La Voce del Sonnambulismo Contemporaneo

Stefano Gualeni's essay, published in the 2012 issue of a Critical Notes journal, examines the long-running controversy over violence in video games by tracing it back to the origins of Mortal Kombat. The piece opens with Midway Games' attempt to capitalize on Capcom's Street Fighter II, which led to a graphically brutal fighting game whose gore provoked a congressional hearing in December 1993. That political pressure produced the ESRB rating system in 1994, but the author argues that the debate has persisted for nearly two decades without conclusive empirical evidence linking virtual violence to real-world aggression.

The central argument is that developers and players defend games by treating virtual worlds as separate, non-communicating realms in which depicted violence functions as a formal feedback mechanism, akin to an explosion in Asteroids. Gualeni finds this defense contradictory, pointing to the growing promotion of serious games, which explicitly aim to transfer behaviors learned in virtual environments into everyday life. He suggests the industry cannot consistently claim that games have real-world influence when that influence is socially beneficial while denying it when it is not.

Drawing on Marshall McLuhan's concept of "the voice of contemporary sleepwalking," the essay contends that public disputes focus on media content, whereas the lasting effects of a medium lie in the structures of thought it enables. Gualeni argues that interactive digital media offer modular, repeatable, and ontologically independent worlds, which Jos De Mul and Vilém Flusser frame as a shift toward possibility and play, an "Homo ludens" orientation toward reality.