So the Philippines, in a fit of post-massacre moral clarity, has banned a video game. A high school shooter used it, you see. And now the UK gaming industry, a body that has spent the last decade trying to convince us that loot boxes are not gambling and that 12-year-olds should be allowed to simulate violent crime for hours on end, is calling for a ‘review’. The sheer predictability of it all would be tiresome if it were not so tragically Roman.
Let us go back to the late Empire, when the Senate would ban astrology after a particularly embarrassing coup prediction, or outlaw purple dye because a barbarian chieftain wore it. The pattern is eternal: a society feels a tremor of genuine horror, and it reaches for the nearest symbolic scapegoat. The Philippines has its culprit: a video game. The UK industry, in its response, has revealed its true nature: a trade association that believes the only problem with violent content is that people keep noticing it.
The shooter in question, a disturbed young man in a country with some of the most restrictive gun laws in Asia, did what disturbed young men have always done: he found a tool. In the 18th century it was a pamphlet, in the 20th a rifle, in the 21st a game controller. But the gaming industry’s defence is always the same: correlation is not causation, millions of people play this game without murdering anyone, and so on. All true. All irrelevant.
Because the real issue is not whether video games cause violence. That argument is as tired as a Victorian clergyman blaming the penny dreadful. The real issue is that the gaming industry has become a cultural juggernaut that refuses to engage in any serious self-reflection. It is the Hollywood of the 1970s, the rock and roll of the 1950s, the comic books of the 1940s: a medium that is simultaneously desperate for respectability and terrified of adult responsibility.
Consider the timing. This ban comes at a moment when the Philippines, a nation with a notoriously brutal drug war and a president who has compared himself to Hitler, decides to take a stand on virtual violence. The hypocrisy is staggering. But it is also instructive. It shows us that moral panics are never about the object itself. They are about the society that panics. The Philippines is not worried about the game. It is worried about the young, the Americanised, the uncontrollable. It is the same panic that led the Romans to ban Dionysian cults and the Victorians to ban dancing.
And what of the UK gaming industry’s call for a review? Let me save them the time. The review will conclude that more research is needed. It will recommend voluntary guidelines. It will issue a statement about the importance of parental controls. And then nothing will change. Because the industry knows that the only way to truly address this issue is to admit that its product, like alcohol or tobacco or cinema, has a dark side that cannot be fully regulated away. And that would require a level of honesty that the modern corporate world, with its focus groups and its brand managers, simply cannot muster.
So here we are. A ban in Manila, a review in London, and a shooter in the ground. The historical cycles grind on. The Romans banned astrology. The Victorians banned penny dreadfuls. And we, in our infinite wisdom, will ban a video game. The only question is whether we will learn anything from the pattern. I suspect we will not. We never do.
