This blog post is an expansion of some thoughts I wrote up for a journalist covering the invocation and position of video games in the horrific shooting in New Zealand. The journalist ultimately didn’t use them. So, here they are. I get contacted frequently about mass murders and acts of terrorism. There are good reasons for this. I’ve written and published on video game violence multiple times (see my article on the first video gaming moral panic; this article about killing monsters in video games; and I have a piece about Night Trap in this new anthology). There is also a reason that is both bad and unspoken: Reporters want a woman to say something about how this is all ok, even when that isn’t quite what I am saying. I do not want to issue a knee-jerk defense of video games. I love games. I study games. I’ve made a career of writing and teaching about games. But, those of us who love games should love them enough to take them seriously, which means interrogating what they mean and what they do.

I have studied game violence as both a historical and cultural topic, and I am deeply, profoundly ambivalent about what game violence means and does. Video games have been invoked in and blamed for acts of violence both real and potential since the mid 1970s. Does this mean games cause violence? Not in any obvious, direct way. However, video games and the surrounding culture can amplify and support violent ideologies like, in this case, Islamaphobia or in several incidents involving Pewdiepie, anti-Semitism. A lot of horrifying statements and acts get chalked up as play, which is something Sartre identified in the habits of antisemites in the period leading up to WWII; it is something we should treat as absolutely unacceptable. Playful or ironic white supremacy is just white supremacy with no need to qualify.

Fundamentally, the question of whether or not video games cause violence is either unanswerable (which video games? in what circumstances? among what population? violence by what definition?) or unhelpful. Video games as a medium are a massive, sprawling form, so it’s not especially helpful to make generalizations about what video games are or aren’t capable of. When people talk about video games in a context like this, they likely mean something relatively narrow. That said, we’ve had crimes inspired by video games, but we’ve also had crimes inspired by movies, and we don’t talk about how movies are causing a crime wave. The newest medium is the most scary–just ask the writers at Black Mirror.

The question shouldn’t be “Do video games cause violence” so much as “Do violent people feel welcome and comfortable in video game culture”? We see little credible evidence of the former, but there is so much horrifying evidence of the latter. Is the problem that a particular terrorist played video games or that he spent a lot of time in video game adjacent places that welcomed and supported his bigotry and violence? Perhaps what we should be seriously talking about is not video games so much as all the games-adjacent media and communities that treat violent ideologies as just more unmoderated and allegedly unmoderatable content. Video games are part of a cultural landscape, and any proposed “solution” to the supposed problem of violent video games that does not address that is just an effort to find a neat solution to a complex problem.

There are no neat solutions to what is happening. There is no easy answer to why a man murders dozens of people on the basis of their faith or sets fire to a mosque. However, every single one of us should think long and hard about what our actions and inactions contribute to an environment in which this is possible. Those of us who make games should think critically about what we make and why. We should feel accountable for what we make and think, long and hard, about what we want our legacies to be. Just because a game in and of itself doesn’t cause a mass shooting is not an adequate justification to continue as if nothing has happened. Something has happened. Something horrible. And we all need to reflect on what we can do within our respective domains to affect change.