Just a game?

Any new entertainment technology worth its salt is greeted as a portent of impending doom. In the 18th and 19th centuries, moralists fretted that novels would leave readers (especially women) sexually inflamed, disconnected from reality, and prone to vice, family desertion, and even suicide. The advent of radio was feared as a distraction from wholesome reading; in turn, movies were decried as a distraction from wholesome family radio listening. Television was such an object of instant cultural anxiety that Bela Lugosi starred in a thriller, , in 1935 – only ten years after John Logie Baird’s first demonstration of the technology and a year before the BBC launched the world’s