The Philippines has banned a video game. Not just any game, but one that, according to the authorities, was linked to a high school shooter. The British gaming watchdog, ever vigilant in its bureaucratic torpor, now reviews the classification. One can almost hear the rustle of official forms, the solemn nodding of committees. How very Roman of them: a new vice, a new scourge, and the state must step in with its stern finger-wagging.
Let us not mince words. This is intellectual decadence dressed up as moral responsibility. The high school shooter, a wretched product of a broken society, played a video game. Therefore, the video game must be the cause. It is the same logic that blamed comic books for juvenile delinquency in the 1950s, rock music for teenage rebellion in the 1960s, and the internet for everything since the 1990s. We seek scapegoats because confronting the real rot is too uncomfortable.
The real rot is the erosion of community, the atomisation of the individual, the collapse of authority—familial, educational, spiritual. A young man picks up a gun because he has been raised in a vacuum of meaning, where the only values are those of the marketplace and the self. He plays a game that simulates violence, but the game is not the teacher; the culture is. And our culture, from Manila to Manchester, is hollowed out. We have traded thick identities for thin ones, loyalty for liberty, and wonder for titillation.
I do not defend the game. I have not played it. But I note that the Philippines, a nation wrestling with deep poverty, political instability, and a fractious history, thinks that banning a digital product will solve something. It will not. It will merely provide a placebo for a populace hungry for simple answers. Meanwhile, the British watchdog will produce a report, likely filled with cautious language and references to ‘harm’ and ‘risk’. Harm is real, but it is not in the pixels. It is in the soul.
We forget that the Victorians, for all their prudishness, understood something. They did not ban penny dreadfuls; they built libraries and mechanics’ institutes. They invested in character formation, not censorship. They knew that a culture that does not cultivate the inner life will be consumed by the outer noise. Today, we have noise. The game is just more noise. Banning it is another form of noise.
What should be done? Not much that a government can legislate. But we can stop pretending that media is the villain. The villain is the absence of a coherent moral framework, the retreat from the difficult work of raising citizens, and the surrender to a consumerist hell where everything is a commodity, even violence. The shooter was a consumer of violence long before he played that game. He was consuming a culture that has no place for him, no narrative of redemption, no vision of the good life beyond gratification.
So ban the game if you must. But know that you are not solving anything. You are merely rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The iceberg is much larger, and it is us.
