A number of left-leaning gaming journalists and figures have criticized the gaming platform Steam for ending its policy of actively selecting which games it will offer. Instead, it will allow all games on its platform, so long as they are not “illegal” or constitute “trolling.”
Steam’s decision comes only a few weeks after they canceled their planned release of “Active Shooter,” a video game which simulates school shootings, on their platform after public outcry and a petition that garnered more than 200,000 signatures.
These two controversies illustrate the contentious collision of a variety of issues that are especially relevant to students: gun violence, campus security, and yes, video games.
Millennials grew up playing video games and witnessing coverage of school shootings on television. Now comes the moment of reckoning, where they are actually living through school shootings themselves, as well as calls to censor the violent content frequently depicted in video games. Moreover, since the Columbine school shooting in 1999, the public consciousness conceives of school shooters as mostly young, male gamers.
Now, the left-wing response to Steam’s free-market approach to gaming exposes their contradictory take on video games in two different situations: expressions of “bigotry” in the gaming community and school shootings.
Whenever a school shooting occurs, both sides inevitably take up competing arguments: Some will point to the lack of mental health considerations as the primary cause, others to lack of gun control measures, and some video games.
Traditionally, conservatives have favored the latter argument, claiming (especially in the wake of Columbine) that the prominence of violence in video games — particularly first-person shooters — has desensitized young people to violence and perhaps even inspired them to commit school shootings.
The Left, of course, often dismisses this explanation, diminishing the social impact of video games and emphasizing the importance of making sure guns don’t fall into the wrong hands — or any hands, for that matter.
But this runs counter to the liberal rationale for censoring or otherwise restricting the content available for consumption on the video game market. The underlying argument for policing so-called “misogyny,” “toxic masculinity,” and “far-right extremism” in video games is that by allowing such content to be made available, these ideas will become normalized among gamers — a generally younger section of the population, including many Gen Zers and millennials.
The perceived abundance of bigotry in the gaming community is what sparked the so-called “Gamergate” controversy of 2014, where female video game developers and journalists who promoted left-wing ideology accused gamers of harassing them. As the liberal response to Steam has revealed, the controversy is still alive and well.
Ultimately, this recent development in the gaming world shows that the Left wants to have its cake and eat it too. They want to downplay the social effect of video games when it comes to school shootings so they can push gun control. But, they also want to oversell the social effect of video games when it comes to normalizing various kinds of bigotry. To sum up their confused position: Video games aren’t a problem — until they are.
Perhaps liberals should compare their positions on these two contentious topics and make consistent arguments about video games, rather than choosing the argument which is most convenient under the circumstances and best serves their political agenda.
Advocates of any kind of censorship — even in the video game market — should be held to this basic standard of logical consistency.
