Normalizing Harm Through Teenagers’ Everyday Experiences with Video Games

Video games are deeply embedded in teenagers’ lives, shaping their social lives while exposing them to prolonged engagement and gambling-like mechanisms. Although prior work has identified harmful game design practices, teenagers’ own understandings of these experiences remain underexplored. Through semi-structured interviews with teenagers aged 13–17 ( n = 7), we examine how harmful experiences are understood and interpreted. Our findings show that despite being aware of manipulative aspects of game design, including engagement-driven reward systems that encourage prolonged engagement, teenagers frame these experiences as expected trade-offs of gaming. Through processes of acceptance, justification, and social reinforcement, harmful gaming experiences are normalized as everyday play. As a result, teenagers viewed self-control and personal responsibility as the primary ways to stay safe while gaming, shifting responsibility for online safety away from platforms and towards teenagers and parents. We argue that the central harm in contemporary gaming lies not only in manipulative mechanics themselves, but in how prolonged participation becomes normalized through routine engagement. We provide an empirical account of how teenagers come to accept, justify, and normalize harmful gaming experiences. We also show how socio-technical environments normalize harmful engagement and shift responsibility for online safety toward teenagers through expectations of self-regulation.