So the Philippines, a nation we in the West are usually keen to lecture about human rights, has done something rather sensible. It has banned a video game – apparently the favourite digital pastime of a school shooter – and the UK games industry, predictably, is now crying for even more age-verification laws. How very efficient. The Manila government acted decisively, while our own bleating guardians of digital liberty wring their hands and propose another layer of bureaucratic red tape. Is this not a perfect microcosm of the intellectual decadence I have long warned about?
The Philippines, a country with a notoriously complicated relationship with the rule of law, has nonetheless seen the obvious: when a teenager murders his classmates and is found to have been obsessed with a particular video game, it is perhaps not an unreasonable leap to suggest that the game might have played some role. Not a proximate cause, you understand – I am not a simpleton who believes in direct, one-to-one causation between pixels and pathology. But we must consider the cultural environment. A disturbed mind feeds on cultural detritus; it is the soil in which the seed of violence grows. Remove the soil, or at least sanitise it, and you reduce the harvest of monsters.
Now, the UK games industry, that bastion of enlightened self-interest, has responded with a proposal for tighter age-verification laws. Splendid. More surveillance, more forms, more friction for legitimate consumers, all while the industry continues to produce games that glorify violence, dehumanise enemies, and reward antisocial behaviour. Age verification is a placebo, a sop to anxious parents, a way to say 'we did something' without actually addressing the rot at the core. The Philippines, however, cut the Gordian knot: if a game is so provocative that it becomes the calling card of school shooters, ban the bloody thing.
I hear the howls already: censorship! Authoritarianism! Where will it end? Such arguments are the refuge of the intellectually lazy. Every civilisation draws lines. The Victorians banned obscene materials; they did not collapse into tyranny. We ban child pornography. We ban hate speech. Why is pornography a special category of protected speech? Because it is profitable, and we have fetishised profit above all other values. The Enlightenment taught us to question authority, but it also taught us to cultivate virtue. We have abandoned the latter and turned the former into a fetish.
The British games industry's response – more age verification – is a classic example of what I call the 'bureaucratic evasion'. It is the same mechanism that gives us traffic cameras instead of better drivers, or risk assessments instead of common sense. It shifts responsibility from the producer to the consumer, from the culture to the individual. But culture matters. A civilisation that endlessly produces violent, nihilistic entertainment for profit is a civilisation that has lost the plot. The Philippines, for all its flaws, remembers that the state has a duty to protect the souls of its young, not just their bodies.
Some will say this is an overreaction, that video games are harmless escapism. Tell that to the parents of the children in that school. Tell that to the families of the dozens of kids who have been traumatised by these incidents. The evidence linking violent games to aggression is disputed, but the evidence that they serve as a badge of identity for outcasts is overwhelming. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold wore Trench Coats; now school shooters wear gamer tags. The Philippines has recognised this cultural shift and responded accordingly.
Meanwhile, our own industry proposes a 'verification' system that will do nothing to stop a determined teenager from accessing the game. It will merely create a new market for fake IDs and VPNs. It is a solution that solves nothing while making the industry look concerned. I would rather have a government that occasionally overreacts than one that never acts at all. The Philippines has sent a message: there are limits. Perhaps the West will learn, though I doubt it. We are too busy congratulating ourselves on our sophistication, even as we are consumed by the decay we refuse to name.
