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Department of Informatics and Media Master’s Programme in Social Sciences, Digital Media and Society specialization Two-year Master’s Thesis Exploring Media Panic Discourses: News Media Attitudes toward Digital Games in China Student: Erchen Shi Supervisor: Peter Jakobsson June 2021 i Abstract Previous research demonstrated the phenomenon of moral panics on “dangerous” games mostly from Western perspectives, regarding media violence and deviant behaviour. With the development of media technology, the term “media panic” has evolved from moral panic, representing the debates and fearful emotion from the public when a new media technology has been created. Digital games as a form of media technology have been developed to be widely played on various platforms in recent decades, which have not only brought concerns to the Western but also to Chinese society. The present study will introduce media panic on digital games in China by analyzing news reports from three Chinese mainstream news media: People’s Daily, Xinhua Daily Telegraph and Wen Wei Po (Shanghai). Content analysis will be adopted as the main method to process the news data (N = 445) which are collected from five periods between 2002 and 2020 (2002-2004, 2007-2009, 2012-2014, 2017-2019, 2020). Different phases and features of the panic will be analyzed through the classical moral panic theories of Cohen, Goode and Ben-Yehuda, and the media panic theory of Drotner. Topics of game addiction, Internet cafes, policies on the game industry, cultural innovation, development of esports will be explored when investigating the changing media attitudes toward digital games in the Chinese context. Keywords: digital games, game addiction, news media, moral panic, media panic, content analysis i List of Figures 4.1 Figure 1 Sample data from three news media sources at different times (page 28) 6.1 Figure 2 The general trend of the code attitudes (page 52) 6.1 Figure 3 The percentage of different attitudes in People’s Daily (page 53) 6.1 Figure 4 The percentage of different attitudes in Xinhua Daily Telegraph (page 54) 6.1 Figure 5 The percentage of different attitudes in Wen Wei Po (page 55) 6.1 Figure 6 The percentage of code deviance, victims and cultural ideology (page 55) 6.1 Figure 7 The percentage of different categories within deviance (page 56) 6.1 Figure 8 The percentage of different categories within cultural ideology (page 58) 6.1 Figure 9 The percentage of different categories within interest group (page 58) iii List of Tables 5.1 Table 1 News attitudes toward digital games 2002 - 2004 (page 34) 5.1 Table 2 Deviant behaviour reported by news media 2002 - 2004 (page 35) 5.1 Table 3 Interest groups participating in media panics 2002 - 2004 (page 36) 5.1 Table 4 News media’s cultural ideology of digital games 2002 - 2004 (page 36) 5.1 Table 5 Victims of digital games reported by the news media 2002 - 2004 (page 37) 5.2 Table 6 News attitudes toward digital games 2007 - 2009 (page 38) 5.2 Table 7 Deviant behaviour reported by news media 2007 - 2009 (page 38) 5.2 Table 8 Interest groups participating in media panics 2007 - 2009 (page 39) 5.2 Table 9 News media’s cultural ideology of digital games 2007 - 2009 (page 40) 5.2 Table 10 Victims of digital games reported by the news media 2007 - 2009 (page 40) 5.3 Table 11 News attitudes toward digital games 2012 - 2014 (page 41) 5.3 Table 12 Deviant behaviour reported by news media 2012 - 2014 (page 42) 5.3 Table 13 Interest groups participating in media panics 2012 - 2014 (page 43) 5.3 Table 14 News media’s cultural ideology of digital games 2012 - 2014 (page 43) 5.3 Table 15 Victims of digital games reported by the news media 2012 - 2014 (page 44) 5.4 Table 16 News attitudes toward digital games 2017 - 2019 (page 45) 5.4 Table 17 Deviant behaviour reported by news media 2017 - 2019 (page 46) 5.4 Table 18 Interest groups participating in media panics 2017 - 2019 (page 47) 5.4 Table 19 News media’s cultural ideology of digital games 2017 - 2019 (page 48) 5.4 Table 20 Victims of digital games reported by the news media 2017 - 2019 (page 48) 5.5 Table 21 News attitudes toward digital games 2020 (page 49) 5.5 Table 22 Deviant behaviour reported by news media 2020 (page 50) 5.5 Table 23 Interest groups participating in media panics 2020 (page 51) 5.5 Table 24 News media’s cultural ideology of digital games 2020 (page 51) 5.5 Table 25 Victims of digital games reported by the news media 2020 (page 52) Table of Contents Abstract i List of Figures ii List of Tables iii Introduction 1 1.1 Background to Global Media Panics 1 1.2 Media Panics toward digital Games in Chinese Society 3 1.3 Aim and Research Questions 5 Literature Review 8 2.1 Media Violence and Aggression 8 2.2 Violent digital Games, School Shootings and Mass Media 9 2.3 Moral Panics, Media Panics and Mass Media 11 2.3.1 Moral Panics and the Media 11 2.3.2 Media Panics and the Media 12 2.4 “Dangerous” Digital Games in China 13 2.4.1 Fear of the Internet and Digital Games Addiction 13 2.4.2 Chinese Gaming Content in News Media 15 2.5 Research Gap and Contribution 16 Theoretical Framework 18 3.1 Elements of Moral Panics 18 3.2 Deviance and News Media 20 3.3 Models of Moral Panics 21 3.4 Cultural Significance in Media Panics 23 Methodology 26 4.1 Data Collection 26 4.2 Content Analysis and Implementations 28 4.3 Ethical Considerations 32 Data Analysis and Results 33 5.1 Starts of Controversy: 2002 - 2004 33 5.2 Media Panics Ongoing: 2007 - 2009 37 5.3 The Retreat: 2012 - 2014 41 5.4 Panics Coming Back: 2017-2019 44 5.5 2020: End of Panics? 48 Discussion 52 6.1 Findings and Contextualization 52 6.2 Limitations 61 Conclusion 62 Acknowledgement 63 References 64 Appendixes 72 Sample News Reportings Mentioned in the Thesis 72 Coding Sheet 77 1 1. Introduction 1.1 Background to Global Media Panics The discussion of moral panic, as well as the role of the media in moral panic, began with Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972), which is a sociological masterpiece exploring the overreaction to Mods and Rockers during the 1960s in Britain. The concept of ‘moral panic’ is defined at the beginning of the research: “A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible” (Cohen, 1972/2011: 1). According to Cohen, the mass media devote a great deal of space to deviance, with the reporting of sensational crimes, scandals, bizarre happenings and strange goings-on (Cohen, 1972/2011: 10). Proponents of ‘moral panic’ as a theoretical concept have argued that the term is every bit as relevant to the contemporary media landscape as it was to the relatively unsophisticated reporting of the Mods and Rockers in the mid-1960s (Hunt, 1997: 644). Admittedly, moral panic has evolved and developed in recent decades, but its relationship with the mass media is in no danger of withering away. Today, with the penetration of digitalization in society, digital games as a relatively new component of cyberculture and media technology have not only become a well-researched topic in moral panics but also trigger a ‘media panic’ along with all the other emerging digital mediums and ICTs. Digital games have allegedly become one of the ‘threats’ to societal values and have been attracting emotional criticism for years, along with the development of information and media technology, playing its part in the new form of a public overreaction. The extent of “overreaction” in moral panics can be understood as mass media focuses on a non-existent problem, or paying much more attention to a specific condition (or time period) than others (Goode & Ben-Yehuda, 1994: 158). 2 For many reasons, it is pervasive for the public to blame ‘dangerous’ games for causing violence or ill health, which sometimes could end up in a moral panic. For instance, the Columbine (Colorado) killings in 1999 were linked with the killers’ affection for violent digital games. Subsequent school shootings, both in the US (the Virginia Tech killings in 2007) and in Europe (Emsdetten, Germany, 2006; Jokela High School, Tuusula, Finland, 2007), were likewise linked to heavy use of violent games. More recently, in the event which many Norwegians refer to simply as “22 July,” Anders Behring Breivik killed 74 people and wounded 242 others, including 69 young people simply shot down on the island of Utøya. Breivik acknowledged playing games such as Modern Warfare 2 and World of Warcraft (WoW), in part as “training” (Ess, 2013: 215). News media that dutifully publicized negative aspects of violent digital games during the school shooting events had been considered playing its role in creating moral panics, because there was no causal link between violent games and school shootings and statistics showed that as violent digital games became more popular, “the violent crimes decreased dramatically” in some countries like Canada, Australia, EU and UK (Ferguson, 2008: 33).