futility nuclear war and kept the world safe for a generation.
posted by SPrintF at 9:33 AM on January 28, 2019 [10 favorites]


Robotron or (god help me) Defender.

The two greatest games ever!!


They're both great, but in my case a game of Defender was not a long-lasting experience.
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:37 AM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]


A pool table, donchaunnerstand?
posted by tspae at 9:49 AM on January 28, 2019 [3 favorites]


Would gamer culture today be quite so poisonous if video games had been accepted by everyone as a normal part of a healthy life?

The gamer culture of today really isn't dominated by young people who went through some kind of video-game-shaming trauma. I remember the phenomenon described here vividly, but I am practically middle-aged. The modern-day asshole gamer comes precisely from the era in which gaming became much more prevalent and widely-accepted.
posted by praemunire at 9:51 AM on January 28, 2019 [9 favorites]


There were like two video games at the "general store" of the slightly rundown Canadian campground where a member of my family's church had a cheap trailer spot which she would share with a rotating cast of church kids over the summer. I still remember those Canadian hick boys (I was no more than ten so they seemed gigantic) playing Galaga while listening to, like, "Tall Cool One" on the jukebox and smoking, possibly even drinking, illicitly. Hive of scum and villainy, indeed!

(I think the other game was Sinistar, but holy cow that game was hard.)
posted by praemunire at 9:54 AM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


because of the 'people who hang out there'
A pool table...

Generally, they had the same sort of down-trodden look and atmosphere as a "pool-hall", congregations of the "wrong-types" of people - generally low-rent outfits. At least that's the stereotypical image I recall from my youth.

It was only when "Playdium/SilverCity" places began opening here in Canada was when they really became respectable and "ok" places to let your kids hang-out, or go there yourself - or even with your co-workers for corporate functions.
posted by jkaczor at 9:56 AM on January 28, 2019


... But, I personally don't remember an overall media anti-arcade push... OTOH, the "Statanic Panic" for role-playing games was far far bigger, IIRC...

After all, society was easily able to stereotype arcades into the common experience/thinking ("pool halls", "bars") - but they had no frame of reference for games where you didn't even have a board to play on - just sitting around a table telling stories, even kids playing make believe would run around outside, right?

Hence that horrible 80's made-for-TV movie with Tom Hanks - Mazes & Monsters... It was sooo laughable, how does one run around carrying a metric shit-ton of rulebooks and paper? Sure, eventually there was LARP - but in the early 80's, that was not all that common outside of conventions or SCA events.
posted by jkaczor at 10:03 AM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]


There were like two video games at the "general store" of the slightly rundown Canadian campground where a member of my family's church had a cheap trailer spot which she would share with a rotating cast of church kids over the summer.

It didn't happen to be Stayner, Ontario did it? Because that'd be a funny coincidence.
posted by Ashwagandha at 10:13 AM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


hey were hard, and a couple of bucks I could be spending on

Yeah, I sucked - I learned very quickly that if I played, it would just be pumping an endless stream of quarters in - so, I mostly watched my friends play, cheering for them. Same thing today when I first aquire a console game, IF I can get over the button mashing learning curve, then I can have some fun - but sometimes that takes soooo long (I am looking at you PS4 Spider-man)...
posted by jkaczor at 10:16 AM on January 28, 2019


For me, it was sneaking out of my high school (I wasn't signed up to go home for lunch because I lived an hour from school) and go play Xevious or Time Pilot with a friend where he'd pilot the ships and I'd fire, and keep playing until we had about 15 seconds to sprint the 5 blocks back to school before the bell rang.
posted by signal at 10:37 AM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


The gamer culture of today really isn't dominated by young people who went through some kind of video-game-shaming trauma. I remember the phenomenon described here vividly, but I am practically middle-aged. The modern-day asshole gamer comes precisely from the era in which gaming became much more prevalent and widely-accepted.

There's kind of a mythology of persecution that's persisted. It's built out of 80s-movie nerds-vs-jocks stereotypes, designated villains like Jack Thompson, and the RPG Satanic Panic. Cases like the Night Trap hearings, Thompson's GTA suits, or the attempts to blame school shootings on games were ridiculous, but their impact was exaggerated over time as a way to justify aggression and bad behavior as self-defense. And as you say, a lot of these jerks didn't even live through most of this stuff. A woman posts videos about stereotypes in games? "She wants to censor video games, exactly like Jack Thompson!" A YouTuber gets dropped by his content network because he used a racial slur? "They're attacking our culture!"
posted by skymt at 10:51 AM on January 28, 2019 [3 favorites]


It didn't happen to be Stayner, Ontario did it? Because that'd be a funny coincidence.

No, but it was Ontario!
posted by praemunire at 10:56 AM on January 28, 2019


There's kind of a mythology of persecution that's persisted. It's built out of 80s-movie nerds-vs-jocks stereotypes, designated villains like Jack Thompson, and the RPG Satanic Panic. Cases like the Night Trap hearings, Thompson's GTA suits, or the attempts to blame school shootings on games were ridiculous, but their impact was exaggerated over time as a way to justify aggression and bad behavior as self-defense. And as you say, a lot of these jerks didn't even live through most of this stuff. A woman posts videos about stereotypes in games? "She wants to censor video games, exactly like Jack Thompson!" A YouTuber gets dropped by his content network because he used a racial slur? "They're attacking our culture!"

This was something that got brought up at the end of the original Game Overthinker run - you have an era where gamers defined themselves culturally in part by pushing back against their critics, and that successful pushback became part of the cultural identity, but it was mythologized instead of being properly contexualized. The result was that when a new generation faced their own critics, they took up the arms of their forebears, not understanding the difference between the previous generation of critics and tne new ones. (There's also the reality that criticism of misogyny in games has always been part of the critical assessment, so the priming to attack that type of criticism has been there from the start as well.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:07 AM on January 28, 2019 [5 favorites]


… Ponce De Leon, constantly on
The fountain of youth, not Robotron


--The Beastie Boys
posted by chavenet at 11:26 AM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]


But could any of these milquetoast pipsqueaks ever take on The Bishop of Battle?

Emilio Estevez could, thanks to the power of the WalkMan™!
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 12:29 PM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


I often wonder if the marketing to boys was made necessary by this kind of moral panic. Were these parents less protective of their sons than their daughters, and more willing to let the young lads test their mettle against these temptations?
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 12:31 PM on January 28, 2019 [3 favorites]


A lot of this moral panic was at the same time as that around "latchkey kids" (does anyone even use that term anymore?), D&D and the EEEVILS of watching too much teevee. It sold copy and people made money doing the talk circuit. Earlier generations freaked out about how comic books were destroying kids, then rock 'n roll. Now-a-days it is cellphones, social media, and youtube (although from personal parenting experience if I could block youtube from my house forever I would, geeze are those videos of teens yelling about games or whatever annoying to listen to).
posted by fimbulvetr at 12:54 PM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


That "bleep" one seems prescient now that I've said LOL aloud.
posted by srboisvert at 2:24 PM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


I often wonder if the marketing to boys was made necessary by this kind of moral panic. Were these parents less protective of their sons than their daughters, and more willing to let the young lads test their mettle against these temptations?

Well, I think there was a certain amount of framing around aggression/adventure/violence as "natural" for boys to want to experience. A lot of video games were pro-military, or depicted "cool" aspects of the Military Industrial Complex, like flying jets, shooting missiles, etc. There were movies like "The Last Starfighter" that showed video games simulating space combat as a training/recruiting tool for actual space combat.

I was just a kid at the time, but as I recall, the moral panic over violent video games focused more on the games in which players simulate what are basically street brawls and depict urban environments as criminal free-for-alls.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 2:36 PM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]




This reminds me of that point in my late adolescence when I felt everything was taking a wrong turn.

For some people in the US, losing the Vietnam war wasn't much different than having their private parts blown off. They never came to terms with the embarrassment. In stead, they found pride in stupid contrarianism, re-inventing history with Rambo and turning to sympathetic religions for status and easy ideas they promise.

Religious talk shows purchased all the time slots that had previously been devoted to late night movie programming. Then they started running all night, on their own channels.

Supposedly, viewers were contributing enough in tiny, personal donations to fund this malignancy. The religious networks got better and better at driving the political agenda with bullshit panic stories. They were FOX News for quite a while before FOX news came on.
posted by bonobothegreat at 2:50 PM on January 28, 2019 [5 favorites]


All of the USAF NCO clubs from 1979 on had Asteroids, and Tron became de rigueur when it appeared. WWII AFSCS were being phased out, and they wanted volunteers for air traffic controllers jobs, like we didn't drink enough already. I stuck to pinball.
posted by halfbuckaroo at 3:04 PM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]


PLAYLAND in Times Square was certainly a hive of scum and villany when I went there in the early 1990s. Every kind of vice was promoted there. And also there was Street Fighter II.

I can confirm the hive of scum and villainry in the mid 80's. And every other vice was promoted next-door.
posted by mikelieman at 3:10 PM on January 28, 2019


Between 1980 and 1984, Navy, Army and Marine recruiters, much like the pedos who also combed the place, trolled arcades looking for young male recruits who were mastering technically difficult games like, Stargate, Defender, Phoenix and Robotron -games that showcased players who had exceptional linear spatial skills and targeting prowess.

Greetings, Starfighter! You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-dan Armada.
posted by Chrysostom at 4:50 PM on January 28, 2019 [6 favorites]


The article was enlightening. Never knew exactly what big city folk of the age were thinking. Came from a small town with only the 4 channels of TV and one paper, always 4 or 5 years behind the times. Maybe it was just me, the '80s was the 6th grade on, I'd have to check release dates to figure out which arcade games I played when and where before the mall got an actual arcade (named "Gold Mine" go figure). We were still more in the Red Dawn mindset and an area of guns and hunters and resisters so the violence bit just wasn't there.

One of my favorite half-remembered quotes from the early '90s was from the first gulf war and along the lines of "they were not prepared for 18yr old Americans in tanks listening to Metallica drinking a Coke and playing Battlezone". Of course I'd make a good fighter pilot, I ruled that Star Wars X-Wing game.
posted by zengargoyle at 4:58 PM on January 28, 2019


> The problem there is that toy sales have always been heavily gendered, and as such, they had to "pick a side", so to speak - and they went with boys.

I don't know if I totally buy that? Look at this set of toy commercials from about that era, all showing mixed gender groups of kids playing together: https://youtu.be/RMVt2kUPioU
posted by smelendez at 5:18 PM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


Eh, those are board games, which tend to be their own thing (and their own section in stores), especially if they're targeting young kids or families. And even then, you can find gendered examples (look up the Crossfire ad sometime.)

Get into toy lines proper, and the gender lines become very clear.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:32 PM on January 28, 2019


Thinking about it more, pre-Crash, video games most likely occupied the same space as board games. Again the post-Crash alignment had a lot to do with Nintendo using toys as a back door into retailers.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:34 PM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]


Would gamer culture today be quite so poisonous if video games had been accepted by everyone as a normal part of a healthy life?

It has been for decades now though and it hasn't stopped the poison.
posted by MartinWisse at 4:34 AM on January 29, 2019 [2 favorites]


A salient feature of the 80s satanic panic/moral culture crusade was that both liberals and conservatives popped their monocles over the same things: video games, rap music, heavy metal, & horror films. Conservatives focused on the modernity of these things, and the extent to which they reflected the ugly consequences of social changes often created by conservative policy (white flight, dual-income-earner families, decline of public education & public spaces, the psychic costs of militarism). I remember Emperor Bush I's quip about how the country needed more "Waltons" and fewer "Simpsons" as pretty indicative of the conservative desire for culture to present a whitewashed image of the past instead of the sardonic essence of the present.

On the liberal side, the focus was placed on the risk that these types of media would damage or traumatize youths. For example, the PMRC didn't just oppose things for being Satanic, they also warned parents about misogynistic content, portrayal of drug & alcohol abuse, and violence. Their fear was that by hearing messages glorifying these practices, kids would be led into harmful behaviors they wouldn't have done otherwise. (Never mind that the overarching culture still carried all these messages and worse.) I still know people who have a grudge over that. The modern gamer's sense of persecution comes from reacting to this strain of thought, even though, as Nox Aeternum noted, they're reacting to a force that's largely no longer present.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 7:41 AM on January 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


the similarity of many of those images to those produced by lot certain artists today trying to make “deep” statements/political commentary about smartphone/social media-addiction is pretty striking
posted by LeviQayin at 5:40 PM on January 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


« Older The 8th Annual Young Comedians Show hosted by John...   |   no escape from reality Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments