Games and Violence: A Stereotype that refuses to go away

Trying to understand French President Emanuel Macron’s comments on video games.

Hyderabad: The last four days have witnessed protests and clashes of unprecedented levels in France due to the fatal shooting of a 17-year-old boy of Algerian descent by the police in the Nanterre suburbs of Paris. This incident has sparked widespread protests across the country, with the nature of the shooting reminiscent of the George Floyd killing in 2020. Consequently, the public’s dissent of the shooting has spread across the nation’s various cities.

In response to the ongoing protests, the country’s president Emanuel Macron has blamed the public’s uproar on video games and social media platforms like Snapchat and TikTok. Regarding video games Macron’s statement reads – “we sometimes have the feeling that some of them are living out, in the streets, the video games that have intoxicated them.”

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The statement from Macron is not entirely unique, as the connection between people’s violent acts and their engagement with video games is an enduring stereotype. However, it is surprising because just last year, he was praising France as a country for video games and recognizing gaming practices as a key part of the country’s soft power.

This week, however, he joins a list of politicians, including American Senator Ted Cruz, in suggesting that video games are responsible for acts like mass shootings and violent protests.

A comment like this from Macron is also surprising considering it undermines the history of riots and protests in France with racial dimensions that go as far back as 1979 and the country and EU’s ongoing cost of living crisis. It also positions a country like France with a rich philosophical and media understanding in the same boat as a country like the USA where gun lobbies like the NRA often fight to protect the right to own firearms but also find innovative new ways to blame the media for violence in society.

Moreover, at a time when most countries around the world are grappling with challenges in rolling out initiatives that promote digital media literacy among their youth, a generalized comment like this undoes years of understanding the role media plays in society.

The loss of nuance and the delinking of the contextual and circumstantial indicates that video games are the go-to scapegoat of choice when governments fail to contain civil unrest amongst their people.

Closer to home we have seen mainstream news channels talk of practices like “gaming jihad” without considering either the intelligence of the players (the supposed victims) or their agency while at the same time blaming gaming practices for a variety of other social problems that the nation’s youth face today.

Thus, we are left with several unanswered questions and one clear answer: How do we change the conversations around these concerns? How do we acknowledge that by passing the buck to video games or other leisure practices we are only demonizing media that represent the societies we live in? And how do we make room for more nuanced conversation where we can hold political systems accountable and critically examine the role of Macron and the 40,000 police officers deployed to contain the anger from a fatal shooting? Unless the police officer that fired the dreadful shot was trained to use the firearm in a video game, I don’t think the medium can be held responsible.