The ever-growing relationship between video games and other media, such as books, movies, and television, leaves no doubt that digital gaming has a permanent place in our culture. Like other media, games are a venue for advertising. A virtual billboard in a video game is usually more than just a digital prop; as in television and the movies, it’s a paid placement. And like other media, games are a subject of social concern. Violent and misogynistic content has from time to time spurred calls for more regulation of electronic games. But as games permeate more aspects of culture and become increasingly available in nonstandard formats and genres, they may also become harder to define and, therefore, regulate.

Electronic Gaming and Media Culture

Beyond the immediate industry, electronic games have had a pronounced effect on media culture. For example, fantasy league sports have spawned a number of draft specials on ESPN as well as a regular podcast, Fantasy Focus, on ESPN Radio. Fantasy football has even inspired an adult comedy called The League on the cable channel FXX. In the case of the Web site Twitch, streaming and archived video of digital games being played is the content. In just three years, the site became so popular that Amazon bought it for almost $1 billion to add to its collection of original video programming.

Like television shows, books, and comics before them, electronic games have inspired movies, such as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), the Resident Evil series (2001–present, including a sixth installment due in 2016), and Need for Speed (2014). Tron (1982), a movie inspired by video games, spurred an entire franchise of books, comic books, and arcade and console video games in the 1980s; and it was revived a generation later with an Xbox LIVE game in 2008, a movie sequel (Tron: Legacy) in 2010, and a Disney television series. For many Hollywood blockbusters today, a video game spin-off is a must-have item. Box-office hits like Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011), Brave (2012), The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), and Maleficent (2014) all have companion video games for consoles, portable players, or mobile devices.

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Books and electronic games have also had a long history of influencing each other. Japanese manga and anime (comic books and animation) have also inspired video games, such as Akira, Astro Boy, and Naruto. Batman: Arkham Asylum, a top video game title introduced in 2009, is based closely on the Batman comic-book stories, while The Witcher, an action role-playing game for PCs, is based on Polish fantasy writer Andrzej Sapkowski’s saga, The Witcher. Perhaps the most unusual link between books and electronic games is the Marvel vs. Capcom series. In this series, characters from Marvel comic books (Captain America, Hulk, Spider-Man, Wolverine) battle characters from Capcom games like Street Fighter and Resident Evil (Akuma, Chun-Li, Ryu, Albert Wesker).

Electronic Gaming and Advertising

Commercialism is as prevalent in video games as it is in most entertainment media. Advergames, like television’s infomercials or newspapers and magazines’ advertorials, are video games created for purely promotional purposes. The first notable advergame debuted in 1992, when Chester Cheetah, the official mascot for Cheetos snacks, starred in two video games for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo systems—Chester Cheetah: Too Cool to Fool and Chester Cheetah: Wild Wild Quest. In late 2006, Burger King sold three advergame titles for Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles for $3.99 each with value-meal purchases. One title, Sneak King, required the player to have the Burger King mascot deliver food to other characters before they fainted from hunger. More recent is the innovative interactive Web commercial “Magnum Pleasure Hunt,” for gourmet Magnum chocolate ice cream bars. In this platform game, the user manipulates the constantly jogging, barefoot “Magnum Girl” up and over the game’s Internet-based environments (such as Bing travel pages, YouTube videos, and luxury hotel Web sites). A player earns points by strategically timing Magnum Girl’s jumps so that she connects with—or consumes—the game’s many chocolate bonbons, and Magnum’s specialty chocolate bar is the final reward for Magnum Girl’s (and the player’s) hard work. In-game advertisements are more subtle; ads are integrated into the game as billboards, logos, or storefronts (e.g., a Farmers Insurance airship floating by in FarmVille or Dove soap spas appearing in The Sims Social), or advertised products appear as components of the game (e.g., in the game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, a large glowing billboard for Axe deodorant becomes an obstacle for the player to overcome).22

Some in-game advertisements are static, which means the ads are permanently placed in the game. Other in-game ads are dynamic, which means the ads are digitally networked and can be altered remotely, so agencies can tailor them according to release time, geographical location, or user preferences. A movie ad, for example, can have multiple configurations to reflect the movie’s release date and screening markets. Advertisers can also record data on users who come in contact with a dynamic ad, such as how long they look at it, from what angle, and how often, and can thus determine how to alter their ad campaigns in the future. The Xbox Kinect has taken dynamic advertising one step further with its newest consoles, enabling players to engage with the in-game ads using motion and voice control to learn more about a product.

Google’s game advertising strategy, launched in 2008, is to place increasing numbers of ads in well-known social game titles, like Frogger and Dance Dance Revolution—an indication of the tremendous potential growth in social gaming. All in-game advertising is estimated to generate $7.2 billion in global revenue in 2016.23

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Addiction and Other Concerns

Though many people view gaming as a simple leisure activity, the electronic gaming industry has sparked controversy. Parents, politicians, the medical establishment, and media scholars have expressed concern about the addictive quality of video games, especially MMORPGs, and have raised the alarm about violent and misogynistic game content—standard fare for many of the most heavily played games.

Addiction

No serious—and honest—gamer can deny the addictive qualities of electronic gaming. In fact, an infamous South Park episode from 2006 (“Make Love, Not Warcraft”) satirized the obsessive, addictive behavior of video game playing. In a 2011 study of more than three thousand third through eighth graders from Singapore, one in ten were considered pathological gamers, meaning that their gaming addiction was jeopardizing multiple areas of their lives, including school, social and family relations, and psychological well-being. Indeed, the more the children were addicted, the more prone they were to depression, social phobias, and increased anxiety, which led to poorer grades in school. Singapore’s high percentage of pathological youth gamers is in line with numbers reported in other countries, including the United States, where studies found 8.5 percent of gamers to be addicted. In China, the number is 10.3 percent, and in Germany, 11.9 percent.24

Gender is a factor in game addiction: A 2013 study found that males are much more susceptible to game addiction. This makes sense, given that the most popular games—action and shooter games—are heavily geared toward males.25 These findings are also not entirely surprising, given that many electronic games are addictive not by accident but by design. Just as habit formation is a primary goal of virtually every commercial form of electronic media, from newspapers to television to radio, cultivating compulsiveness is the aim of most game designs. From recognizing high scores to incorporating various difficulty settings (encouraging players to try easy, medium, and hard versions) and levels that gradually increase in complexity, designers provide constant in-game incentives for obsessive play.

This is especially true of multiplayer online games—like Halo, Call of Duty, and World of Warcraft—that make money from long-term engagement by selling expansion packs or charging monthly subscription fees. These games have elaborate achievement systems with hard-to-resist rewards that include military ranks like “General” or fanciful titles like “King Slayer,” as well as special armor, weapons, and mounts (creatures your avatar can ride, including bears, wolves, or even dragons), all aimed at turning casual players into habitual ones.

This strategy of promoting habit formation may not differ from the cultivation of other media obsessions, like watching televised sporting events. Even so, real-life stories, such as that of the South Korean couple whose three-month-old daughter died of malnutrition while the negligent parents spent ten-hour overnight sessions in an Internet café raising a virtual daughter, bring up serious questions about video games and addiction.26 South Korea, one of the world’s most Internet-connected countries, is already sponsoring efforts to battle Internet addiction, along with China, the Netherlands, and Australia.

Meanwhile, industry executives and others cite the positive impact of digital games, such as the mental stimulation and educational benefits of games like SimCity, the health benefits of Wii Fit, and the socially rewarding benefits of playing games together as a family or with friends.

Violence and Misogyny

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA)—the main trade association of the gaming industry—likes to point out that nearly half of game players are women, that nearly three-quarters of games sold are rated in the family- and teen-friendly categories, and that the average age of a game player is thirty. While these statements are true, they also mask a troubling aspect of some of game culture’s most popular games: their violent and sexist imagery.

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Most games involving combat, guns, and other weapons are intentionally violent, with representations of violence becoming all the more graphic as game visuals reach cinematic hyperrealism. The most violent video games, rated M for “Mature,” often belong to the first-person shooter, dark fantasy, or survival horror genres (or a combination of all three) and cast players in a variety of sinister roles—serial killers, mortal combat soldiers, chain-gun-wielding assassins, nut jobs going “postal,” father-hating sons, mutated guys out for revenge, not-quite-executed death-row inmates, and underworld criminals (to name a few)—in which they earn points by killing and maiming their foes (sometimes monsters but often “ordinary people”) through the most horrendous means possible. In this genre of games, violence is a celebration, as is clear from one Top 10 list featuring the most “delightfully violent video games of all time.”27

That some games can be violent and misogynistic is not a point of dispute. But the possible effects of such games have been debated for years, and video games have been accused of being a factor in violent episodes, such as the Columbine High School shootings in 1999. Earlier research linked playing violent video games to aggressive thoughts or hostility, but those effects don’t necessarily transfer to real-world environments. Instead, more recent studies suggest that the personality traits of certain types of players should be of greater concern than the violence of video games. For example, a study in the Review of General Psychology noted that individuals with a combination of “high neuroticism (e.g., easily upset, angry, depressed, emotional, etc.), low agreeableness (e.g., little concern for others, indifferent to others’ feelings, cold, etc.), and low conscientiousness (e.g., break rules, don’t keep promises, act without thinking, etc.)” are more susceptible to the negative outcomes measured in studies of violent video games.28 For the vast majority of players, the study concluded, violent video games have no adverse effects.

There is less research on misogyny (hatred of women) in video games. One of the most extreme game narratives is from Grand Theft Auto 3, in which male characters can pick up female prostitutes, pay money for sex, get an increase in player “health,” and then beat up or kill the hooker to get their money back. Although women are close to half of the digital game audience in the United States, it’s likely that many aren’t engaged by this story. The source of the problem may be the male insularity of the game development industry—for reasons that are unclear, few women are on the career path to be involved in game development. According to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, “Women hold 56% of all professional occupations in the U.S. workforce, but only 25% of IT occupations.” And even as the digital game industry gets bigger, the impact of women gets smaller. “In 2009, just 18% of undergraduate Computing and Information Sciences degrees were awarded to women; in 1985, women earned 37% of these degrees.”29 (See “Global Village: Global Controversy: The Gender Problem in Digital Games” on pages 96–97 for more on violence and misogyny in video games.)

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Regulating Gaming

For decades, concern about violence in video games has led to calls for regulation. Back in 1976, an arcade game called Death Race prompted the first public outcry over the violence of electronic gaming. The primitive graphics of the game depicted a blocky car running down stick-figure Gremlins that, if struck, turned into grave markers. Described as “sick and morbid” by the National Safety Council, Death Race inspired a 60 Minutes report on the potential psychological damage of playing video games. Over the next forty years, violent video games would prompt citizen groups and politicians to call for government regulation of electronic games’ content.

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In 1993, after the violence of Mortal Kombat and Night Trap attracted the attention of religious and educational organizations, Senator Joe Lieberman conducted a hearing that proposed federal regulation of the gaming industry. Following a pattern established in the movie and music industries, the gaming industry implemented a self-regulation system enforced by an industry panel. The industry founded the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) in 1994 to institute a labeling system designed to inform parents of sexual and violent content that might not be suitable for younger players. Publishers aren’t required to submit their games to the ESRB for a rating, but many retailers will only sell rated games, so gamemakers usually consent to the process. To get a rating, the game companies submit scripts that include any dialogue and music lyrics, and also fill out a questionnaire to describe the story and identify possibly offensive content.30 Currently the ESRB sorts games into six categories: EC (Early Childhood), E (Everyone), E 10+, T (Teens), M (17+), and AO (Adults Only 18+).

In the most recent effort to regulate video games, California passed a law in 2005 to fine stores $1,000 for selling video games rated M or AO to minors. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law in a 7–2 decision, setting a difficult precedent for the establishment of other laws regulating electronic games.

The Future of Gaming and Interactive Environments

Gaming technology of the future promises a more immersive and portable experience that will touch even more aspects of our lives. The Wii has been successful in harnessing more interactive technology to attract nongamers with its motion-controlled games. Nintendo’s latest Wii U system goes a step further—in one game, the controller serves as a shield to block virtual arrows shot by pirates on the TV screen. Microsoft’s motion-sensing Xbox Kinect has been a hit since its introduction in late 2010, and with Avatar Kinect, users can control their avatar’s motions as the Kinect senses even small physical gestures. In 2012, Sony released its SOEmote facial-tracking and voice-font software with its popular Everquest II game, enabling players to give their facial expressions and voices to their avatars. The anticipated release of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset could further deepen the immersive play of games.

Video games in the future will also continue to move beyond just entertainment. The term gamification describes how interactive game experiences are being embedded to bring competition and rewards to everyday activities.31 Games are already used in workforce training, for social causes, in classrooms, and as part of multimedia journalism. For example, to accompany a news report about texting while driving, the New York Times developed an interactive game, Gauging Your Distraction, to demonstrate the consequences of distractions (such as cell phones) on driving ability. All these developments continue to make games a larger part of our media experiences.