Panic at the Arcade? An Introduction to Five Essays on Gaming Trust & Safety

By: Samantha Bradshaw, Dean Jackson, Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat, Kate Ruane, and Dhanaraj Thakur.

In the early 80s, rumors spread that a mysterious new game called Polybius had appeared in arcades around Portland, Oregon. Said to be housed in a plain black cabinet, children were allegedly compelled to play Polybius until they fell ill and died. More frightening still, the machines were said to be occasionally visited by men in black who extracted information on the players. 

Polybius was, of course, an urban legend; no such game existed. The story combined a handful of real news stories with public fear about the moral and developmental impact of arcades on American youth. 

Moral panics like the one which led to the legend of Polybius are a consistent theme in gaming history. Around the same time, a moral panic over the roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons spread as parents and community leaders worried the game promoted Satanism, witchcraft, pornography and murder. On a segment of the popular American television show, 60 Minutes, Thomas Radecki, the President of the National Coalition on Television Violence, claimed the game had led to at least 28 murders and suicides in connection with the game. Like the Polybius conspiracy, there was no evidence to support this claim. 

As games moved from coin-operated machines or paper and dice to a new generation of home consoles and, eventually, personal computers and mobile devices, concerns about their impact on the wellbeing of children remained ever present. In the early 1990s, they even reached the Senate floor when Senator Joseph Lieberman brought national attention to concerns about violent content in popular console games like Mortal Kombat. Policymakers and the media were worried that exposure to violent content would make children more aggressive and less empathetic. By 2011, the tide shifted: research showed that many of these concerns were overstated, and the US Supreme Court ruled that video games are protected speech and that their sale to minors cannot be prohibited based on violent content. Nevertheless, similar concerns echo throughout contemporary debates as regulators grapple with how to govern online spaces.

This essay is the introduction to a series of papers exploring how the games industry approaches trust and safety — the emergent professional subfield specializing in the governance of online spaces. While more commonly associated with social media platforms, trust and safety can take important lessons from how online playgrounds approach questions of governance. As importantly, it can ground these lessons in evidence, not panic.

Read the full article on the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Website here: https://cdt.org/insights/panic-at-the-arcade-an-introduction-to-five-essays-on-gaming-trust-safety/