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Non-violent game


Nonviolent video games are video games characterized by little or no violence. As the term is vague, game designers, developers, and marketers that describe themselves as non-violent video game makers, as well as certain reviewers and members of the non-violent gaming community, often employ it to describe games with comparatively little or no violence. The definition has been applied flexibly to games in such purposive genres as the Christian video game, however a number of games at the fringe of the "non-violence" label can only be viewed as objectively violent.

The purposes behind the development of the nonviolent genre are primarily reactionary in nature. As video quality and level of gaming technology have increased, the violent nature of some video games has gained worldwide attention from moral, political, gender, and medical/psychological quarters. The popularity of violent video games and increases in youth violence have led to much research into the degree to which video games may be blamed for societally negative behaviors. Despite the inconclusive nature of the scientific results, a number of groups have rejected violent video games as offensive and have promoted the development of non-violent alternatives. The existence of a market for such games has in turn led to the manufacture and distribution of a number of games specifically designed for the nonviolent gaming community. Video game reviewers have additionally identified a number of games belonging to traditionally violent gameplay genres as "nonviolent" in comparison to a typical game from the violent genre. Despite the fact that some of these games contain mild violence, many of them have entered the argot of nonviolent gamers as characteristic non-violent games.

Controversies surrounding the negative influences of video games are nearly as old as the medium itself. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan, a noted media theorist, suggested in his book, , that "[t]he games people play reveal a great deal about them. " This was built upon in the early 1980s in an anti-video-game crusade spearheaded by the former Long Island PTA president, Ronnie Lamm, who spoke about her cause on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour in December 1982. The same year, Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, had suggested that games had no merit and offered little in the way of anything constructive to young people. Despite early general claims of the negative effects of video games, however, effects of these concerns were relatively minor prior to the early 1990s.


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