The gutter press is a truly unique British institution with the power to topple governments and ruin celebrities. Peter Parrish investigates our redtops irrational hatred of computer and video games.
If you’ve been unfortunate enough to see a Daily Mirror headline recently, chances are high that you’ll have been exposed to something like this: “FATAL GRAND THEFT DEATH CHASE OF SKIVING BIRD FLU IMMIGRANTS KILLED OUR PRINCESS”. Other than political wrongheadedness, conspiracy theories about decade-old car crashes and Sodoku, there’s nothing our sensationalist tabloids enjoy doing more than drawing dubious links between gaming hijinx and every single crime committed in the entire country.
Rather than being the result of a complex and unpredictable stew of social, cultural and psychological factors, it turns out that criminality can be accurately determined by how much you enjoy playing the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Thank heavens for that - it saves an awful lot of time-consuming research. Handily, the resultant media exposure also tends to act as something of a sales boost; almost as if tabloid scaremongering and controversial game sales are reciprocally feeding off one another like gigantic, slurping parasites. Or something.
All complete nonsense, of course. If games had ever possessed the level of influence hypothesised by certain contemporary columnists looking for a cheap way to SHOCK the nation, the world around us would have been reduced to smoking wreckage many moons ago. Can’t quite believe that 8-bit machines would teach such malevolence? Then please take a standard-issue white coat and follow the pulsing floor lights towards the scientific research area, as we expose the deeply disturbing lessons taunt by the murky underbelly of Spectrum software ...
