The moral panic surrounding violent video games: a pragmatist perspective

Abstract

The article offers an alternative to the constructivist approach to moral panics. It presents the broad outlines of pragmatist sociology, inspired by the founding works of pragmatist philosophy and ethnomethodology, to re-grasp moral panics as shared troubles that surround living together. This invitation is based on the one hand on the analysis of the use of moral panic as a given to understand the problem of violent video games, as it is presented mainly in the academic literature of game studies. On the other hand, an empirical investigation shows that such a public problem does not systematically give rise to moral panic, as the case of the ban on violent video games in Switzerland indicates.