The Video Game Panic is Dead

At least 2024 brought us one good thing...

This weekend I attended a classical music performance held in a large church which featured music from popular video games.  These ranged from a medley of songs from early 80s games, though modern game theme music such as that from World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy, Halo, and Fortnite.  Though plenty of the folks there were young people, some of whom were gamers eager to see their game music put to song, a majority were older classical music fans.

The performance, by Central Florida Community Arts, apparently the largest orchestra in the US, was amazing.  In general, I tend to find modern movie/game theme music better than historical classical music.  But as I was enjoying it, I thought that this performance and others like it surely marked the end of the video game panic.

Okay, maybe I’m being optimistic.  Perhaps not quite sensing the shifting of the winds, the World Health Organization created a nonsense “gaming disorder” diagnosis in 2017, the chief outcome of which has been to create spurious lawsuits against games such as Fortnite…yep, the same Fortnite featured in a night of classical music enjoyed across generations.  Some legal firms are still soliciting clients for game “addiction” cases…yes, there’s actual big money in moral panics.  The WHO decision would be widely condemned among scholars, but they’ve got sunk costs now so we’re stuck with this dumb diagnosis.  None other than Prince Harry, who’s most adept at making himself ridiculous as anything else, came out against the dangers of Fortnite in 2019.

But watching people, old and young, celebrating the music of Fortnite reveals the unseriousness of it all.  After all, we don’t have community celebrations for The Music of Porn (a moral panic that will never die), or An Evening’s Celebration of Heroin.  Certainly not held in a church!  Our society can’t really believe Fortnite is a source of harm and evil for youth while simultaneously clapping to its theme song.

I’ll certainly be eager to see how these lawsuits turn out.  But, aside from this, the video game panic is done folks.  Once the blue hairs are on board with the media in question, that’s the end.  Heavy metal music was the scourge of society from the 70s through the early 90s, when Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne were still being sued for causing suicide.  Then, somewhere in the 90s it just…kinda stopped.  Mostly because the old people clutching pearls over “Against Christ/Devil’s Child” (AC/DC) had died, and also partly because societal panics had shifted to…video games.  Today musical icons like Ozzy or Judas Priest are hailed as classics.  No one thinks their music murders children anymore.

I think something similar is at play with video games…the old pearl clutchers are dying off and folks raised with video games…people my age…are starting to watch their hair turn blue.  We now buy newspapers, vote for bad politicians, and have money for grants (well, not me, but maybe you).  And we’re not interested in the evils of video games.  We want to hear how social media and AI are ruining the world.  Because humans never really learn.