Why we always blame video games

There’s been a moral panic around video games basically since they first debuted. From too much sex to causing laziness and violence, just about the only thing society and the media have taken seriously about video games since their advent is that they are somehow seriously harmful. Chris Plante joins us today to talk about what causes people (aka parents) to freak out about video games’ influence, and how they actually impact us, both in good and bad ways. Our guest Chris Plante is the co-founder of Polygon and current host of the Post Games podcast — all about how and why we love video games — which you can subscribe to here or wherever you listen to pods. Want to hear Ryan and Chris’s extended conversation? Plus ad-free audio & video episodes, more bonuses and extended episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for our Patreon at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Show notes: The secret plan to outlaw porn in the US Your conspiracy families And if you want to see this conversation on video, ⁠Panic World is now posting episodes to YouTube! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:26Speaker 01

  Just letting you know before we start today's episode, if you're like, "Damn, I wish this episode was a little bit longer," you can go to patreon.com/panicworld and there's some extra minutes of us talking and a bunch of other stuff that exists on our Patreon that you probably know about. And if you're like, "I love their show so much, I wish I could show people how much I love this show but not have to talk to them." Store.couriernewsroom.com, buy the shirt, bring us a little bit closer to that hoodie number. The bosses won't tell me how many more we need to sell. They say it's not my business and to stop asking them and calling them in the middle of the night, fine. Let's start the episode.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  I want to start with a really simple, nice question before we get into the horrors of the modern age. What are you playing right now? What's on your, what's on your list? You play, you play video games?

• 1:15Speaker 02

  Can I be the biggest asshole on the planet? I'm playing, I'm playing a game that doesn't have an announcement. It doesn't have a release date. It might come out in like April, my dude. I, that's what I'm playing right now. I'm, and I usually don't get to do this. I don't usually get a big dog, somebody, and come to the show. But let me tell you, I am playing the game of the year 2026. That is where I live.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  What's, what kind of game? What console?

• 1:56Speaker 02

  PC. And let me tell you, what if I said you took match three games and you blended it with some, some other stuff?

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Okay, so it's like Bejeweled?

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a way of putting it.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Or Candy Crush?

• 2:09Speaker 02

  But let me tell you, it's heaven. If you want something more like, what am I playing right now that other people can play? Which is like the nice thing and not being a piece of shit.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, be polite.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Thank you. It's really hard. Sams at Blake Manor, that's, that's my like real shit right now. Do you know about this?

• 2:27Ryan Broderick?

  I don't. Yeah, I'm, we're gonna, it's gonna become very apparent.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:32Ryan Broderick?

  How

• 2:32Speaker 02

  This is good.

• 2:33Ryan Broderick?

  shallow my video game knowledge is as we go.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  What if I told you, you could play Agatha Christie's story, but most of the racism is stripped out and it's set in Ireland? And it's just like a good chill hangout in a spooky mansion.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm keying in on the term, most of the racism is, is stripped out. Yeah.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  I've been doing this long enough, friends, and I never say all because I'm fully aware that there's some.

• 2:58Ryan Broderick?

  There's no, there's no, yeah, there's no, that's not possible. Is there a lot of reading in this game?

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Oh, man, so much reading.

• 3:05Ryan Broderick?

  I'm out, I'm out.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  They also, they talk it at you too. So if you're, if you're okay with them talking it out.

• 3:10Ryan Broderick?

  So you have to use audio too?

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, they definitely talk it out.

• 3:13Ryan Broderick?

  I have not turned the audio on in a video game in like 10 years. I'll be very honest.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  You've been playing match three games without knowing what they're called, my friend.

• 3:20Ryan Broderick?

  I am completely shamelessly addicted right now to Digimon Time Stranger.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Dude, dude, no joke. I, the, one of the two shows I do, we got hammered by people who are mad that we didn't talk about Digimon. They're like, I can't believe you talked about this Pokemon piece of shit, you pieces of scum, Digimon.

• 3:41Ryan Broderick?

  Honestly, I chose it over the new Pokemon game. So I'm a massive monster hunter, uh, player. Like I, I just love catching and raising monsters and the Digimon series is just like streamlined it into pure crack. Uh, my girlfriend was like, you didn't say a word for like three hours. I was like, yeah, cause I was raising Digimon. And I completely lost what I was doing in my life. So.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  I've been caught by the Pokemon monsters.

• 4:04Ryan Broderick?

  You know, actually I think Digimon had like way more adult themes than Pokemon. Um.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  You've, you've sat on twice in two episodes and it's gonna be a problem. Keep going.

• 4:14Ryan Broderick?

  Well, actually, actually, I think this piece of children's media is way more adult than what you would think. Um, that's, uh.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Have you ever seen Steven Universe?

• 4:23Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I think Steven Universe has way more adult themes than people give it credit for. I am the Digimon master, the Digimon tamer, uh, Ryan Broderick. And with me as always is, uh. The Pokemaster Grant Irving, he wants to be the champion, the very best. And this is Panic World, a show about how the internet works our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And joining us today, host of Post Games, Chris Plant. I don't know what they call it in like the pal world. I was trying to keep it in theme. Like I was gonna give you, but I think it's such a copyright ripoff. They don't have a term for like what you do in pal world. Like you're just like a guy, I guess. You're the pal world guy. And today, we're talking about video games.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:09Ryan Broderick?

  We're talking about the moral panic around video games. But to start, I would love to hear about your new show because I feel like it's been a while since I've checked in on you. I want to hear everything that's going on. So what are you working on right now?

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah. I used to work at this company called Vox Media and I legally am not going to talk about that company. And now I, yeah, I finally went independent. I did what you did and what Casey did and what all the smart people do, which is rather than make a thing and found it and run it for 10 years, make a thing and then own it yourself. And then if it bombs, blame yourself, which I'm totally okay with. Fortunately, it's not bombing.

• 5:47Ryan Broderick?

  You gotta run it until the people working for you try to unionize. And then you gotta be like, I'm out, actually.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  I'm just really curious why you didn't list Matty Uglasis on the list of smart people. And speaking of Vox, when you're saying people start their own company, I just.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  I've never heard that name.

• 6:01Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, interesting. I've always, oh, no, it's pronounced Matty Glacius.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Oh, I think, I think, I think I'm familiar.

• 6:09Ryan Broderick?

  I actually did think it was that for a long time. I thought his name, I thought he was an adult man named by Matty. I thought it was Matty Glacius.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  It's a pretty lovable name, honestly. Like, that's not like a good teddy bear.

• 6:17Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I think it's, I think it's better. So yeah, so how, how is the indie world treating you?

• 6:22Speaker 02

  It is so good. I mean, making a weekly podcast about video games, it's like, hey, what if I do the thing that I always griped about, which is why do mainstream publications not take video games seriously? Hey, I'll just go do an NPR style show and I can interview smart people each week and I can make that thing every damn week. And turns out there's like an audience for it. There's a million video game podcasts, like literally, I think a million and three was the last count. But there are not many for people over the age of like 35 that also treat the people listening like they are over the age of 35.

• 7:01Ryan Broderick?

  Also, like, I imagine you're not a white nationalist, so that's gotta be like a

• 7:05Speaker 02

  No.

• 7:05Ryan Broderick?

  Pretty unique niche in the world of video games.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  It puts me above like at least 999,000, so, you know.

• 7:11Ryan Broderick?

  Sure, yeah, you're really in the top 1%. And you actually approached us for today's topic. It is a topic that we've kicked around a little bit, and we, we've kind of gone back in time on this show a bit, but not a ton. I'm fascinated by this period of time because it's sort of right, right around when I was sort of becoming aware of the world and sort of the media environment that I, that we were all growing up in. And so, uh, I want you to kind of talk about why you chose this topic and why it's fascinating to you.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Sure, I mean, so, the topic is, do video games cause violence? And it's fascinating to me because it just never goes away. People think it goes away, but what I find, uh, so, I don't know, wonderful about it, because now it's kind of been neutered in terms of its risk to actual video games, is that it, it so nicely reflects whatever the, the politics are of its moment. So like, whether that is like the very beginning with like Death Race, or that is the early 1990s, where it is the, you know, congressional freakouts over like Two Live Crew, or it is right, the, I would say the school shooting era, which is like lasted for a very long

• 8:29Speaker 02

  time. There's always a different version of this, and it's always rooted in the same, not just like pseudoscience, but all the science, I'm sure as we will talk about, is rooted in entirely separate claim. Like, there is a conversation about aggression, and there is a conversation about violence. And yet, uh, it always gets mushed together in really kind of perverse ways.

• 8:56Ryan Broderick?

  Tangentially related to this, I heard this great anecdote this week about the beginnings of PBS and how at the very beginning PBS was advertising itself as a way to hypnotize your children as a positive.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 9:10Ryan Broderick?

  Because children were so unruly and annoying and this was like, you know, the age where like children were not human beings and you like wanted them to be seen and not heard. And so the earliest PBS promotion was like, we figured out how to make children finally watch TV because that like children were not watching TV.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:25Ryan Broderick?

  And they very quickly scrapped that because like, obviously people started to get really creeped out by that, but in the very beginnings PBS was like, we'll hypnotize your children for you. So they'll pay like they'll sit down. And I, and I think it's very funny because that feeling of like, what is like media doing to children is changing as video games are emerging.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:46Ryan Broderick?

  So like you enter the eighties and you get this like, the beginnings of what we would call like helicopter parenting. It's, it's sort of starting, but it's starting in kind of in different directions. And I, before we delve into the history of all this, I wanted to throw a take at you and get your thoughts because I, this is sort of my lens through which I view all debates around the larger world of video games and extremism, which is that I believe that things like Gamergate, the sort of like radicalizing pipelines that you, you know, you've heard about in video game communities for years are essentially one to one to something like soccer hooliganism.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Hmm. Go explain that a little bit more. Yeah.

• 10:28Ryan Broderick?

  Basically like, it, it, to me, and we're going to get into this story today.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  They're Oasis?

• 10:33Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, they're all about loving Oasis. Um, no. So they, it's all about tracksuits and bowl cuts and

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Not looking back in anger.

• 10:41Ryan Broderick?

  To look back at this anger. Uh, it is very fascinating to me that we spent effectively 20 years, almost 30 years complaining, worrying, fretting, trying to legal, like, you know, legislate this idea that video games cause aggression. And right when the right wing figures out how to actually infiltrate these spaces and turn them into extremist movements, a lot of that stuff starts to fall away. And if we're talking about sort of a grand theory of like, what do video games do to you? My argument would be almost nothing that is different from any other sport or maybe even interest being a radicalizing vector for young people.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Yes, I definitely agree with that. I

• 11:21Speaker 02

  Agree specifically with the take on the aggression side of it. I think the science proves that out, that whenever you do look at research on video games causing aggression, not violence, but aggression, it's both not significant and not insignificant. It does create some sort of feeling, not unlike watching sports or watching cartoons. Like, those are your comparisons. And I think where that comparison you're making with something like soccer hooliganism is just where are young people? Like, that's the story, right? Young people are in sports in the 80s and 90s. Young people are in video games in the last 10 to 15

• 12:04Speaker 02

  years. Why are young people, especially young men, aggregating here? Because it's the core interest, and it's just like the law of numbers.

• 12:12Ryan Broderick?

  Right. If there is an alternate reality where comic books become the dominant, I mean, technically, like, yes, this is happening, it did happen. It's like, whatever the emergent popular media form is, creates those bubbles that can cause radicalization, can can can lead to aggression, and goes back to a premise that Grant and I have talked about on the show before, which is the idea that we need to have federally mandated masculinity lifeguards to be in all male spaces. So right now, we're at the limit. Three men, I think, should be the legal limit of men that can be around each other without a masculinity lifeguard. And then, once you hit four, you have to have someone from the government com licensed, and make sure you don't spin off into some sort of white supremacist cult.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  I mean, if you're bringing in someone from the government, I think you might actually get the opposite result right now. But

• 13:03Ryan Broderick?

  Maybe someone else's government, maybe another country's government. Oh, it's a UN watchdog. It's a UN-appointed masculinity lifeguard that comes in and basically just helps men not spiral out of control while talking about what they're interested in.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  Can you help me visualize, what are they wearing?

• 13:21Ryan Broderick?

  They wear the blue helmet. They wear the

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Interesting. I'm just imagining, like, an HR person with a cold, who like, really doesn't want to be there, but is just always like, can you guys, can you guys please calm down? And then, like, I'm gonna need some I statement right now. And there's like a whistle.

• 13:37Ryan Broderick?

  I was imagining like, a literal soldier with a gun.

• 13:42Ryan Broderick?

  I was imagining like a heavily armed UN soldier, just who comes into your apartment once the fourth man enters with them. And then they're like, okay, you guys can hang out now, but I'm gonna be over in the corner. And if you start to get crazy, I'm gonna pop a round off. You got one warning shot. Yeah, you got one warning shot and then we're, then it's off to the Hague with you. Okay, so let's get into our story. And our story starts in November 1985. We've done this research for you today, and we're going to talk about how we became convinced that video games cause aggression. The story starts with Tipper Gore, Al Gore's wife. She leads a campaign in the mid 80s that influences the Recording Industry Association of America,

• 14:27Ryan Broderick?

  the RIAA, to agree to a parental advisory label put on music that's sold in the US. And that sets the stage for today's villain. Are you familiar with a man named Jack Thompson?

• 14:40Speaker 02

  We go way back, you know, me and Jack, we are buddies. I'm very familiar with Jack, but I'm very curious how you talk about this, this wonderful Florida man.

• 14:52Ryan Broderick?

  So our outline here says hung like a moose, cool guy. Please don't sell us, is what it says. Yeah, so 1990, Jack Thompson.

• 15:06Ryan Broderick?

  Spoilers. 1990, Jack Thompson, a lawyer and Republican politician for Florida, starts a similar campaign based off of Tipper Gore's with the idea of trying to ban explicit music entirely. I do feel like that effectively has happened in a way, like we have algorithmically sort of ruined, that's a whole other episode to talk about. Jack Thompson focuses on trying to bring obscenity charges to Two Live Crew. Are you familiar with Two Live Crew?

• 15:34Speaker 02

  I mean, some of the greatest music of the 1980s, you know. Spring break music is, I think, the energy.

• 15:41Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's right, like very pornographic.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, are you gonna quote some lyrics? Did you bring that?

• 15:46Ryan Broderick?

  No, I'm not. Although I have been sitting on a take for a while about the concept of like straight camp and how like we used to have this like very over-sexualized like straight mainstream media like kinda culminating with Bloodhound Gang.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:00Ryan Broderick?

  And then like that all kinda went away in an interesting way and I'm like curious like what caused it anyways.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  I mean, you did gooners already. That's, I think gooners is-

• 16:08Ryan Broderick?

  Do you think woke killed it? No, gooning is not that.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Really?

• 16:12Ryan Broderick?

  Gooning is actually, I think, trying to fill the vacuum of that. Whereas if you had something sort of disgusting and heterosexual in the mainstream media, you know, something like Two Live Crew or Bloodhound Gang, maybe we wouldn't need to goon. Anyways, so they go to trial, Two Live Crew wins. Thompson, even though he loses, gets a lot of attention and is hired by Oliver North's far-right Freedom Alliance in 1992. We have been doing the same shit in this country since the very beginning. It is so annoying. And then Thompson spends most of the 90s going after various musicians, movie studios, entertainers. How did you first come across Mr. Thompson? How do you know about him?

• 16:50Speaker 02

  I mean, like, very first time hearing about him as an adult, or I guess a teenager, was like the Grand Theft Auto controversies. He goes very, very hard on Grand Theft Auto. But what I find so interesting about him in that he fits into the long line of school shooting inspires people to lose their minds about video games. And like, that's like, for me, the curiosity of him is like, he has the same genesis as so many of these people.

• 17:23Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, he doesn't really focus on video games for the, until the late 90s. That's when he kind of realizes he can latch on to this. And in April 1999, he appears in court and blames video games for the first time, saying that a shooter who watched Natural Born Killers also played Doom in Mortal Kombat. And this is what the New York Times writes at the time. "The parents of three students killed at a Kentucky high school filed a $130 million lawsuit today against the- ...industry, named in the lawsuit filed in federal district court. Here were two internet pornography sites, several computer game companies, and the makers and distributors of a 1990 film featuring Leonardo DiCaprio. "We intend to hurt Hollywood," said Jack Thompson, one of the parent's lawyers.

• 18:08Ryan Broderick?

  "We intend to hurt the video game industry. We intend to hurt sex porn sites." And as for why he chose these things specifically, the article goes on, "One scene in the Basketball Diaries shows a dream sequence in which the main character, played by Mr. DiCaprio, guns down his teacher and some of the classmates. The suit also asserts that Michael Carniel, the shooter, was an average computer user who logged on to internet pornography sites to view sexually violent material." This is literally the conversations we're still having today. We had these conversations about Charlie Kirk's shooter like two months ago.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. Sex pornography mixed with video games, mixed with anything else that is not guns or psychology.

• 18:48Ryan Broderick?

  And that desperate sort of desire to pull whatevers in the zeitgeist into the moral panic. So it's this guy who got his start trying to ban explicit music is like, "Well, the new thing's video games, and we want to hurt popular culture in general. So we're just gonna build this like giant catamaran of all the things in culture that were, that are new and interesting, and we're gonna blame those." And that same month, we entered effectively the modern age of America. April 1999 is when the Columbine shooting happens, which you alluded to just a minute ago. And it emerges that the shooters were fans of Doom and Quake and had custom mods of the game on their personal website. And the New York Times writes again,

• 19:31Ryan Broderick?

  "The files on Harris's Doom and Quake exploits contain programs he had written to work with the games." Listening to them describe what a mod is in 1999 is kinda wild. As well as his commentary on them, but despite coming in the context of computer games famous for their realistic violence, realistic is doing a lot of work there. Describe Doom. I'm gonna say, "These files scattered with enthusiastic observations and exclamation points provided a glimpse at a teenager who seemed less angry and morbid than in the other postings attributed to him. It took me about 10 hours to finish this level, so send some comments to me once in a while," Harris wrote in one file dated November 26, 1996. His comments accompanied a program that he made available to the public on an internet site.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  Can I say loser shit all around? This is the most benign take in the world. The Columbine shooters suck shit.

• 20:27Ryan Broderick?

  Columbine bad, you're saying?

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Columbine bad, and the shooters losers, but losers of, uh, congrats, you spent 10 hours making a fog? Like, you fucking loser? That sucks. And also like losers because you know about like, they read the Doom novels? And like that's not they had like-

• 20:45Ryan Broderick?

  Novels based on Doom?

• 20:47Speaker 02

  They, like, Harris had named his shotgun after a character in the Doom novels.

• 20:54Ryan Broderick?

  Wow. That's true loser shit, actually.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  True loser shit and also true, uh, where was, where was the novel pushback, you know? Like where, where we're hearing- Banned books. We should ban all books.

• 21:08Ryan Broderick?

  We should ban books. I agree. Especially ones about video games, I think. But-

• 21:15Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah, but this is something that we see a lot and we've talked about a lot on this show, which is if you go through any of these shooters' backstories, and I've sort of reached the point where I'm comfortable saying that like, any mass shooter is a political extremist. It's just that their political ideology is, is a little more amorphous and confusing than someone who's- You know, it's, yeah, I think so. And, and so if you go through any of these people's history, yes, you're gonna find that they spent a lot of time online because they didn't have a lot of personal connections. And you're gonna find that they were very fascinated with connecting the live wires of popular culture to political violence and extremism and violence. That, that is a very classic idea.

• 21:55Ryan Broderick?

  It is unfortunate that every time, you know, we could have a conversation about how that works, you get people like Jack Thompson, who just go like, well, no, no, no, no, this is what made them do it. It's not other, much more complicated conversations you could be having. It's, it's the fact that he read a book based on the video game Doom.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, it sucks.

• 22:17Ryan Broderick?

  I, I'm also like, I, and this is, okay. I'm not charmed by Columbine. I want to be clear.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Dude. I really came on the wrong episode, dude.

• 22:28Ryan Broderick?

  But I am charmed, I, I find it fascinating to see echoes of how we currently use the internet and talk about this stuff in older, sort of, sources. We, we come across this a lot, where like, we'll dig up something from the 90s and it's like, oh, wow. They were talking and using the internet, talking on and using the internet in almost exact same ways we are now. And so the fact that like, a Columbine shooter effectively has what would be said out loud in a Twitch stream now, in a text file on his website to download his Doom mod or whatever, of like, of, of this young person like using the internet to try to talk to other people. And even saying like, this took me a while, like, leave a comment, you know, it's, it seems so modern in this really weird way.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Yes, I completely agree. And like, the whole thing at that point was, people are using Doom mods to recreate their homes and their schools. One of the best games that came out last year was a game called MyHouse.WAD that is a mod of a home that is a fictional story about a person, a teenager who passed away and they recreated their house and now he can go explore it. So like, we're still... As an art form tinkering with that, I also think it's telling that what came out game wise right after Columbine, it was doing similar things. I don't know if you ever played Pico's School. Do you know about this?

• 23:54Ryan Broderick?

  I know of it. Yeah, I never played it. Describe it.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Basically, a school shooting happens. This is a Newgrounds like point and click adventure game. A school shooting happens and then you have to hunt the school shooters when you wake up in the school and then it's like aliens. I can't remember. And then also Super Columbine Massacre RPG, which was a RPG maker game that was trying to like, kind of grapple with this. Are either of these games great? I think there's been kind of a revisionist history to make Super Columbine Massacre more like a piece of art than I think it really is. But yes, it's this weird thing that we're seeing even now where the Charlie Kirk killing happens and then right away people are like, I gotta make it into a game on Roblox.

• 24:44Ryan Broderick?

  Right. Fun fact, I was a very, very big RPG Maker user and I spent the better part of a year trying to make a top down 2D version of Kingdom Hearts and I downloaded custom sprite maps for all the characters to basically turn it into a turn based RPG on RPG Maker.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  It's weird that I didn't know this lore about you and yet it feels like I did.

• 25:10Ryan Broderick?

  I eventually moved on to Mujin, which is like an Italian open source 2D fighting simulator kind of thing where you can load your custom sprites into that. And that's actually how I ended up actually learning C++ for a little bit because I was making like these fighting games where like I could have like a Gundam fighting Spider-Man.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Sorry, for the people whose brands are like mine, can you unpack the Charlie Kirk Roblox thing?

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah.

• 25:38Ryan Broderick?

  Basically what I You don't want to hear about my Kingdom Hearts RPG that I was making? I have.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  To Ryan's point that the internet is different and then the exact same as it always was. It was shocking when Columbine happened and then people were like, oh, they were making these experiences in the game and then they were making experiences in games inspired by this tragic incident.

• 26:02Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  And meanwhile, today, it's like that's already happening. People are making grotesque things in games before and after they happen, whether that is like streaming an event live while it's happening, or whether it is, again, the moment after it being like, I gotta turn this into some hot content.

• 26:20Ryan Broderick?

  We are always very scandalized. It's interesting, like, the newer the media, the type, the more scandalized we are by how people use it to process sort of extreme emotions. So like, if you were to write a book about Columbine, an alternate, honestly, like, Bobcat Goldthwait's World's Greatest Dad. Oh, yeah. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was actually just talking, I was trying to describe this movie to somebody the other day and I was like, okay, so there's a movie where Robin Williams gets totally completely naked and it's basically about a kid who like, does autoretics asphyxiation. It's the Spy Kids kid. It's an insane movie.

• 27:00Ryan Broderick?

  But like, there are movies about school shootings. There are comedies about school shootings. The Nirvana the Band.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:08Ryan Broderick?

  Group, they did one.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  The Uglies? Is that what it was called?

• 27:10Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's called The Uglies, yeah. Like, and that wasn't really even acceptable until like, you know, maybe 10 years ago. But if you were at a book about a school shooting, I don't think anyone would bat an eye. And the fact that, you know, we now have people, you know, in the early 2000s, starting to experiment with like, talking about really serious material in the form of a video game, still to this day, I think, makes people uncomfortable. I mean, I don't think it's an accident that the video game at the center of Gamergate was called Depression Quest and it was like a woman trying to like, talk through like a very serious mental health concept. And it's like, so the newer the media type, the more we feel like it's off limits from touching like really, it has to stay frivolous.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and at the same time, it is the scariest thing in the world and it's so important. And anything you contribute into it is dangerous.

• 27:58Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  So it's both like, we don't want it to say anything, and also if it does say anything, it is somehow going to turn our kids into cold-blooded killers.

• 28:06Ryan Broderick?

  And at this time period that we're talking about, the media environment weirdly is probably the closest to today's in terms of being weirdly fragmented, not really having a sense of, a very sort of oral narrative rather than written. I've been looking at this time period a lot recently because I do think it's almost exactly like what it is now, where you just like can't keep track of what's happening and you're generating so many urban legends and rumors because you have this fractured media environment. And so you end up with the urban legend that the Columbine shooters had created a mod of their high school for practice, which best we can tell, there's no evidence that that was one of the mods. And this leads directly to backlash to the video game industry, as Salon writes at the

• 28:50Ryan Broderick?

  time, "Over on Usenet, at alt.games.quake2, gamers scoffed at the inaccuracies of the media reports and joked sarcastically that their gaming habits could turn them too into sociopaths. One poster complained about TV reports that said they learned how to use pipe bombs and grenades from Doom. Doom doesn't even have pipe bombs or grenades."

• 29:12Ryan Broderick?

  And, you know, once again, this idea of like, everything that's old is still new. Like, we saw the same sort of shitposting within like, the trans community around the Charlie Kirk shooting, where it was like, a bunch of trans people being like, "I'm gonna take my Charlie Kirk like injection, my Charlie Kirk killer injection now." You know, that kind of, it is always sort of the young people who are misreported on, kind of scoffing and laughing at it, but then the media, I think, very straight-facedly looking back at that and being like, "They're not even taking this seriously." You know, it's such a weird cycle that we're still in with this stuff.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  It's still happening. I mean, as I said at the very top, right, is like, we are now 30 to 40 years into video game hysteria. There are people who, in theory, play video games at the New York Times, at the Washington Post, and yet... You would not know it. Most of the time, these things still get reported.

• 30:05Ryan Broderick?

  I think they keep them in like some kind of room. Like I think all the video game writers in New York Times are like in a padded room in the back and they don't let them out, you know? Cause God knows, like no one at the Times is, is talking to them about any of this stuff. Thank God for Gene Park at the Washington Post. Last man standing over there in terms of like maybe helping them understand this stuff, but most major papers, you're right, do not, still are doing this.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:30Ryan Broderick?

  And we're going to talk about how your buddy, Jack Thompson, enters the story right after a word from our sponsors, Dare. Keep your children off drugs by teaching them exactly what the drugs look like and where to find them.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  You gotta do mine later. I'm proud of this one.

• 30:46Ryan Broderick?

  Which one was yours?

• 30:47Speaker 01

  It's, it's down in the document. You'll get there. You can, this is a little teaser for my fake ad.

• 30:52Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, I see it. That's good. Yeah, I'll use that one next. Okay, cool.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  Hey Spotify listeners. When you travel with American Airlines, you'll enjoy comfort and convenience at every altitude. Before takeoff, unwind in the Admirals Club Lounge with curated self-serve offerings of hearty bites and refreshments. In flight, stay connected with high-speed Wi-Fi, sponsored by AT&T. Your journey is designed to feel easy from the moment you check in to the moment you arrive. No matter where you're going, American gets you there. Book now at aa.com.

• 31:26Speaker 04

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 31:52Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, Jack Thompson, he gets real big off this, right? Um, he, he does like, like he's based, it's just like his Columbine is like real big for Jack Thompson and he's basically arguing that video games are school shooting simulators. From Alabama Baptist.org in 2006, they write, "Jack Thompson, the attorney who represented the parents of three teenagers killed in the Paducah, Kentucky, school shooting in 1997, is continuing his efforts after violent video games because of their influence on unstable youth. One of his main concerns now is the October release of Bully." Do you remember Bully?

• 32:29Speaker 02

  Yes, Bully is, I wish it was a series, but it was just a one-off game from Rockstar back when they made those things, not just Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto. And Bully, you could think of it kind of like, I mean, this is like a very Jack Thompson way of putting it, it's Grand Theft Auto in a private school.

• 32:46Ryan Broderick?

  He calls it a Columbine simulator. Yeah, exactly.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  Great. It's really the, it's just a story of being a kid in a school. It's not so different than basically any other 1980s kind of, I don't know, high school movie. Uh, you're, you're not shooting people. You're not doing any of the Rockstar stuff.

• 33:05Ryan Broderick?

  I think they kind of latched on to the fact that he has like a baseball bat on the cover.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. He's a bad boy.

• 33:10Ryan Broderick?

  And of course, school shootings, uh, continue throughout the 2000s and Jack Thompson keeps using that as a way to sort of plug his worldview. And this is, uh, Grant's gonna pull this up. This is a clip of, uh, him on the cable news in 2007 following the Virginia Tech shooting.

• 33:29Speaker 05

  Typically the school shooters train literally on video games to do this. Dawson College last year, Montreal, uh, the shooter, the killer trained on a game called Super Columbine Massacre, also Postal 2, both of which are murder simulation games in which the school shooters can rehearse and plan for and make themselves more efficient in these kind of murderous rampages.

• 33:53Ryan Broderick?

  You perked up at a couple of the games you mentioned there. Uh, talk, talk of a little bit about that.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, we already talked about Super Columbine Massacre, but Postal 2, I actually agree with Jack Thompson. That game should be banned because it sucks. Bad game.

• 34:08Ryan Broderick?

  Postal one is the basis of my favorite movie Postal, which opens with a window which yeah, which opens with a a window washer on one of the twin towers, I believe. One of the most like offensive movies ever made kind of thing.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, postal was the something awful made into a video game of its era. It's edgelord shit. The what I love about this take is it explains why I have won the Super Bowl three years in a row because I played a lot of Madden and it made me very efficient and talented at playing football. If it's hard for people who don't remember video games of this era and first person shooters, it wasn't like the skill Call of Duty stuff of today. Not that that is also going to train you to be a shooter. This is like clumsy ass, barely moving around with like a X, Y, and Z axis.

• 35:08Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  To, you know, you in postal, like, I don't know, piss on a mailman or something.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, Super Columbine massacre looks like Zelda on a SNES. Like, again, for visuals here, like, that's what these games look like.

• 35:24Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, and it's like very clear that this is part of a right wing culture war that he's whipping up. He's also very shameless about it. And he even writes after this in a letter. I went on NBC's Today Show and predicted Columbine one week before it happened. Which is like, you know, that's like, that's like not even something like a guy on Substack would write now, you know, like, like, that's like below that level of discourse of like, I'm a, you know, talking head pundit, you know, garbage.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  Babe Ruth of school shootings, like.

• 36:00Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I, I'm, I'm 10 for 10 on predicting school shootings. And it's like, well, then maybe you should tell people about, you know, where they're going to happen, if you can really predict school shootings. And, and this is the, this is the sad thing. And, and, and once again, this is something I think we see a lot with like pulling back these moral panics, which is that. There is something real happening, which is the rise of school shootings in America. And then there are people who respond to this very real problem. I think we talked about this with the climate change episode where it's like, there are people who recognize what's happening. And instead of focusing on figuring out what's actually causing it, access to guns, alienation of young people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, we, there's a million things you could point to.

• 36:45Ryan Broderick?

  It's like, well, I'm gonna go after the thing that supports my pre-existing sort of political beliefs or, or my desire to control the minds of young Americans or whatever it is. And it's so frustrating because like, Jack Thompson is clearly, you know, he clearly cares about what is happening here, but he's so fixated on this simple, easy solution that just, you know, puts people back in churches or, or removes, you know, anti-religious art or whatever, you know, whatever he cares about.

• 37:18Speaker 02

  Do you think people really believe what they're selling here? This is the part that like, I just, I can't get into other people's heads, but I just always come back to, do people really, deep down inside, believe that it's not guns? Or it's not mental health? That it's video games or, or comic books, you know, 40 years ago or whatever? Or do they know that they're protecting the thing that they love? That the thing that they love, their guns, is, is actually harmful, but they just don't want to accept that?

• 37:50Ryan Broderick?

  I think about this a lot, especially with like, right wing grifters. You know, there's, I think there's this prevalence on the left in particular to assume that everyone on the right is the cynical arch, kind of like, I'm making this thing up. And I just don't think people are, the majority of people are good enough to operate like that for that long. So if I see someone like Jack Thompson, who has spent 30 years basically blaming everything other than guns for school shootings and the moral decay of young Americans or whatever. I just sort of believe you think that. I think you can convince yourself of anything.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  It's, you know, like, I need my gun. I don't need video games.

• 38:30Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I also think like, like a lot of Americans like us, Americans who have, you know, been to college or live in major cities or work in the media. I think we do tend to forget that like a big bulk of this country sees popular culture as a foreign entity that is entering their homes in some way. I think this is a lot about the anti-woke backlash of the 2010s where they're like, every celebrity is a person of color and now there's no white people on TV. And it's like, well, yeah, you might actually think that if you view all of popular culture as this other thing that you're not connected to.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  You gotta stand your ground. It's, it's on your property now, you know?

• 39:06Ryan Broderick?

  You're joking, but I think that that is a bit of the psychology here where it's like, okay, video games didn't exist five years ago. Now my kid wants one and I don't know what they are. And then there's a guy like Jack Thompson who's on TV saying, well, actually they're gonna make you aggressive. And you're like, well, that actually makes sense because I don't know anything about this and this bothers me and scares me. And when I see the video games, there's like cartoon blood or whatever it is. And that is sort of the psychological profile I, I, I tend to believe in for a lot of these people.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Kind of skipped to the end there, which is, uh, the best thing you can do as a parent is spend time with your kids and actually.

• 39:42Ryan Broderick?

  I was gonna say, give them violent video games to play alone.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  Hey, that's what my parents did. They just watched me do it. And they're like, Mortal Kombat? That's scary. And then they watch it and they're like, oh no, you're gonna be fine. This is dumb shit.

• 39:53Ryan Broderick?

  Parents, if you're listening, if you give your children violent video games, let them play them alone in their bedroom, they will turn out to be a podcaster. So do not do that.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Give them PPS. It will hypnotize them and they'll not be able to look away. I think, I think one thing, just very quickly to, to add to your question is just, I think it's very easy to believe things, especially when the, it gives you.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  The ability to go on cable TV, it gives you money and it gives you a crusade. People's capabilities to grift themselves, I think gets overlooked. I think it's easy to be a true believer when you only get reinforcement and an enemy to attack. Go for it, right? I just, I just think that it's an important part in, in helping me understand how somebody could ever brag about Columbine.

• 40:43Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I, I think that's right. It is a self perpetuating cycle for sure. And as the 2000s progressed, we see more and more of this sort of thing. We see video games popping up in murder trials. With the Virginia Tech shooter, they try the same lines. It's later discovered he only liked Sonic, which is obviously not a shooter game. But I mean, look, there's no normal Sonic player, so maybe they were onto something there. So like, that does make sense to me that you would have some sort of deviant brain shape if you like Sonic the Hedgehog. And then of course, we get to what I would argue is even more so than Columbine. I don't know, Charlie, I think I brought this up on the show before, but writer Charlie Wazle, friend of the show, has often argued that like Sandy Hook is the moment we, we gave up on trying to fix the school shooting problem.

• 41:28Ryan Broderick?

  So like, if you view Columbine as Sandy Hook as this moment where like, if there were less Jack Thompsons in the world, we may have actually solved it, but we didn't. So now where this is just the world we live in. And so Sandy Hook happens at the end of January 2012. And of course, the brother of the shooter is misidentified. My bad, it was my first day on a news desk. I was one of the reporters that did that. And my bad, I got pilloried, yeah. But he liked Mass Effect, like he liked the page on Facebook. So Fox News kind of whipped up a whole frenzy around that. And then the fucking NRA blames video games for shootings.

• 42:09Ryan Broderick?

  And then right after that, we head into the Navy Yard shooting in, you know, 2013. Once again, video games are involved. And I guess like, what I'm fascinated by with all of this is how, well, you sort of mentioned it in the top of the show, this, this idea that there is sort of two, two things happening here, like the idea of blaming video games for school shootings. And the idea of blaming video games for aggression. Would you say that one appeared before the other? Would you say that they're intertwined, have changed over time? Because like, looking at this like laid out like this, it just feels like it's the same thing every single time. But do you feel like the the larger national discourse, the larger moral panic around video games

• 42:51Ryan Broderick?

  has evolved in some way from 2003 to 2013?

• 42:55Speaker 02

  I do. I think there's a huge thing that happens right before Sandy Hook. And I think it it changes the calculus on all of this, which is Brown versus Entertainment Merchants Association is argued in the Supreme Court in 2010. It is decided in mid 2011. And Brown versus Entertainment Merchants Association basically is the core legal text of why video games are protected from all of this. It's a 7-2 decision. It strikes on this California law that banned the sales of violent games to children. I think it was under 18 without parent supervision.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  And the most important part is that in the the majority opinion, Scalia says speech about violence is not obscene. And that is like, those words. I think even more than the idea of like, games are protected under First Amendment rights are crucial because it sets a precedent for not just video games, but all sorts of other media. Right? If like violent speech is not obscene, then it can't be struck down by obscenity laws. So you have this protection that is granted to video games. And you know what people love really going after is a thing that they can take a really

• 44:19Speaker 02

  high horse on, but then isn't actually going to have any impact? Because then their video game publishers will still donate to them because it's like, whatever, like, we're freaking out about it, but it's not going to do anything. This is the thing, I grew up in Missouri and right on the Kansas border. And I would always hear about this with, and now it's terrible and sad, but with abortion, where it was like, oh, we run on this knowing that. We're never going to change it. Well, surprise, they they did. But I think that because that becomes law in in mid 2011, then it becomes a really easy thing to target without fear of actually having any big impact.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  So I think that's the big difference. I think the other big difference is there's just more school shootings, you know?

• 45:08Ryan Broderick?

  It's kind of amazing how often video games come up in the discourse immediately after, still even into the late 2010s. Because after Parkland, President Trump holds a video game summit with the executives of major publishers. This touches on a rumor that I had heard at the time, and I suppose we could talk about it a little bit, which is, so The New York Times writes, "The president said some content viewed by his 11-year-old son Baron had surprised him. The video games, the movies, the internet stuff is so violent. It's so incredible. I see it. I look at some of the things he's watching and I say, how is that possible? And this is what kids are watching. And I think maybe you have to take a look at it." I have heard that that was Baron really loving Fortnite.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  That makes a lot more sense to me, that he would be less worried about violence and more worried about his child not pursuing something that is financially gainful.

• 46:04Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I suppose now he loves it because like, you know, Fortnite is a great pathway into like, you know, finding unstable men to make memes for them.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  This, so this, um, the, the, the meeting following the Parkland shooting, I defined to be one of like the iconic Trump moments for a few reasons. One, targeting video games is so perfectly Trump in that it is something that was big in the 90s, has largely been decided, and yet he didn't get the memo and he's just like rehashing stuff that he remembers watching or reading in the New York Post in like 1996. To this, the meeting that they have is like shortly after the shooting. And Sarah Huckabee mentioned this meeting during a press conference. And then immediately, all the game publishers were like, what? Like, nobody, nobody called us.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  This is gonna be like two or three days. They had to reach out the other way to like, figure out what this meeting was? And then, of course, like, the meeting happens. And then, basically, from like, it was a closed-door meeting, but all reports are, game publishers get yelled at by some critics, and then it spins wildly off track. People start talking about how we need to have these meetings for like, film and TV. Everyone gets distracted. Marco Rubio is in that meeting, and they find him afterwards, the press does. Like, hey, you know, what's up? And Marco Rubio, who is representing Florida, is like, eh, doesn't mean much. Video games don't cause violence. We just need to make sure parents are aware of, you know, like, parent support tools.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  So it's all immediately washed over within the course of a week.

• 47:45Ryan Broderick?

  That's so, so funny. Yeah, I feel like now is a good time in our story to talk about the evidence that this is all kind of garbage, right? So, um, this is from, uh, the New York Times. Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University, led the committee that developed the policy statement. So this is the policy statement that basically like, comes out after this summit. Uh, in an interview on Monday, he said, "The evidence was clear that violent video games are not a risk factor for serious acts of aggression. Neither are violent movies nor other forms of media. The data on bananas causing suicide is about as conclusive," he said. Literally, the numbers work out about the same.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  Potentially?

• 48:30Ryan Broderick?

  And, and this is-

• 48:32Speaker 02

  A serious question there?

• 48:34Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 48:35Speaker 02

  When they say bananas cause suicide, do they mean eating bananas? Or do they mean people purposely dropping them on the floor, Looney Tunes style, and then intentionally trying to-

• 48:46Ryan Broderick?

  I assume it's both. I assume, I assume, I actually watched a guy do a full, almost flip fall after stepping on a banana peel. It was, no, it was my buddy Jim. We were out one night and he stepped on a banana peel and he slipped and he went up in the air and he came down on his back and we all just stood there in complete disbelief that it happened. It was amazing.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  When we did the TyPod episode and we talked, we briefly talked about the banana peel challenge, which was people trying to slip on purpose. I lost like a good hour of my life of just watching those videos, like putting on, turning them off. Yeah.

• 49:19Ryan Broderick?

  But, but back to the, back to Dr. Ferguson's thing here. This is kind of for me, the, the end of any conversation around

• 49:31Ryan Broderick?

  the like internet dopamine stuff that everyone's obsessed with right now. Like, there's just not a lot of evidence that like media can really hijack your brain the way we like to think it can. Obviously, there are social behaviors that are downstream of the media you consume. We know this. But if video games can't turn you into a school shooter, then I, I'm not sure I totally buy the argument that like what you see on TikTok can turn you into a political extremist in a way. It's, it's hard to gel those two things together. And, and it kind of goes back to my, we always tend to freak out about the newest media type and what we do with it. And there's this massive

• 50:16Ryan Broderick?

  amount of discourse right now around like, oh yeah, like you've got to go on a, the amount of YouTubers were like, you have to buy a notebook and journal in it to like, reset your dopamine receptors. And it's like, what the fuck are you talking about? What are you talking about? It is this thing that just continues to come around over and over and over again. And just to throw one more study at this before we go to a break. The Washington Post found similarly in 2012, that if video games could cause real life violence and aggression, they were so popular and had become so popular so quickly that the amount of violence and aggression we would see in society would be out of control. The purge. We would be living the purge. It would be the purge. We would be living in the purge.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Which might be a good ideology.

• 50:54Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, you know, you know, who would love the idea of the purge? Our next sponsor, which Grant put in here in the doc, the NRA. We'll be right back.

• 51:08Speaker 00

  Hey Spotify listeners. When you travel with American Airlines, you'll enjoy comfort and convenience at every altitude. Before takeoff, unwind in the Admiral's Club Lounge with curated self-serve offerings of hearty bites and refreshments. In flight, stay connected with high-speed Wi-Fi. Sponsored by AT&T. Your journey is designed to feel easy from the moment you check in to the moment you arrive. No matter where you're going, American gets you there. Book now at aa.com.

• 51:35Speaker 04

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies, 18+.

• 52:01Ryan Broderick?

  Just to put a cap on this as we kind of take this thing home. We've kind of known this. Like, we've known that, like, you don't really get, like, brainwashed into being a new human being based on the meat you consume. And to really drive this home, I want to bring back our friend, Jack Thompson, one more time. Thompson does this song and dance even when it's glaringly obvious that something much darker was happening. For instance, 2003, a 16-year-old in Ohio on trial for murder initially claims insanity with his parents saying Grand Theft Auto III drove him to do it. From WorldNetDaily quoting this teenage killer, "I killed Jolynn for my own personal satisfaction. I yearn to see blood. It's a need or an addiction. Whomever else believes the GTA III

• 52:45Ryan Broderick?

  influenced me to brutally kill Jolynn, they are all idiots." So no matter the specifics, after teens do something deranged, pun and treat easily and quickly becomes finger-pointing. And here's a quote I think really sums up this whole gross industry. So in 2007, Jason De La Roca, the executive director of the International Game Developers Association, said, "It's so sad. These massacre chasers, they're worse than ambulance chasers. They're waiting for these things to happen so they can jump on their soapbox." And like, that to me is really the story of all of this, which is that instead of reckoning with the violent and antisocial and alienating culture of 21st century America, we just created a new industry of people who go on TV and tell you

• 53:29Ryan Broderick?

  that, like, whatever's popular with kids, like, caused it.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. Can I give you my hot take? My super hot take, I don't think video games cause violence, but I do think video games can influence your belief systems. And I feel like that is what's weirdly overlooked. Like, how many people play a version of SimCity or SimTower or those games? And then want to go on and be city organizers? Not because like, oh, they want to literally move around pieces on a board, but because they learned about a passion and then it got them reading more and it inspired something within them. Like, I would have concerns about a game that is, uh, let's say,

• 54:16Speaker 02

  the triumph of the will of video games, right? That is like a celebration of white nationalism. So I, I think there are conversations to be had. I think in the same way that I am frustrated whenever a school shooting happens and people blame blanket video games instead of, hey, let's talk about the literal things, the guns, right? The mental health. It goes the same way with video game conversations where we're talking about violence, which is so amorphous, when we could talk about, hey, we are literally creating slot machines and giving them to children over and over and over again. It's not like we're teaching them how a theory of gambling works. We're literally giving them gambling.

• 55:00Speaker 02

  And it's not, I'm saying that like that is bad or good. It's just weird how little energy goes into worrying about these things that should be researched versus a thing that is, again, we've had the argument for 40 years. Like, let's just have a different argument.

• 55:16Ryan Broderick?

  First, yes, I agree. And I think what, you know, tell me if I'm wrong. It sounds like what you're arguing is that there are things that we are predisposed to. And, I mean, we've, we've used this metaphor before. It's like, I can have a beer and not go on a bender. And there are people who can't. So there are obviously things that we are predisposed to. And I can watch really offensive art and come away fine. Like, I, I'm not gonna watch Triumph of the Will and they'd be like, that was great. I believe this. This is my thing now. But there are people who can't because of the way that they are wired or the way that they were raised or the environment that they're in.

• 55:58Ryan Broderick?

  And so it is probably most likely, I think the most charitable read on all of this is a is a real horse before the cart kind of situation where it's like if you are someone who is on the track to become violent and aggressive and hurt people, you're going to encounter video games the same way another kid who is not on that track would. And that's going to determine how you interface with those video games is going to determine what video games you're interested in, what they reinforce. And that is, I think, the same for a Facebook feed, the same for a TikTok feed, the same for the music you listen to. It is all kind of building the operating system of who you are. And so the fact that

• 56:43Ryan Broderick?

  the Columbine shooters were interested in video games and were on message boards talking about doing like weird niche stuff with your video games as a way to sort of find connection with other people, that makes total sense to me.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 56:56Ryan Broderick?

  And it makes total sense to me that you can do that and not become a school shooter too.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  Yes, I agree with all of that. And then I also would just add that if we're going to continue to research games, research the things that we literally already have proven are risky or dangerous or bad elsewhere. We know the effects of gambling. We know the effects of marketing, right? So then why are we not having a conversation about, say, the partnerships between arms corporations and weapons manufacturers with a Call of Duty or Battlefield and like actual licensing in a game?

• 57:37Ryan Broderick?

  Do they, I don't know, do they still have those enlistment trucks where like you go on as a little kid and you play like Call of Duty in like a in a truck sponsored by the army? Do you know what I'm talking about?

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. Or yeah, and then America's Army, there's, there are so many conversations to be had and they are tied to research that we already have seen outside of games and is rooted in some sort of truth and is specific. But I think that is, I mean, it gets to so much of your show, the death of specificity. For the answer to just be a thing.

• 58:10Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  And that is the problem that just continues to lurch around the video game violence conversation.

• 58:16Ryan Broderick?

  It's also, I mean, something that I've definitely been thinking about a lot recently because a project I'm working on currently. The complications around right wing social control. And you can see it right now with the schism happening after Charlie Kirk's death and Nick Fuentes ascending to sort of the top of the heap. And to me, that is like such an obvious display of how difficult it is for the right wing to control social behavior in the exact way they want. The army would be another great way where it's like, we want to indoctrinate kids into joining the army by putting them on a truck when they're not even 18 years old and letting them play video games with soldiers. But if they take those guns into a classroom,

• 58:59Ryan Broderick?

  that's bad. And it's like, well, that's a really, really hard line to walk. In the same way that they're like, we want to like have all of our supporters posting racist edgelord memes. But the minute they start photoshopping Charlie Kirk's face on a Japanese porn clips, that's apparently a step too far. And it's like, well, that's, that's a really hard line to keep people on. And so you see this even in the 90s with Jack Thompson where it's like, we want to ban all explicit art. But I guarantee you, if you went back in a little time machine and you ask Jack Thompson like, well, what about, you know, this piece of racist filmmaking from the 50s or whatever? He'd be like, well, that's probably fine, you know, or like the, the sort of evangelical Christian background, like that's really fine.

• 59:44Ryan Broderick?

  But it's, it's about sort of maintaining this very strict line to keep people on. And the modern world, I think, has just made that infinitely more complicated for, for the right because these behaviors don't exist in a vacuum.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  Do, do we have time for me to ask my one big question for you?

• 1:00:00Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  It's like the future.

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  How does the GOP have it both ways? So the future of this is you have the gamergate contingency that has, you know, played a serious role in creating the Trump coalition, or inspiring it, I guess you could say, and still around it. And then at the same time, you will have them now and then, say that video games are the devil, or porn is the devil, or anime and hentai are the devil.

• 1:00:27Ryan Broderick?

  Those things are, that is true.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  Sure, sure. But it's this weird thing of you're attacking your cohort.

• 1:00:36Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  And I don't know how that balance works out in the long term.

• 1:00:41Ryan Broderick?

  It's extremely complicated to maintain, and you can see how difficult it is for them. Because it effectively took them the better part of 15 years to get to this point, and this point is not even really functioning that well. Like, the people that I was just talking about, who are like photoshopping Charlie Kirk's face onto porn stars, they never liked Charlie Kirk. They were the sort of the right of the right. So like, this coalition is very loose. But I think the simplest answer to your question is, self-loathing is very powerful. And you can see this a lot with like, right-wing accounts on X, where they are clearly like a hentai-addicted freak, who is talking about like, restoring like, Western Christian values.

• 1:01:24Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, you can see this with like, the Jeffrey Epstein email leaks, where it's like, all these right-wing dudes are like, doing something with a bunch of underage girls in like, cabana houses, and like, writing poetry to each other about it. There's such a core of self-loathing to the entire right-wing project. And so it doesn't totally surprise me that right as they sort of put video games in their crosshairs, so to speak, they also figured out a way to start radicalizing and recruiting from those very video game players.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:56Ryan Broderick?

  Because it's such an easy story to tell. And like, 4chan is nothing but an infinite pit of misery and self-loathing. It is not hard, in my mind, to imagine someone like Steve Bannon or Marlon Annapolis going into those spaces and being like, "You're a worthless piece of shit, and everything that you care about is violent and dangerous." But wouldn't it be great if like, the president knew what your memes were? And like, talked to you that way? And then maybe one day in the future, you can be big and strong and not be staring at hentai all day?

• 1:02:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  I'm drawing a line now that we're wrapping up.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Also, now, everyone knows that this is a bullshit conversation. It's like every time there's a match, like, we've given up. Everyone knows that the game is, that the game is over. There's no interest in fixing anything, but you gotta say something to stop the conversation or change the conversation when there's a school shooting. So like, if you're an alt-right video game player who's spending all your time doing that, and then you see that they're saying, "Video games are the problem," you go, "Well, they, no one's gonna talk to my video games, so it doesn't fucking matter." Like, like, they can just ignore the dangling keys, because they're still, like, their porn hasn't been taken away, their video games haven't been taken away. So like, those words, they can just ignore, because like, they're united in like, the hating of women.

• 1:03:17Speaker 02

  That is so spot on, in that my family in the Midwest, who follow Trump, the excuse is always, "Oh, he's just saying that." That thing, he's just saying, but the things that we like, he means, until it happens to come for you. Okay, well, that's appropriately sad.

• 1:03:37Ryan Broderick?

  I think there's an unspoken second, sort of, point, that you will see articulated in really, really extreme spaces, which is like, if Trump tomorrow was like, "We're gonna ban video games," the assumption from a lot of his more extreme followers is like, "Well, for everyone else."

• 1:04:02Ryan Broderick?

  And, and, and, and that is, like, the, the idea is like, we're gonna elevate, you know, the most racist chuds possible to the top, and they can watch anime and play video games, and then they'll be worshipped for it, but no one else will be able to, which is like, such a powerful projection of my own self-loathing. It's like, "We're gonna police the rest of society, and not let them do what I do, and I'll keep doing it, and they'll like, and, and then I'll be at the top, though, so it won't matter." It's, it's such a, it's such a complicated psycho, like, psychology to put out, and it works so well.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  It's like J.D. Vance with all of his boyfriends, you know, he's able, he's able to, no, all right, okay, we can, I can cut that, it's fine.

• 1:04:44Ryan Broderick?

  I think, I think, I mean, I agree with you.

• 1:04:50Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, what I will say, it is like J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance is in a lot of ways sort of the archetype of this. He is a politician who grew up in the exact time period we've been talking about today, in the height of anti-video game hysteria, the height of evangelical Christian hysteria. And a lot of times, he is repeating the same stuff, but with a little wink. A little like, "Yeah, we're gonna do it, but not for you guys." A little sassy wink, little J.D. Little eyeliner wink. I guess to sort of put a cap on all of this, do you, okay, imagine we get to vote again, and imagine we don't have a Republican in office.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:05:32Ryan Broderick?

  How do you see sort of like this story continuing? Like, do you think we're just gonna be talking about this forever, or do you think?

• 1:05:42Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, of course. At least another 20 years. I mean, we didn't even talk about, you know, Hillary Clinton put forward the legislation that didn't go through in 2005. Obama requested Congress do an investigation following a school shooting. The legislation in California, I believe, came from a state senator, Leland Yee, who amazingly was accused of smuggling, I think smuggling weapons or dealing firearms. He was found guilty of racketeering. So, you know, it's like you said, it's always for you, not for me, or the opposite. So, no, I think it's, this isn't like a conservative thing.

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  This is a, it's an easy thing to point at for now. I think what will change is the stuff that I mentioned, like, "Hey, we should really investigate gambling in video games, especially free-to-play games that are targeted towards kids." I think we're very slowly starting to see movement on that. And I think we're seeing major publishers actually preemptively Prepare for it. That's a real threat that is gonna come into this station.

• 1:06:53Ryan Broderick?

  And I suppose it's worth like running through just like an around the world section here just because it is kind of interesting because this is not specifically an American problem. So the UK, they had a big blow up over there. The very sick. I remember this game. Carmageddon. Do you remember that game?

• 1:07:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:09Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that game.

• 1:07:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, Death Race to Carmageddon. Man, every, I feel like every 20 years we get a game where you just drive over people with your car and it's lose their.

• 1:07:18Ryan Broderick?

  I loved Carmageddon and the UK demanded a version of the game where all the blood from the people you're running over is green. And that was in the late 90s. In the 2010s, Uzbekistan attempts to ban a group of games, including Grand Theft Auto and Mortal Kombat, but also The Sims for distorting values. Uh, let's see, Japan.

• 1:07:40Speaker 02

  I say really quickly of the time doesn't change.

• 1:07:42Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:43Speaker 02

  I don't know if you saw the new Prey movie, Prey Badlands?

• 1:07:45Ryan Broderick?

  I haven't seen it yet.

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  But we're still living in this world where it's like you just changed the color of the blood. There are humans that have white blood in the movie. So I guess they're like androids.

• 1:07:55Ryan Broderick?

  They're androids. Yeah, they're androids.

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  The number of decapitations in this movie is all time high shit. Our movie PG 13, whatever you want to call it. You change the color of the blood and the MPAs like, our job here is done.

• 1:08:08Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, they're cool with it.

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  We're good.

• 1:08:10Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, yeah, just to finish this out, Mortal Kombat 11 doesn't get released in Japan, Indonesia, or Ukraine. It's banned later in China and Korea in the two, in the early 2020s. The Taliban is invading Afghanistan, right? As players unknown battleground or PUBG is getting popular. And hilariously, both the Afghan government and the Taliban agree that it's bad. And the Taliban, when they take over, eventually banned PUBG.

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  Great.

• 1:08:38Ryan Broderick?

  Which is just great. And yeah, I think you're right. I think this stuff will just continue to happen. It is, it is a fear of governments around the world as if, yeah, Carmageddon, oh, kind of so good.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  I wanted to shoot that box art with you because it's beautiful.

• 1:08:53Ryan Broderick?

  I, I, I totally forgot about this game. I lost so many hours to this game. And I did not become a school shooter, by the way.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you just have a jilted girlfriend and a jilted producer because you're busy playing video games instead of paying attention to us.

• 1:09:10Ryan Broderick?

  I have never committed vehicular homicide and I did so many hours in Carmageddon just mowing down random civilians. Oh my God. What a game.

• 1:09:18Speaker 02

  Grant, can I just say how cute it is that you put yourself right alongside?

• 1:09:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I was gonna, I was, so I was not gonna touch that one. I was just ignoring that because like I was like, I don't like, during our next couples therapy session, me and Grant can talk about it.

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  You're putting that on the Patreon, right?

• 1:09:37Ryan Broderick?

  We are. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's right.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  People would fucking pay for that.

• 1:09:41Ryan Broderick?

  Right, right up there with Grant's workout videos that they want to.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  3,000 patrons and I will upload the workout videos. We're 1,000 away. Get 1,000 of your

• 1:09:49Ryan Broderick?

  But remember, the rule is you're not allowed to speak in them. You're just, you just have to silently work out in front of the camera.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  I don't fucking speak when I work out. I'm locked in.

• 1:09:57Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I wanted to, I wanted to feel like security camera footage. Okay, Chris, where can people follow you online?

• 1:10:04Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you so much for asking. If you want more of this, you can find me at post.games. Just download Post Games on your favorite podcast app of choice. It's a delightful show and one day I'll have you both on, maybe for some couples therapy.

• 1:10:18Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, bring us on.

• 1:10:19Speaker 02

  Carmageddon.

• 1:10:20Ryan Broderick?

  I would talk about any of your games that I'm aware of and play.

• 1:10:25Speaker 02

  Great.

• 1:10:25Ryan Broderick?

  Which is, which is very small, but I have a Steam Deck, you know, so I can, I can get a game to play for the show.

• 1:10:34Speaker 02

  You've got gamer cred. Don't worry, I'll get you set up.

• 1:10:36Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, cool.

• 1:10:38Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstedt is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Kuga is their Director of Marketing. YouTube and Podcast Growth Marketer, Samantha Hollows. And Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at [email protected]. Be sure

• 1:11:23Ryan Broderick?

  to check out the Panic World YouTube channel, which you can find at youtube.com/panicworldpod.

• 1:11:29Ryan Broderick?

  And please, give us some nice ratings on podcast apps and leave a funny review. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.

• 1:11:42Speaker 06

  Stone Fire Naan is made with real buttermilk and ghee. It's the perfect flatbread for any occasion.

• 1:11:47Speaker 07

  I put out Stone Fire Naan with dips at every dinner party.

• 1:11:50Speaker 06

  I make naan grilled cheese when my daughter has friends over.

• 1:11:53Speaker 08

  I use Stone Fire Naan to reward the humans who do my bidding.

• 1:11:57Speaker 07

  Right, it's perfect for camping trips. Dance for it, feeble mortal. Sorry, is he talking to me or? Dance. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

• 1:12:07Speaker 06

  From our tradition to yours, Stone Fire.

• 1:12:10Speaker 07

  Together we Naan.