Does Gaming Perpetuate Antisocial Behaviour? [Column]

Hey guys - sorry I haven't managed to get a post up since my last column. Life's been really hectic what with my long weekend being taken up by Debating Provincials and what not. But! I hope to have my post on my overall vision for this blog up by the end of this weekend. Heaven help us all.... anyways! Here's my next column, due to go live tomorrow, part of my mini-series on dealing with attacks on gaming. Hope you guys enjoy, please do comment with feedback and opinions!

Column starts here


Now that I have been graced with the honour of my very own soap box to shout nonsense from for a little while now, I would like to keep this theme of dealing with attacks on gaming by taking a swipe at one criticism of gaming advocated by the parental advisory committees and menopausal female columnists I mentioned in my previous column which irks me in particular – that is, the attack on gaming for its alleged antisocial nature.

You probably noticed how I prefixed my topic rather pompously with the word ‘alleged’. This is for the simple reason that I find most of the attacks in this regard to be so weak that I shudder at even the thought of affording them the status of a legitimate attack… ultimately, I just don’t think that they hold water. Or any other liquid for that matter, regardless of viscosity. The amount of rebuttal on this issue is enormous, and I’m not going to go into much detail concerning most of it, as I’m sure the majority of it is as much a knee-jerk reaction for you as for me. As gamers seeking to defend our beloved past time, we simply need to point to the hugely social focus of events like LANs, the communities of friends which we develop by playing games (specifically multiplayer games) and so on and so forth to debunk these rather emotionally founded attacks. I personally have made and maintained a number of solid friendships which I would never have had the opportunity to be in were it not for our shared hobby (of gaming, that is). In fact, now that I think about it, I am really unable to think of someone I know who is antisocial because of games – if anything, the opposite is true because of the influence games have in their lives. Granted, I may not know them because of their antisocial behavior, but in this case I’m talking largely about people I know from school. If you disagree or know to the contrary, please do comment, as gathering some casual data on this especially would be something I would find quite interesting.

Let us take this a step further, however, and make some slightly more in depth analysis on the matter.

Now, some counter-rebuttal to what I have proposed would be to say that while the majority of gamers may not be subject to the perpetuation of antisociality (we can just pretend like that is actually a word) as a result of gaming, there are still those who do. To that ends, we would probably be painted a picture of the stereotypical antisocial gamer – alone in their room with discarded pizza boxes forming a makeshift barricade around their swivel chair and nought to illuminate their cave but the dim glow of the computer screen shining upon this poor nerd’s pale face. This scene certainly does present us with a problem, a problem which most would feel something should certainly be done about –however, to paint video games as the cause of this problem would be a classic example of a causation-correlation fallacy… Or, in the English that most normal people speak, video games would be blamed for a problem which they are not, in fact the root cause of. Now, let’s set about exploring that. Imagine, for a moment, a world where video games do not exist (heaven forbid!). The assumption made by many of gaming’s critics in this regard is that without video games to perpetuate antisocial behavior, the child or individual concerned would instead have grown up to be a regular hipster about town.

In the interests of logic and reason, I cry nay! The problem with this argument is that it assumes an alternate outcome under a certain set of preconditions – the problem is that were these preconditions to be met, that outcome would not be achieved. If video games had never entered their lives, these people would have remained just as socially awkward (if not more so) as if they had grown up with video games.

Why?

Because people do not go so far down that road without something else being wrong in the first place. The difference in this situation would be that they would have grown up without video games as a mechanism to help them escape the reality of being part of a peer group to which you do not truly belong, and having to suffer through the torment which often accompanies such a situation. In fact, even in this most extreme case, video games are still incur benefits and not harms, as they give this woefully socially inadequate person something to be good at. This in turn spawns benefits in the form of things like self-belief and self-confidence, which make one more likely to be successful at social interaction anyway. Ironically, these people would be even more confident in themselves if video gaming’s critics were less vocal than they were in undermining video gaming as a hobby, because they would not only see themselves as good at something, but something which matters to a far fairer extent. But I digress.

More than that, however, I would go so far as to say that gaming actually creates social benefits in that it makes people who, without video games, would probably just hole up in their man-caves all day (like the one described above) and read, or plot their gun-toting revenge on society, or whatever, more likely to be socially active.

Why?

Because it creates a middle-ground on which people can interact and form friendships. Socially awkward person A and socially awkward person B, with video games, are now able to form a friendship because of a shared passion, where previously one did not and would not have existed.

So, what we’ve seen so far is that in cases such as woefully socially inadequate WoW-addicts, video games are first of all not to blame and, second of all, actually create a mechanism through which they are able to restore some semblance of their self-belief and deal with the issues facing them. Which beats the living fecal matter out of just lying around being depressed. Not only that, but video games actually benefit people who would otherwise have been marginalized by their peer groups in that they create a middle-ground on which they are able to use their shared interests to make friends, which perpetuates social activity.

So, even in the most extreme and passionately touted cases argued against video games, the arguments don’t stand.

What I’d also say is that I’m actually being far too nice here, in that I’m giving these arguments a chance at all. The reality of the situation is that they are straight up, plain and fundamentally incorrect. While antisocial stereotypes may exist around games and those who play them, that doesn’t mean they’re right, or that we should entertain them. Gamers aren’t some backwardly developed, alternate species or something. They’re people. They have friends, they enjoy social interaction. The only difference between them and jocks is that instead of discussing rugby they discuss Call of Duty.

In reality gaming is a catalyst for social behavior. Groups of friends use it to pass the time, have a laugh while doing so and make more friends. Those who take gaming more seriously than others still develop groups of friends with whom they play and practice. To use myself as a pretty hardcore StarCraft 2 player for an example, I stay at home on Friday nights instead of going to movies, because I don’t enjoy crowds and I find that sort of social interaction fickle and tedious. Instead, I play StarCraft with my four or five odd friends who play as well, and I can honestly say that it is because of StarCraft that they rank among the closest friends I have.

In short, to say that in the majority of cases gaming perpetuates antisocial behavior is just retarded.

I’ll stop my ranting there, before it gets too ragetastic.

At the end of the day, both the gamers and the anti-gaming activists want the same thing – to help that poor kid in the basement. We simply see our games as a means to an end, or a coping mechanism, while they see our games as the cause of the issue – which, as I have already mentioned, is not the case.

In conclusion, I would in fact say that gaming has given many, many people who were not that great at sports, or socially inadequate, or whatever the case may be the opportunity to form friendships and social relationships on the middle ground which it creates. The unfortunate reality is that too many people will only how great an asset video games can be in bridging social divides once gaming becomes more generally socially accepted than it is now, by older generations as well as younger.


Column ends here

Hope you enjoyed it, commentary/criticism is always welcome!

Duncan
Out