Apocalypse Postponed: Discourses on Video Games from Noxious Objects to Redemptive Devices

Carbone and Ruffino's "Apocalypse Postponed: Discourses on Video Games from Noxious Objects to Redemptive Devices" examines how public and scholarly discussion of video games has shifted over roughly the past two decades. The authors trace a movement from early 2000s framings, when games were widely blamed for violence in the wake of the 1999 Columbine shooting and condemned as wasteful, toward a more contested landscape in which they are increasingly presented as beneficial for cognitive skills, maturity, and social problem-solving. Their central thesis is that these newer, redemptive narratives are no more rigorous than the apocalyptic ones they replaced, and that both rest on a form of technological determinism that reverses polarity without deepening understanding.

The book's critique centers on the statistics and examples commonly marshaled to support positive claims. Industry-linked surveys, such as Entertainment Software Association data on player age and gender, and market-size figures drawn from sources like Newzoo, are shown not to logically establish psychological, social, or aesthetic benefits. Praise for individual titles, such as the reception of L.A. Noire at the Tribeca screening, is similarly found to rely on film-derived standards rather than on the qualities of gameplay itself. The authors note that scapegoating after the 2011 Oslo attacks was notably less pronounced than after Columbine, with academic critics such as Christopher Ferguson resisting the impulse to blame games.

Ultimately, the authors argue that shifts in discourse, from sanitary concern to aesthetic appraisal to claims of activist potential, are driven more by discursive formations than by accumulating historical evidence. They contend that games are still frequently either trivialized or overhyped rather than examined in their historical, social, and psychological complexity. The book calls for critical, self-aware scholarship that resists uncritical acceptance of either apocalyptic or redemptive claims, and its argument is grounded primarily in media-effects, cultural-studies, and game-studies literature rather than in original empirical data.