Blame Video Games: Baltimore Ravens Take Players’ Games Away, Lose Anyway

from the try-again dept

I very much promise that you don’t need to know about, or even care about, American football in any way for this post. We should all know at this point that the “blame video games” crowd has not gotten any smaller recently and that video games are blamed for just about everything you can think of as a result. Presidential candidate gets shot at? Video games. Think that America is in a state of moral decay? Video games! Mass shootings? Video games, bruh! The abuse of Medicaid coverage? You guessed it: video games.

This cultural default is so pervasive, in fact, then when the Baltimore Ravens started off this NFL season with one win in four contests, the team decided that part of the problem was the video game consoles in the locker room.

On October 20, The Baltimore Sun reported that after going 1-3 and a player posting a photo of them playing games to social media, team officials and Harbaugh removed several “recreational staples” from the Ravens’ locker room. These included a basketball hoop, a ping pong table, a few corn hole boards, and some “video game consoles.”

The report doesn’t specify which consoles, but it does mention that the team often played “intense rounds” of Super Smash Bros, so I’d assume some Switch or Switch 2 systems were removed. The outlet also says that these Super Smash sessions drew “small crowds of teammates late in the day.”

I’ll just go ahead and note that the Ravens lost the following two games after those “recreational staples”, including the gaming consoles, were removed. Now, they won this past weekend, but that was because they were playing the Bears and the universe enjoys keeping me miserable, but that isn’t really the point.

Instead, the point is that this reflex is stupid. Video games aren’t making the Ravens bad at football. A combination of the players playing and the coaches coaching is what is doing that. And while this is something of a silly story without any real important consequences coming from it, it certainly does highlight the silliness and ubiquity of this video game blaming reflex we seem to have as a society.

Stop looking for scapegoats, in other words.

Filed Under: blame, football, videos games

Companies: baltimore ravens