Missile Command’s infamous game over screen. (Note: there is some Pokémon-style flashing colors on this screen, so an epilepsy warning.
Shoot-em-down and kill people games
Passing references in Mind at Play remind us that gaming genres had not yet been codified. Donkey Kong is described as a “saving-people game” (and is unironically referred to as a King Kong game, something Universal’s lawyers would famously challenge.) Frogger, despite having no people in it, is also a “saving-people game.” Space Invaders and Galaxian are described as “shoot-’em-down” games, which, when you think about it, makes more sense than the term “shoot-‘em-up.”
(For another amusing look into early gaming genres, see Kate Willaert’s great article about the Arkies, the world’s first video game awards. Eccentric categories included “Best Pong Variant” and “Best Solitaire Game.” “Solitaire” in this context meaning “single player” and not the card game.)
The book was written before certain game history “truisms” developed. For instance, most modern readings of arcade classic Missile Command treat it as a warning of the horrors of nuclear war. The game notoriously ends not with a “Game Over” screen but with the much more ominous “The End” after your cities have all been destroyed.
But not everyone viewed Missile Command in this way. The book pointed me to a 1982 article by eminent psychologist Carl Rogers in the journal of the American Psychological Review (not exactly Nintendo Power). For Rogers, the very act of putting nuclear war into a video game means that “we are making nuclear war thinkable by treating it as though it were just a game.”
Rogers’ critique also hints at the still-contentious connection between video games and violence. Philip Zimbardo, who ran the notorious and now disgraced Stanford Prison Experiment, is quoted in the book as saying that video games may be so addictive that they promote violence among players.
The Loftuses take a measured approach, calling for more research on the effects of “kill people” games like Death Race. They point out that many other mediums have faced moral panics about violence.
For instance, movies have also been linked to violence. The Loftuses use an example of a murder outside my local suburban movie theater that followed a screening of the The Warriors. Researching this incident, I learned it wasn’t even the only murder outside this theater! (Although in the second case, the killing followed a screening of the notably less-violent The Lion King.)
Violence and warfare also feature in one of the most curious tangents in the book—the idea making the rounds that video game mastery may lead to a future of joystick-wielding super soldiers.
