Would it have been a better had I merely said "Video games support and reinforce carjacking."?
The problem is, as I see it,
nobody fucking ever actually reads Foucault. They
love to name drop, post quotes, and cherry pick from his work, but actually read it? naw bro, too hard. I say this, precisely for this exact sort of conflating cultivation and normalization that is disturbingly pervasive among pseudo-intellectuals with ideological axes to grind and ulterior motives that underlie them. And on the flip side,
nobody fucking actually reads Foucault to be equipped with a tool kit for countering the bullshit narrative.
Here's what's going on.
Cultivation is a theory that states people believe the world is, as represented by mass media. That's it. So for example, if all an hypothetical person ever watched was The Office and had never been exposed to an actual white-collar workplace before, they might be inclined to think white-collar workplaces are happy go-lucky affairs populated by whacky folks who get up to shenanigans for which they rarely, if ever, face lasting consequences. When the reality is Dunder-Mifflin's HR and legal team would have taken a chainsaw to the Scranton branch simply to avoid the avalanche of potential hostile work environment suits, starting with Michael.
Or, a more stark and controversial example, if all a person ever watched was Lifetime, informative murder porn channels like Investigation Discovery, or dumpster-tier infotainment channels like HLN, they'd be more likely to believe the majority of men (if not all men) are abusive and likely to murder their spouses, while the women would be abusive and likely to murder their children.
Except the problem is, you don't get from cultivation to normalization in a vacuum as aforementioned pseudo-intellectuals assert. Normalization is
contextual, and while cultivation is a key factor it must be paired with operant conditioning to create a regime of thoughts and behaviors to be
idealized as well as denigrated. Your average cubicle-monkey isn't turning into Jim or Dwight because, even though The Office is an idealized work place, a television show alone cannot create conditions for reward or punishment for the viewer based upon how they act in their own work places.
And likewise, Lifetime specials and informative murder porn don't idealize spousal and child abuse, and murder, all on their own; rather, they superficially denigrate it. You could make the case they idealize those behaviors in a uniquely American sense in the greater context of all media because American media idealizes fame, and if nothing involvement in a particularly salacious abuse or murder case is one way to get famous fast (and likely a book or movie deal). I mean case in point,
But are those shitty television shows capable of
normalizing spousal and child abuse, and murder, of and by themselves? No.
The argument is, due to these games' mechanics, violent and "deviant" behavior is idealized by way of incentivization in the context of game play. The issue is, incentivization and idealization/denigration are not synonymous. The GTA series in particular, despite that violent and "deviant" behaviors are incentivized in the course of game play, those behaviors are also
denigrated as the games go out of their way to portray the player characters as
villainous. Even accounting for the series' overarching themes of excess materialism and consumerism, late capitalism, gross social inequity, and toxic masculinity as definitive breeding grounds for criminality.
The worst you'll get from GTA is
cultivation, which in this case is a perception of the world as violently criminal and overwhelmingly dominated by the very worst excesses of capitalism.
Because the game does not idealize this state of affairs; rather, it condemns it.
