Prelims

Half Title Page

Video Games, Crime and Next-gen Deviance

Title Page

Video Games, Crime and Next-gen Deviance

Reorienting the Debate

Edited by

Craig Kelly, Adam Lynes, and Kevin Hoffin

Birmingham City University, UK

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2020

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ISBN: 978-1-83867-450-2 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83867-447-2 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-83867-449-6 (Epub)

Dedication

Dedicated to Charlotte, Lore and Eleanor

About the Editors

Craig Kelly is a Lecturer in Criminology at Birmingham City University. His research interests include violence, organised crime and illicit markets. His previous research has sought to re-theorise serial murder (the Dark Flâneur) and ethnographic research of violence and illicit markets. He is currently working alongside Dr Adam Lynes on a project examining the links between drill music and knife crime.

Dr Adam Lynes is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Birmingham City University, where he has taught since 2012, covering topics such as criminological theory, homicide and transnational organised and corporate crime. He is currently involved in a number of ongoing research projects. With regard to research articles, he is currently examining the supposed links between drill music and the rise in knife crime, along with further developing his new theoretical framework on serial murder (the Dark Flâneur) which seeks to re-orientate academic discussions on this form of offending.

Kevin Hoffin is a Lecturer in Criminology at Birmingham City University, UK. His research interests involve transgression, subcultures and media representations of crime and justice, particularly in comics. He also contributes to the field of Black Metal Theory. He is currently publishing a material on how subcultures are subject to a glocalisation effect through the kaleidoscope of Black Metal.

About the Contributors

Melindy Brown is a Lecturer in Criminology at Birmingham City University. Her main areas of research are around the topics of desistance, rehabilitation, probation and substance use. Currently she is focusing on support within the community to encourage desistance from offending and substance misuse, with a particular focus on alcohol-related offending.

Ben Colliver is a Lecturer in Criminology at Birmingham City University. His research interests include hate crime, gender and sexuality. His most recent project focuses on ‘everyday’ incidents of hate crime targeting transgender communities. He is a member of the steering group of the British Society of Criminology Hate Crime Network

Elaine DeVos had a 15-year professional career in computing before beginning her academic career. She completed her undergraduate degree with the Open University and graduated from Birmingham City University with a Masters distinction in Criminology. Elaine is currently a Doctoral Researcher at Brunel University London.

Max Hart is an Associate Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Worcester. He began this position after completing his Masters in Criminology at Birmingham City University, followed by a 6-month post as a Research Assistant within the Social Research and Evaluation Unit within the same institution. His interests include cybercrime, media and crime, popular culture and ultra-realism.

John Bahadur Lamb gained his PhD at Birmingham City University investigating how the United Kingdom's counter-terrorism policy operationalised. He recently moved to a new position as Senior Lecturer in Policing at Staffordshire University's Institute of Policing. Alongside his research, Dr Bahadur Lamb regularly contributes advice to police and military counter-terrorism units and maintains links with industry and other governmental departments.

Geraldine Lee-Treweek is a Sociologist/Social Gerontologist. The founder of the world's first Abuse Studies degree, she has research interests in toxic masculinity and femininity; social exclusion; gender-based violence; race hate; human trafficking; vulnerable adults and risk; and feminisms.

Saabirah Osman is a Lecturer in Criminology and Policing at Leeds Trinity University. Prior her current role, Saabirah worked within the Birmingham Youth Offending services and other Higher Education institutes. Saabirah's area of interest is around the successful rehabilitation and reintegration of sex offenders. Whilst pursuing her academic role, Saabirah is still involved in providing support for young people within the Criminal Justice System.

James Treadwell is Professor of Criminology at Staffordshire University and has also worked at the University of Birmingham and University of Leicester. Previously he worked for the crime reduction charity NACRO and as a Probation Officer in the West Midlands. He undertakes ethnographic and qualitative research for crime and criminal justice-related projects, including studies of the English Defence League and the August 2011 English Riots.

Foreword: Climax culture

The crude idea that violent games directly influence violence outside these worlds is increasingly rejected. Yet, as the contributions in this volume highlight, our concern with the subtle and more complex articulations of harm that flow from game worlds is only just beginning to take shape. As with film, literature and other products of our material culture, video games join with and shape the subjectivities and complex social lives of their many players. Games bed down in both the complex social, economic, political and psychological structures of their times, but they are also products of those conditions. The players of games and the designers of those games are themselves social subjects, keen to experience or produce visceral responses in those walking the spaces they have designed. The companies that publish and develop software, code and new titles are increasingly large organisations with the kind of mercenary motives to make profits and to win their own corporate battles – for hearts, minds and the dollars of players, shareholders and venture capitalist investors. The rules and culture of capitalism are increasingly evident as recent stories highlight practices of tax avoidance and sharp practices that rival the in-game narratives of Grand Theft Auto (Rockstar, 2013). Gold farmers spend time sourcing goods that can be sold, companies embed casino mechanisms into games filled with corporate messages and systems – advertising, rankings, billboards and social media. Meanwhile the stuff of games themselves has become what some see as a kind of constant creative inertia – more of the same, another Call of Duty (Infinity Ward, 2019), a slight graphics upgrade here, a new and more sadistic perspective there to draw jaded gamers in. The economy and society loom large in all of these configurations.

As the contributions highlight in diverse and useful ways, the question is not simply one of violence and more a question of how games are situated within a much wider web of harms as these cultural products become part of the contemporary culture. We need to understand the complex pathways of articulation, reception and cultivation of what may be subtly anti-social formations as well as those, more fleeting engagements with little of substance to them. One of the problems of the media effects holy grail in research is its highly psychologised approach which diminishes the complexity, variety and range of social settings and contexts within which such pursuits occur, shape and are deployed by their users. None of this denies the concern we will still have with anti-social, misogynist, blunt sociological models in narrowly defined gameworlds. As I write this, the most popular games are overtly militaristic, para-nationalist and unremittingly violent games whose ‘social’ content has if anything reduced some claim to narrative and good storytelling. Fragging all round. But also there a farming simulator (Focus Home Interactive, 2019), various Lego games (Interactive Entertainment, 2017, 2019), Minecraft (Mojang, 2009) and several delightful if derivative Nintendo games. Like drivers who are also pedestrians and cyclists, many gamers match mood and time with particular titles and the sense that a genuinely anti-social force is pervasive needs to be tempered.

The thesis of Kelly, Lynes and Hoffin that we are diverted from wider and multiple harms by a simplistic interest in direct violence is a valuable one. Indeed, we, our societies and polities, remain significant producers of violence through our neglect (and direct promotion of) of the deeper causes of violence, structural conditions, family violence and weakening community structures. Yet a focus on games and gaming continues to provide a useful scapegoat. Even so we can recognise that these leisure forms may have harmful impacts while being subtly woven into a culture fixed on vicariously experiencing violence. Call of Duty (Infinity Ward, 2019) or GTA (Rockstar, 2013) may not induce killing, but a vulnerable or damaged child's maturing moral world can now (whereas in the past it could not) be enveloped in an electively engaged world of bleak media that might include not only violent video games but diverse forms of pornography, celebrity culture, Instagram bodies, mediated bullying and fail videos – a phantasmagoria of images and experiences. The idea that such points of social and technological confluence should not concern us would seem perverse and complacent. The influence of these complex and varied experiences in a less cohesive and more complex and precarious social world remain thought-provoking and important areas for study. What these contributions also focus on is the potentially deepening corrosion of the subject by capitalism that operates through its games as well as through labour, via endless rounds of consumption, immersion and stasis – a kind of apathetic hyperactivity that is now incredibly pervasive.

The pursuit of experiences in a kind of climax culture is everywhere – a focus on the peak moments, the explosive release, an endless repeating of constantly, exploding, perfectly aimed at heads serving as the preparation for competitive, empty, apolitical, corporate staging posts in a modular (or indeed military) life. The harms and effects of games themselves are shaped within variegated worlds and formats – online players cajoling, competing and bullying in ways that mirror or extend behaviour in playgrounds an hour or two earlier. Complex single player adventures create more or less fascistic ubermenschs whose unassailability makes all into cannon fodder and render all subordinates to the game-driven narrative of a hero or, increasingly, anti-hero. All of this is a long way from Super Mario 64 (Nintendo, 1996), but of course we can also choose to return to such formats, taking joy in non-networked safety, immune from the baiting and exhausting tribal competitions of Fortnite (Epic Games, 2018) or Call of Duty (Infinity Ward, 2019).

Look away from mass shootings apparently inspired by gameplay, and a more intricate series of connections between a shifting line of deviance and normality revolves around videogame culture and play. A forceful argument that spans the contributions found here is the sense that an inquiring attitude is needed in a world still immature and grappling with what it means to spend time in, to compete (sometimes professionally) and to enjoy or find another form of labour and drudgery in the wide world of games around us. Crime, deviance and harm are inevitably parts of this emerging context. But it is clear that the increasing social content of many games spills out, bleeding into the fabric of the ‘real’ world in new, complex and sometimes unanticipated ways, inspiring guilt, deviance, pleasure or simply joy. This book is a worthwhile engagement that dials down a reactionary response to games, replacing this with new questions and perspectives constructively engaging with today's ludodromes.

Rowland Atkinson

Research Chair in Inclusive Societies, University of Sheffield

Acknowledgements

Craig

First and foremost I would like to thank my wife Charlotte. Her continued support made this possible, not to mention the fact that I would be hard pressed to find anyone else who would put up with my rants and ramblings as she has in the last few months (though she would probably argue longer). Thank you to my little man, Oscar who discovered video games as I wrote this. Thank you to my mum, if it wasn't for your support I would never be sat typing this (I even managed not to call you mother here!). A thank you to my wider family for all your support, with special thanks to Anne and Stuart for all the childcare and other help in the last four years. A thank you to the many academics who have taken their time to help me, mentor me and support me in the last few years, with a special thank you to James Treadwell, Emma Kelly, John Lamb and Simon Winlow. A huge thank you goes to Rowland Atkinson for being kind enough to provide the foreword to this edited collection. Thank you to Adam Lynes and Kevin Hoffin for supporting me in the project, it is not lost on me how random this all sounded when we first discussed it! Thank you to all of those who were kind enough to contribute to the collection, taking time out of such busy schedules was not easy and we really appreciate it. Thank you to all my colleagues at BCU for your support as I start my career, especially Sarah Pemberton, the greatest line manager I could of wished for!

Adam

First and foremost I would like to thank Lore for her continual love and support, without which I would have given up a long time ago. Special thanks also go to the contributors of the collection, who I know took time out of their (incredibly) busy schedule to make this possible. Last but not least, I would like to thank my family for their unwavering encouragement, guidance, and who instilled in me the priceless value of knowledge. Thank you to Rowland Atkinson for the foreword.

Kevin

Thanks go to Eleanor, my family, my cousin Sam for helping to keep my love of gaming alive, all the contributors to this text, my co-authors Elaine DeVos and Dr Geraldine Lee-Treweek. And especially my co-editors Adam and Craig and friends at BCU and elsewhere.