Historian Kevin Impellizeri shares a story of a video game controversy to his friends: Elford Stephens, Phil Thomas, and Andy Hunter. As we work our way towards learning how video games got age ratings in the United States by learning about how violent video games, led by Mortal Kombat, made people anxious about the impact of games on kids. This increased attention to Mortal Kombat and its imitators came at a time when Americans were really concerned about violence in society, especially youth violence. These circumstances, in turn, inspired some people to call upon the industry to rate itself, lest the federal government do it for them.

Topics discussed include: Mortal Kombat clones, the 1993 “Summer of Violence,” the secret origins of Mokap, the underreported epidemic of centaur leg thefts, and how the media ruined the lives of countless children (but not in the ways you might think).

Content warning: (20:00-1:08:48) Discussion of mass shootings, violent crime, gun violence, and mass incarceration.

Important sources for this episode:
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010).
Theodore Chiricos, "Moral Panic As Ideology: Drugs, Violence, Race and Punishment in America," in Justice with Prejudice: Race and Criminal Justice in America, eds. Michael J. Lynch and E. Britt Patterson (Guilderland, NY: Harrow and Heston, 1996): 19-48.
Paul Colomy and Laura Ross Greiner, “Making Violence Visible: The News Media and the Summer of Violence,” Denver Law Review 77, Iss. 4 (“Symposium - Law and Policy on Youth Violence”) (January 2000): 661-688.
LyNell Hancock, “When Denver Lost Its Mind Over Youth Crime,” The New Republic, November 23, 2021: https://newrepublic.com/article/164419/denver-lost-mind-youth-crime-wave-panic
Sara Sun Beale, “The News Media’s Influence on Criminal Justice Policy: How Market-Driven News Promotes Punitiveness,” William and Mary Law Review 48, No. 2 (2006): 397-481.

To learn more about different theories about why the U.S. crime rates went down so much since the early 1990s, see: Dana Lind and German Lopez, “16 Theories for Why Crime Plummeted in the US,” Vox, May 20, 2015, https://www.vox.com/2015/2/13/8032231/crime-drop.

Check out Jax’s amazing ending cutscene from Mortal Kombat 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNkRvcUn6VM. 

Theme Music: Occam's Sikhwee by Sikh Knowledge (Free Music Archive: https://bit.ly/33G4sLO), used under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US (https://bit.ly/33JXogQ) 

More info, including show notes and sources at http://scandalousgamespodcast.wordpress.com.