Du sollst nicht töten spielen

Abstract

Two cases of running amok at German schools in 2002 and 2006 have fuelled the ongoing video game controversy. The adolescents who committed the crimes notoriously played violent video games, and the similarities between the scenarios of the games and the school massacres seemed to confirm drastically the findings of media researchers, that the exposure to violent game content causes aggressive behaviour. Conservative politicians in Germany have exhibited a law by which the production and sale of ›killographic‹ video games (Killerspiele) shall be sconced up to one year imprisonment. The present paper argues that this is a hysterical reaction typical for an adaptational crisis in the course of media upheavals. Like the reading revolution in the late 18th and the film debate in the early 20th century, the video game controversy around the year 2000 indicates conceptual difficulties in grasping the nature of new media forms. Lacking the adequate conceptual schemes the public discourse cannot differentiate the portrayal of a practice and the practice portrayed. Particularly with regard to the portrayal of violent behaviour this must lead to hysterical reactions. The morphological hard core of recent video games seems to be a new and unique type of iconic resonance that establishes a mutual shaping of the empirical performance of the player and the virtual world that is exposed on the computer display. The Gameplay thus enacts an artificial portrayal of the phenomenology of practices and establishes a simulation of life. Instead of the violence debate the paper advocates a critique of simulation styles according to the well established literary and film critique.