Most remember Senator Joe Lieberman, who passed away last week at the age of 82, as the running mate of Al Gore in the hotly contested 2000 presidential elections, with all of their hanging chads. But I’ll always have a soft spot for his Quixotic jeremiad against video games.
To set the stage, let me share the opening lines of a New York Times op-ed from 1998, with the cheery title of Children and Violent Video Games: A Warning. “It's almost Christmas. Do you know what your children are playing? Might they perhaps be ripping out the spines of their enemies, perpetrating massacres of marching bands and splatting their screens with sprays and spurts of pixelated blood?”
Massacres of marching bands? Was this the Gray Lady, or had the drugs taken hold somewhere outside the Mushroom Kingdom? The hysteria over violence in video games wasn’t the first politicized mass-media moral crusade, and it wouldn’t be the last: today, the political panic centers mainly on TikTok. But it is one of the first that I remember experiencing in real-time. It crescendoed in 1994, when Lieberman convened the second of two Congressional hearings demanding that the American video game industry regulate itself or face governmental intervention.
American authorities had long viewed electronic entertainments with suspicion. Chicago, New York City and Los Angeles banned pinball altogether until the mid-Seventies, linking them to gambling and organized crime. Video games, which arrived in a cultural sense with Pong in 1972, initially proved too simple to attract much scrutiny. But they steadily improved over the course of the decade – or rather, one might say, Japan steadily improved them. As made-in-Japan megahits like Space Invaders and Pac-Man gobbled up the nation’s quarters like so many power-pellets, the grown-ups started to worry again. C. Everett Koop, America’s Surgeon General (a title that always sounded suspiciously like a game character to me) weighed in on the topic at the peak of the Pac-Man craze in 1982. In a fiery speech he declared that video games addicted children “body and soul.”
As a survivor of Pac-Man Fever, I can say it’s true: Buckner & Garcia’s epic ode of the same name is etched forever in my brain. On the other, it’s hard to get addicted to something that can be cut off by the simple expedient of denying a child some quarters. And the home game consoles of the era were, let’s be honest, not very good, though they too left their marks in other ways, such as my never-ending fascination with wood-paneled electronics. Criticism (of Koop, not the paneling, never the paneling) came so quickly and fiercely that he issued a follow-up statement to the effect that well that was just, like, my opinion, man. Game over, Surgeon General!
Or maybe not: the entire American home video game industry crashed and burned the following year. In the wake of that Missile Command-esque implosion, Japanese companies made landfall one after the other. Nintendo debuted the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985, Sega the Master System in 1986, and NEC the TurboGrafx-16 in 1987. The “console wars” were on.
Koop’s dark insinuations about Pac-Man and friends hadn’t made much of a dent in the discussion, but in 1993, Senator Lieberman hit the “ready player two” button. To set the stage, the airwaves were filled with a mix of Whitney Houston and the five grunge songs mainstream radio endlessly played. Babydoll dresses, tattered plaid flannel, and combat boots were in. And video games had emerged as something more than digital curiosities: they were by this point Culture with a capital C, competing with television and movies as equals – or betters. In 1993, Nintendo earned more than all of Hollywood’s top five studios put together, and more kids surveyed recognized Mario than they did Mickey Mouse.
This period also marked the peak of “Japan bashing” in the West. The race-baiting Rising Sun, which hit theaters in 1993, delivered sympathetic audiences a Sean Connery “very, very okotta” at dastardly Japanese businessmen. Japanese game companies ruled the tech landscape to the point even Apple quivered in their boots, so you’d expect Nintendo and their rivals would make a convenient target for politicians (and the occasional Scotsman). But ironically, it wasn’t Japanese games that attracted Lieberman’s ire. It was a pair of American ones by the names of Mortal Kombat and Night Trap.
Japanese games were filled with violence, too, but it was of a highly stylized and cartoonish variety. Less pump-action shotgun than “inflating dragons with a pump until they pop.” It was American creators who injected “realistically” portrayed brutality into their games. I use scare quotes because this was “realism” modeled not on “reality” but “Hollywood” (admittedly, a thin distinction in the minds of many of my fellow countryfolk.) Both Mortal Kombat and Night Trap featured digitized imagery of actors engaging in all sorts of naughty behavior – you know, ripping out hearts, slumber parties with fading child-stars, the works. None of it really went beyond what you might see in a PG-13 rated film back then, but games were only for kids, and who will think of the children? The only thing that stood between the youth of America and digital dissipation was Lieberman, and he was very very okotta indeed.
The thing was, games weren’t only for kids, even back then. I was twenty, more or less, when these games hit the market and I was okotta, too, albeit for different reasons: these two games really sucked. Okay, Mortal Kombat didn’t suck, exactly. It felt like the (superior) Street Fighter II on meth, though even a grump like me could see that was precisely its charm. But Night Trap? Where to begin. It felt less like a game than some kind of ophthalmological S&M, forcing players to mash buttons in response to pixelated, postage-stamp sized videos. And the biggest crime of all: they’d made me spend thirty-nine bucks on it!
Lieberman convened a press conference in December of 1993. In the mode of a king of yore enlisting a champion to fight in his stead, he arrived in the company of one Captain Kangaroo, another man, come to think of it, possessing a moniker reminiscent of a game character. “We're not talking Pac-Man or Space Invaders anymore,” said Lieberman, apparently forgetting the ire that gentle pellet-muncher had aroused in the Surgeon General a decade before. “We're talking about video games that glorify violence and teach children to enjoy inflicting the most gruesome forms of cruelty imaginable.” No footage of the press conference seems to exist, though I like to imagine Bob Keeshan’s gleaming golden bowl-cut swishing mournfully in simpatico. There were going to be hearings, said Lieberman. He and the Captain were going to get to the bottom of this.
So it was that a U.S. senator compelled the heads of Sega of America and Nintendo of America to appear before Congress and explain themselves over games they hadn’t even created. Key to Lieberman’s inquisition was the testimony of one Professor Eugene F. Provenzo, author of a book called Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo, who claimed that “violence, destruction, xenophobia, racism, and sexism are so much a part of the world of Nintendo.” Mama mia! Keeshan wasn’t in attendance, but it felt like a kangaroo court all the same.
As the American heads of Nintendo and Sega traded barbs over which puppet of Japanese masters was the worse of the two, Lieberman theatrically waved a pastel blue light-gun in the shape of a revolver, an accessory from the Konami game Lethal Enforcers. Perhaps cowed by this show of plastic force, the heads of the game industry agreed to self-regulate. Henceforth they would label their products according to the decisions of an Entertainment Software Rating Board, or ESRB. But much like the “Parental Advisory” labels that Congress demanded record companies add to albums with explicit lyrics, the highlighting of naughtiness only served to increase the sales of naughty products. Sega’s uncensored home version of Mortal Kombat went on to outsell Nintendo’s sanitized edition by five to one, according to the head of its publisher Acclaim. Mission accomplished, in that George W sense of the word.
You might be asking yourself: how was Japan reacting to all of this? The answer is with a shrug. The tradepaper Game Machine devoted precisely one-quarter of one page to coverage of the hearings in all of 1994. It’s easy to understand why: this was someone else’s problem. The consoles may have been Japanese, but most of the games on trial were American-made. And Japan never really saw video games as kids’ stuff in the first place. Space Invaders competed against pachinko for the hundred-yen coins of bored salarymen. The government saw arcades as adult entertainment spaces, making it difficult for kids to get in. And Mortal Kombat fared poorly against domestic competitors with better gameplay and graphic design. The problem in Japanese gaming (at least, insofar as the authorities saw it) wasn’t one of violence but one of sex: little in the way of blood, lots in the way of anime-girl hanky-panky. And that was a very big deal in Japan –more so, perhaps, than violence was in the States. But that’s that’s a cel-acious story for another time.
Footage of the Congressional video-game hearings has aged like a fine cheese. Boomers in suits squirm in their seats as grainy footage of video game violence plays on a giant glass-tube TV perched atop one of those old-school AV carts. You’d be forgiven for thinking this was taking place in a classroom rather than the hallowed halls of Congress, were it not for all the haberdashery and fine wood paneling (there I go again.) Phrases like “I’ve studied the video game literature” are uttered with gravitas. Descriptions are delivered with the clinical attachment of a county coroner. “When a player wins, the death sequence begins,” says Lieberman in his trademark nasal monotone, reminiscent of Steven Wright’s deejaying in Reservoir Dogs. “The game narrator instructs the player to, and I quote, ‘finish’ his opponent. The player must then choose a method of murder.” Murder! Won’t someone think of the pixels? Some part of me wonders how much Mortal Kombat might have benefitted from a Lieberman voice-over.
While the 1993-4 hearings may have succeeded in establishing a ratings system for games, as the 1998 quote that opened this essay shows, they did absolutely nothing to quell the fears over video-game violence in the States. But the hearings were only peripherally about violence: they were really about inter-generational conflict. The old folks hadn’t liked that Pac-Man, by golly, but couldn’t put their finger on why. Mortal Kombat delivered them the gift of something to get worked up about.
Today it all feels a little quaint: games are everywhere, and far more explicit than anything produced in 1993. More to the point daily life has been gamified, with all of its algorithmically-driven engament, its likes and views and all the perceived influence that comes with them — a development far more insidious than cartoonish pixellated violence. So what was it all for? There’s a moment that perfectly captures the futility of the hearings. At one point, Nintendo of America’s then-president Howard Lincoln takes the mic to righteously declare that “Night Trap will never appear on a Nintendo system.” Nintendo released a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the game for the kid-friendly Switch in 2018 to absolutely zero controversy.
This may have been Lieberman's high water mark! Intentionally or not. Thanks for commemorating.
Thanks for revisiting this episode of American moral panic and highlighting Lieberman’s role. It does seem quaint but I really appreciate your tying it to the TikTok madness.