If {battleState = BattleState.standby}: Bringing the Gamer Into Play in Computer Game Development
As it becomes clear throughout the contributions of this book, those who regularly deal with questions about potential negative effects of computer games are among others anxious parents, legislators entrusted with the protection of minors, reviewers working for entertainment software self-regulation bodies like the German USK and journalists, educators and psychologists interested in an possible link between computer games and the aggressive behaviour of children.
Abstract
Computer games are frequently discussed with regard to those who play them, usually focusing on children and adolescents, especially young Western males. Within these discussions, we can identify different concerns that are associated with different problematisations, e.g. the question of harmful effects that computer games may have on the player. In Germany computer games, children, young adolescents and the topic of media harm are fairly often grouped in one single collection and thereby related to each other. As it becomes clear throughout the contributions of this book, those who regularly deal with questions about potential negative effects of computer games are among others anxious parents, legislators entrusted with the protection of minors, reviewers working for entertainment software self-regulation bodies like the German USK (cf. Schank, 2017); moreover, there are journalists, educators and psychologists interested in an possible link between computer games and the aggressive behaviour of children. They all share certain concerns regarding computer games and children, frequently addressing them through categories in which children as vulnerable subjects in need of protection are endangered by specific products of the entertainment industry. These concerns do also exist among the developers of computer games in Germany, where I did two years of ethnographic observations. After all, they cannot ignore the critical discourse about the potential harm their products may cause and for many reasons, including moral and economic considerations, they have to take a