ABSTRACT

This chapter provides an overview of the dominant approaches to understanding the impact of mediation on media consumers. Before approaching the topic regarding video games however, it is important to plot the trajectory of how people have understood moral panics from the media. The first video game subjected to moral panic was the 1976 driving simulator Death Race. The chapter covers five main areas of thought: a definition of moral panic, early accounts of media fears, the rise of moral panics as a result of mass communication, the refinement of media effects as individual processing, interactivity as a key igniter of moral panic debate. The chapter also covers a contemporary view of media effects as the interaction of messages and the idiosyncratic ways they are processed. As a social science, the study of media psychology aims to untangle the complex relationship between humans and the evolving digital environment.