Disinterest as a Media Effect?

Last week, I posted about the potential for anti-social media content to have a pro-social effect on individuals in the form of eliciting feelings of appreciation and meaningfulness - that is, such content could led to moral pause rather than moral panic. Today, I consider how anti-social content can elicit feelings of disinterest; that is, virtual experiences with morally abhorring content might drive us to be disgusted by rather than engrossed in the content. These passages are excerpts from an upcoming essay on video game theory and research - rough pages here, so please feel free to comment and challenge! 


Disinterest. As entertainment software, we commonly assume video games to be inherently engaging and interesting. Yet, an often-overlooked effect of game content on individuals is that of disinterest – simply, the notion that we can become less interested or attracted towards a thought, feeling, or behavior after experiencing its mediated version. Bogost (2011) argued that gaming experiences are not inherently enjoyable, and that they can be just as include to licit shock as well as awe; that is, we can be repulsed by gaming content just as much as we can be engrossed by it. Notably, this is not a cathartic argument, as catharsis would assume individuals to have some affinity toward the content so as to expunge it in advance of real-world consequences (a concept that has been heavily critiqued in the literature; cf. Bushman, 2002). Rather, disinterest argues that video game portrayals can create or reinforce our negative gut reactions to anti-social content.

Figure 1. Screenshot from The Torture Game

An example of such disinterest can be found in the browser-based casual game The Torture Game (Figure 1), a game that invites players to take turns “tortur[ing] the poor guy using different objects” (ArcadeCabin.com, para. 2). In the game, players select from a series of brutal – nooses, guns, straight razors, chainsaws, and pikes to name a few – and are invited to use them in an effort to inflict varying amounts of damage onto the zombie-like figure (Figure 1). While the figure appears to be in a catatonic state, his health status is displayed as a smear of blood in the bottom-left portion of the screen and once depleted, the figure collapses into a bloody mess, bellows a desperate groan and is proclaimed “dead.”  Gameplay is simple, violent, and graphic, and is not justified by any narrative element. Rather, it is clearly and blatantly labeled as torture. Furthermore, gamers are given the option to replace the figure’s head with any image from their computer or the Internet, serving as a digital voodoo doll. In short, if any video game could be considered a true torture and murder simulator, The Torture Game most closely fits the bill. Reaction to the game was (and continues to be) very intense, with even avid video gamers questioning the role of such content in the general panacea of gaming. Popular video game forum Kongregate hosted a debate about the “evil or stress-relieving” qualities of this game, and a general theme of the discussion can best be summarized by user @kingbilly, who writes:

“To be honest, the concept of having torture in a flash game is sick. I’ve never played it and never will…” (Kongregate, 2008).

Yet, such repulsion is precisely what Bogost (2011) argues is both (a) a potential media effect and (b) a decidedly pro-social one. In being repulsed, gamers are reminded of their own humanistic limits, and by vicariously experiencing the role of executioner, are left with a feeling of guilt and even disgust from bearing witness to their own actions. Moreover, the real-world implications of this process are not trivial. Consider the current debate in the US regarding proper interrogation techniques of suspected terrorists. Proponents of the practice contest that such “enhanced interrogation techniques” (Nordgren, 2011) allow intelligence agents to ascertain valuable information regarding future terrorist activities against US targets. Yet, these individuals rarely have experienced the practice themselves. In fact, US human rights activist Steve Powers has already hosted public events simulating water boarding in real life, finding individuals who experience the treatment firsthand almost instantaneously reverse their support of the practice (cf. Nordgren, 2011). Video games may play an even more compelling role in this process, allowing for the simulation of similar actions and forcing individuals to cope with the consequences of their own actions. The concept of disinterest moves beyond the catharsis perspective and argues that the learning of anti-social models of cognition, affect, or behavior can result in the internalization and eventual rejection of the same – yet this claim has yet to be tested empirically.

Read more about the notion of disinterest in Ian Bogost's book "How To Do Things With Video Games" (Chapter 19), and read my review of the same in the International Journal of Communication.