Moral panic Mortal Kombat sparked widespread controversy on its release. Moral panic Mortal Kombat sparked widespread controversy on its release. On its release in 1993, Midway's gore-filled fighting game ushered in a new era of hyperviolent gaming that continues to influence the industry to this day O n 9 December 1993, Democratic senator Joe Lieberman sat before a congressional hearing on video game violence and told attendees that the video game industry had crossed a line. The focus of his ire was Mortal Kombat, Midway's bloody fighting game, recently released on the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System after a successful run in the arcades. "Blood splatters from the contestants' heads," he told the room. "The game narrator instructs the player to finish his opponent.

Earlier last week, just around the time when the driver of Rishi Sunak's armoured Jaguar might have been thinking about typing "Bletchley Park" into the limousine's satnav, Joe Biden was in the White House putting his signature on a new executive order "on the safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence". In a mere 20,000 words, or thereabouts, the order directs an innumerable number of federal agencies and government departments that oversee "everything from housing to health to national security to create standards and regulations for the use or oversight of AI". These bodies are required to develop guidance on the responsible use of AI in areas such as criminal justice, education, healthcare, housing and labour, "with a focus on protecting Americans' civil rights and liberties". Within No 10, though, there might have been some infuriated spin doctors. After all, the main purpose of the Bletchley Park AI safety summit was to hype the prime minister's claim to "global leadership" in this matter, and here was bloody Biden announcing tangible plans actually to do something about the technology rather than just fostering lofty "declarations".

Nick Clegg has compared the clamour over artificial intelligence to the 80s-era "moral panic" over video games, firing a warning shot to international politicians and regulators as they gather for a two-day summit on AI safety. The former UK deputy prime minister who is now president of global affairs at Mark Zuckerberg's Meta said AI was caught in a "great hype cycle" but warned that new technologies inspired a mixture of excessive zeal and excessive pessimism. British officials are hoping to use the summit, which starts on Wednesday at Bletchley Park, to kickstart a regulatory process that could mirror international attempts to combat the climate crisis. But Clegg's comments show they are likely to encounter resistance from some of the industry's most powerful companies. "New technologies always lead to hype," he said.

The banning of video game Disco Elysium from sale in Australia has renewed calls for the Australian government to overhaul the classification system to move away from the "moral panic" associated with video games. On Friday afternoon, the Australian classification board announced Disco Elysium – The Final Cut was refused classification on the grounds the game was found to "depict, express or otherwise deal with matters of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence or revolting or abhorrent phenomena" in a way that offended "against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults". It ruled the game should not be classified. The post-war murder mystery role-playing game has won over a dozen industry awards since its release in 2019. The game has been available in Australia for two years through the Steam online games store, but the game's developers, ZA/UM planned to launch the game on consoles this month, meaning before it could be sold in stores in Australia, it had to go to the classification board for review.

Kendal Parmar's son went from being a sporty and sociable boy who loved school, to a child who would stay in his room and rarely go outside. The change in his personality was down to a gaming disorder that crept up on him at the age of 12, when he started secondary school. Three years later, Joseph is still struggling with the problem. Parmar says the biggest sign that something was wrong was the amount of arguing that would occur when she asked him to stop playing video games. "Eventually his habits developed and he was gaming all the time. He became too terrified to go to school and he was terrified of people," she says.

There is no strong evidence to support fears that screen time is inherently bad for children, experts have warned, adding that the recognition of so-called gaming disorder by the World Health Organisation is premature. Time spent using devices ranging from computers to smartphones and televisions has been the subject of debate after the UK's culture secretary Matt Hancock called for parents to set boundaries for their children on the use of tech. "Unlimited and unsupervised access to smartphones can be a portal to some very serious risks. And the chief medical officer has highlighted growing concerns around the impact on children's mental health. This backs up every parent's instinct; that children must be protected," he said.

The House of Lords wants to make sure data used by AI systems is not monopolised and the technology is developed on ethical guidelines. That's not impossible, Lord Tim Clement-Jones, chair of the Lords' Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence told us. "We looked to see where it had been done well and done badly. GM Foods is where it was done badly, and human embryo research is where it has been done well." The report was designed "to avoid a moral panic," Clement-Jones told us.

The World Health Organization took an unprecedented step in January when it decided to include "gaming disorder" in its 11th International Classification of Diseases (IDC). Though doctors and researchers have examined the effects of heavy internet usage since the days when access arrived on AOL CDs, this marks the first time that the organization has listed this disorder as a mental health condition. Doing so could have far-reaching, and potentially negative, implications for how the disorder is diagnosed and treated. But video games aren't the only aspect of internet society that has people concerned. A 2016 study by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that helps teens and their parents navigate modern media, found that nearly half of the teens surveyed described themselves as "addicted" to their phones.

We have a long history of "moral panics." Things that we fear, whether we should or not. In most cases, these fears aren't entirely irrational, but based on exaggerations or predictions that could, but probably won't, come true or simply are not nearly as horrific as may first appear. Many of us remember the Y2K scare of 1999, when we were told that the power grid, ATMs and our transportation systems could come to a screeching halt at midnight on Jan.1, 2000 because computers weren't programmed to recognize a new century. And, yes, there were a handful of problems, but the world didn't come to an end. There was a panic that our personal privacy was over in 1988 when Kodak introduced the first portable camera.

OK, they didn't literally run for any hills. But the EFF wrote a very panicked blog post warning of the dangers to come if an AI trained to hack wasn't parented properly. The histrionic post made a few headlines, but missed the point of the competition entirely. If the AI playing Def Con's all-machine Capture the Flag had feelings, they would've been very hurt indeed. The seven different AI agents were projects of teams that hailed from around the world, coming together to compete for a 2 million purse.