A report from the Media Analysis Laboratory
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby B.C.
October 1998
Reprinted with permission.

Introduction

As industry legend has it, the first video game "Space Wars" took a multi-million dollar, room size PDP1 computer in the basement of MIT to play the first video game. Yet, because it demonstrated the novel possibility of using computers for fun, Steve Russell's invention has had a profound an impact on contemporary children's culture. By applying the same cybernetic principles of "interactivity" -- originally associated with automation and office technology -- to children's entertainment, he created an entirely new medium out of the TV screen. Indeed, just three decades after its invention, video gaming became the fastest growing and most profitable children's cultural industry which is expected to garner an estimated $30 billion in 1998 for the corporations that manufacture, design and sell them.

Mario, Sonic and Crash Bandycoot are as familiar as Mickey, Donald and Bugs were in previous generations. Mortal Kombat and Doom are household names. Indeed the video game industry has become the most active and dynamic merchandisers of culture to the young. It has already won 30% of the US toy market, earning $8.8 billion in the US alone - a share which is larger than the Hollywood box-office gross ($5.2 billion) and ten times the amount spent on the production of children's television (Haynes and Dinsey, 1995). And with the help of their growing global marketing efforts, video game culture is developing a loyal following of millions, who prefer interacting in cyber-play rather than "vegging-out" in front of the television, hanging around with friends or playing street sports. Just as parents were becoming accustomed to the fact that their kids were spending close to three hours a day with television, the video game came along and began changing children's leisure. This report is about the impact of that invention on Canadian youth.

The growth of this new play culture has not been publically acknowledged. Comparing it with the more glamourized internet technology Stiles (1995), notes that this industries astounding success is due to the manufacturers' constant innovations in technology and programming. The current home consoles (sold for under $200 in Canada) pack as much processing capacity as thousands of those original PDP's and 10 times that of the latest Pentium PC's. Moreover, recent advances in 3D graphics means kids are playing the latest versions of Doom, Mortal Kombat, and Final Fantasy on extremely advanced 10 MIP consoles with computational speeds and graphics display chips exceeding those of most engineering workstations.  In his book Being Digital (1995), Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT media lab similarly claims that the growth of video gaming is just another indication of the way computers are increasingly transforming so many aspects of human communication. "We are not waiting on any invention. It is here. It is now. It is almost genetic in its nature, in that each generation will become more digital than the proceeding one. The control bits of that digital future are more than ever before in the hands of the young. Nothing could make me happier."  

Whether we agree with his optimism or not, there is little doubt that our children's popular entertainment is becoming increasingly hi-tech. Video games emerge from the convergence of the twentieth century's two most important communication technologies - the computer and television and this "hybrid" is already profoundly changing the way children play and learn.

Douglas Rushkoff, in his book Playing the Future, says "While their parents may condemn Nintendo as mindless and masterbatory, kids who have mastered video gaming early on stand a better chance of exploiting the real but mediated inter-activity that will make itself available to them by the time they hit techno-puberty in their teens."  He goes on to quote Timothy Leary to support his optimism about the impact of kids interactive entertainment: "The importance of the Nintendo phenomenon is about equal to that of the Gutenberg Printing press. Here you had a new generation of kids who grew up knowing that they could change whats on the screen."

Yet as this report documents, the video game industry has not only been selling our kids on digital technology, but also a unique entertainment experience which has already dramatically affected the way kids allocate and spend their leisure time. Indeed, according to Eugene Provenzo (1991), one of the first to examine this emerging cultural trend, the real significance of video game technology for contemporary childhood is that:

Yet as Provenzo notes, this hybrid technology offers a novel and confusing blend of TV's spectatorship with the computers interactive play. It is confusing at least to parents, because although the computer chips makes play more "dynamic" and "controllable", the contents and themes of these games appear to be extensions of escapist TV fare. Have we really transcended and reversed the effects of television in this new digital playground he wonders when so much of it resonates with action-adventure fantasy and cartoon violence. Noting that "[T]he largest single target audience will no doubt be children" Provenzo worries that video game industry is simply extending the troubled TV culture of the past :  "If the video game industry is going to provide the foundation for the development of interactive television, then concerned parents and educators have cause for considerable alarm. During the past decade, the video game industry has developed games whose social content has been overwhelmingly violent, sexist, and even racist."

Indeed, bathed in a maniacal aggressiveness, filled with a postmodern cynicism and urging a new tribalism of virtual comradery, the offerings from the multimedia entertainment industries has increasingly caught the eye of the popular press. What new identities and values are they inculcating in the coming generations they ask. What activities and social relations are being eroded by children's increasing fascination with the screen. Several writers have speculated on the addictiveness of interactive entertainment for some children (Kubey 1996, Keepers 1992, Griffiths 1994) and others have remarked on the frenzied aggressive themes borrowed from action adventure films and television (Kinder 1994) and brutal so prevalent in the world of interactive entertainment (Anderson and Ford 1986, Durkin 1996, Funk 1997). Yet compared with television, there is a remarkably limited research literature on the questions of aggressiveness, isolation and addiction of young people to video games.  

Despite its ascent as the fastest growing entertainment industry, there is remarkably little academic study of the development and acceptance of this new medium and even less of its impact on children's culture. As cultural critic of virtual media, Allucquère Rosanne Stone (1995) recently observed, "there seems no question that a significant proportion of young people will spend a significant and increasing proportion of their waking-hours playing computer based games." She goes on to add that, "it is entirely possible that computer-based games will turn out to be the major unacknowledged source of socialization and education in industrialized countries before the 1990s have run their course" (p. 26-27). Video games have already been incorporated into the daily routines of 65% of all U.S. households, and 85% of those with male children. When figures for game systems are measured against recent Statistics Canada estimates that PC's have penetrated just 40% of Canadian households and the internet only about 20%, the video game appears to be by far the more important children's communication medium (Statistics Canada, 1997). So when it comes to discussing the cultural impact of computers on childhood we should pay a little more attention to the growth of home game systems, arcade gaming, and increasingly virtual theme parks.

Although the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement (BBM) is beginning to measure internet use, and Statistics Canada now includes computers and modems in its inventories of home technologies, there is very little reliable public data on video games, their use, or why children choose to play them, let alone their impact on children's culture. Stone attributes this to the feeling on the part of many academics that computer games are beneath serious attention, or worse simply a blip on the more important screen of the coming age of digital communication. Unfortunately, the consequence of this attitude is that we run the risk of ignoring one of the most dynamic and influential forces shaping children's culture today.

The present research, therefore, was undertaken to understand the growing significance of children's video game play by providing data on Canadian teenagers' involvement, interest and motives for gaming. Although the industry studies the gaming market extensively, the data is proprietory. This report provides therefore the first public survey of B.C. teen's attitudes and behaviors around video game play. The research objectives which guided the development of the survey can be summarized as follows:

1.   to gain awareness of the distribution of video game technology in the homes of teenagers.  

2.   to document the importance of video games in the lives of teens, specifically looking at how, when, where, and with whom they played.  

3.   to examine teens' leisure time and how they integrated video gaming into their entertainment preferences.  

4.   to explore the kinds of games they enjoyed and their motivations for playing them.  

5.   to learn about teens' opinions and concerns around gaming, especially around the issues of violence and addiction.  

6.   to examine the way their families controlled or influenced their play habits.
 

Overall, this study sought to understand one key question:  

Why are so many young people today turning on their video game consoles in search of excitement, distraction and solace among the various other options for leisure, self-development and entertainment?