Playing with violence: Gamers’ social construction of violent video game play as tolerable deviance

Relatively little research has focused on leisure pastimes that include violence. The current study explores one increasingly popular leisure activity: violent video games. Regardless of the simulated violence and socially anomic behaviour in games, they have become a socially accepted leisure activity. That is, whereas there is a degree of social concern, unease, and sometimes disdain about violent game play, it remains tolerated within society. Little is known about the cultural implications of this leisure practice, especially from a “gamer's” perspective. The purpose of this study was to explore players’ social constructions of “gaming” and the socio‐cultural implications of “playing with violence” as a form of tolerable deviance. Players’ viewed the games as harmless leisure entertainment, while simultaneously indicating unease and social concern. The opposing nature of these experiences resulted in players’ dissonance about their involvement. Players’ rationalizations helped them to dissipate the dissonance between the two internally opposing positions. Supportive rationalizations such as these perpetuate the view of such activities as socially “harmless.”