tabloids have for years used the greatest public fear to shift copies – the fear that something might happen to your children. From rock ‘n’ roll as the devil’s music onward, there has always been some new scourge of all that is good and decent in society, some overreaction to the unknown.īut somewhere along the line, moral panics stopped being a reaction and started being a construction. Cohen defines a moral panic as something that poses a threat to societal values, popularized and transmitted by the mass media.
#BLOOD ON THE BOARD BY PANIC MODE MODS#
“Moral panic” was a term first coined by Stanley Cohen, a sociologist who wrote of social and media reaction to the violent clashes between Mods and Rockers in 1960s U.K. Comic books, rock ‘n’ roll, cable television, rap music and internet pornography have all suffered the same or worse, and the only lesson from each of these experiences appears to be that to live through a moral panic is to gain widespread acceptance.
This treatment is practically a right of passage for any new medium. Brutal, uncivilized, a threat to society, it has been made a figure of hate by moral guardians and bottom-line-obsessed editors the world over.īut gaming is not alone. Like every new form of media before it, gaming has been demonized, criticized and made out to be something it isn’t. With apologies to Gandhi: First they ignored gaming, then they laughed at gaming, then they fought gaming.
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