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Interview With Gary Gygax About Game Violence
bdavenport writes "After yesterday's post on game violence and the relation to real-world violence, i found this interview with legend Gary Gygax. He expounds his views on a range of subjects, one of which is his opinion that gaming violence, having been vilified since the 1970s when it related to D&D, is not causationally linked to actual violence. "
Ok OK OOOK! We've heard this same argument over and over again. Take music for an example. Kids back in the 70's and 80's would listen to a record backwards - apparently the music/record would tell the kids to go out and rape their cat or something. (Ozzy?)
;)
Today, it seems to be video games that are causing kids to do these horrendous things. Uh...does anyone see the problem here?? People do stupid shit sometimes. The adults are looking for ways (scapegoat?) to explain the irrational behaviors exhibited by youth. Are there deep seeded psychological issues? Were the parents negligent? Nature? Nurture? Beer?
30 years from now it will be something else that is "the cause" of these irrational actions by people. Face it - you're going to have a small section of the population that deviates from the norm - ALWAYS.
"Those damnned neuro-implants! I told ya Marge! Access to all that information, playin' games, surfin' the hyper-web...If it wasn't for those implants, those two kids wouldn't have nuked that convenience store!"
"Violence, when it's sanctioned by the state, is acceptable to us because we regard individual acts of violence with repugnance, and revulsion."
Nope...just wore the shirts anyway, along with a good percentage of the student population.
I guess you don't know squat if you paid penalties for something that was not wrong.
You must have had some shitty teachers. And how can anyone be smug at $24k a year?
I think what pissed me off in high school is when the administration would start talking about banning this or that for some insane reason - which was to say that declining grades were probably due to the Iron Maiden t-shirts being worn - as smart as violence is linked to video games.
Man...I suck at FPS's (unless I get a sniper rifle). I can't aim worth crap, even with a real gun and a still target.
If the world ever does become anarchy, I'll probably get fragged pretty quickly - hopefully though I won't blow myself up like I tend to do in Unreal.
Hmmm...time to baricade myself in the New York Public Library and change my name to Brain - where's Adrienne Barbeau?
Ahh... so a logical argument loses foundation when the person has a stake in it? Everyone has a stake in something they make an argument for. The fact that he's on the other side makes him a good person to make the argument. Would it be preferable to ask an uninformed bystander
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
That's pretty funny.
Seriously, Canada does have some ammount of limited military power. They do contribute to UN and NATO exercises. They even buy American and British built warplanes. I know they have a navy.
The extent of their forces is unknown to me, but really, they need it for limited self-defense. They haven't been attacked in how long?
"Grandparent" Post:
This trains people to pull the trigger without thinking. This is the same psychologically as playing Quake or Halflife.
Parent Post:
Well, I've had quite a bit of training in the Canadian Army myself. Even with training, we still expect that more than half of all combatants will not shoot at another human being, but will miss. This is pretty much a constant.
Well, any military worth it's rounds would train to think before shooting. If you shoot without thinking, you might as well start shooting innocent people. You don't shoot at anything that moves because it moves. Proper aiming should be automatically. Pulling the trigger should never, ever happen until you are sure your target needs it. They even teach this philosophy to the Navy Seals. From my impression, in general they aren't trigger happy or killer robots.
no you are not supposed to think before shooting. If this was true, you might decide not to shoot, for various reasons. The people in command dont want members of the Army to think, just follow their commands.
And maybe they'd want the Aegis ships to start shooting down airliners as well? There HAS to be a discriminating factor involved at every level of weapon use. I think there were US soldiers in the Korean war that got ratted on for killing a bear in a fire fight.
The military would get EXTREMELY bad press if there is evidence of soldiers shooting just because there is a target. Wanton massacres are discovered in due time. The Vietnam war proved that. There will always be a loose crank, but they breach protocol. In the US, the military is under civilian control. If the civilians don't like how things go, they get the lawmakers to change things.
No fighting force is perfect, and there is evidence of wrongdoing that happens in just about any major war, but it just isn't widespread.
There's nothing at all wrong with people playing hack & slash, and even hack & slash role playing games. It's just highly annoying when that's perceived as the whole point of all Role Playing Games for all of us. Screw that!
In case you're moderating and missed the on-topic point: Gygax is a pretty sad spokesman for supposedly persecuted game companies. If anything, TSR capitalized on the free publicity that D&D got when kids' suicides were blamed on it and religious nuts claimed it taught Satanism. For a more relevant, more persecuted game designer's perspective, talk to somebody at Steve Jackson Games. If that rings a bell, it may be due to the uproar when the US Secret Service raided the company, nearly put them out of business, but never brought charges.
Sorry to see this get modded down as "offtopic" (as I said in my other post on the subject). It's relevant in that Gygax likes to blow smoke, and isn't necessarily someone who gamers like to have speaking for them on issues like this.
Well, aside from the ridiculous name-calling in your comment, have you ever considered that putting a gun in the hand of a young person, with training, and with supervision, is not an act of violence?
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO it's NOT.
Rolling On the Floor Laughing.
Consider for a moment the idea that real-life exposure to guns is in no way, shape, or form, an act of violence.
And I am the Pope! I AM THE POPE!! WWAAAOUOAUOUAOUOHHHH!
--
To kill someone, you have to look away from your computer.
;)
Not if you work for the NSA.. Did anyone else think of 'Command & Conquer' when watching 'Patriot Games'?
0.25 *
Your Working Boy,
There already exist the concept of role-palying, or story telling if you will, which is more than enough for us.
Seriously.. Rules are meant to be 'reinterpreted'.. Though I still consider Magic cards tantamount to crack, I don't have quite the spite I used to have about them and their role in 'destroying' traditional roleplaying...
Diablo and its ilk (I don't include MUDs because they feel like a different category to me, more of a 'realtime' Zork thing which is separate in my mind) have done good things and bad things to traditional gaming. I can keep in touch with gamer friends from around the country/world, but there's just something to getting together in a musty room with oddly-shaped dice and a stage for hamming up the death scene of a 9th level dwarven barbarian that I miss.
Oh well.
Your Working Boy,
Yes. But in fairly balanced individuals this period is quite short and doesn't lead to anything more than some harmless daydreaming.
I don't dispute that such a thing could adversely affect someone who's mental condition isn't as stable. But is this really the fault of the catharsis itself?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Who's at fault here? The TV show producer or the people who expect the TV show to stand in lieu of a babysitter or, heavens forefend, quality time?
I'my sorry, but there's far too many excuses out there drawing attention away from the real issue.
SHODDY PARENTING .
Most of these people would LOVE to let the government raise their kids for them. Then we could have whole generations of maladjusted misantrhopic psychopaths walking the streets!
RPG doesn't desensitize one to violence. It merely draws attention to it in a way that clearly deliniates fantastical conflict from the real thing.
And FPS games like Quake desensitize nobody if the player's parents take the time and the *OOH NASTY WORD COMING UP!* effort to explain and reinforce the difference between the cartoonish violence in games and the real thing.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Well. Lemme chuck a couple imps and cacodaemons at you. =)
A la peanut butter sandwiches!
*POOF*
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Being exposed to something doesn't mean you're more likely to do it yourself. I've been exposed to beer most of my life. I don't drink.
In my job, I have access to narcotics and some of my patients are narcotics abusers. Notice that I don't shoot up?
Both my parents smoke, as did all of my grandparents, and most of my immediate family. I took one drag on a cigarette at age 8 and haven't touched another cigarette, cigar, pipe, etc since.
I've seen real people literally beaten do death. I've seen people shot. I've seen people hurt in ways you wouldn't wish on ANYONE.
Does this mean I'm going to go out and mangle someone? Not in this lifetime (though I could probably make your hair stand up with some of my empty threats...).
If parents take the time and effort to educate their children and the difference between real and imaginary violence, they're far less likely to actually do it themselves. But when their babysitter is the computer in the corner running Doom, Quake, Quake2, Quake3, Unreal, Half-Life, etc all day every day, I can see how a kid could become disconnected.
Who's fault is that though? The games' or the parents'? It's time to stop looking for excuses and focus on the real issue.
SHODDY PARENTING
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Actually, most people in the military nowadays are in for the college bennies. The lifers are in mainly because it's a chance at a somewhat honorable career. Very, VERY few of these individuals EVER want to actually go to war. And most people like this will be weeded out in permanent party assignments.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
So you're saying catharsis is a myth? And pray tell, how is describing a mythic battle (complete with magic and monsters) going to make someone any better at killing REAL things?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
If you can show that (just for instance, I have no idea what the actual numbers might be) 25% of the population has spent significant amounts of time playing Quake III / HalfLife / UT / etc., and that a disproportionate percentage of violent crimes (like 35% or more) are attributable to people in this group, THEN I might begin to believe it.
This is exactly the sort of belief that makes for bad science. If a disproportionate percentage of violent crimes are commited by gamers that play fps, then all you've shown is that people who commit violent crimes like to play video games. It says nothing about the causality.
To make this point another way, during the breast implant lawsuits in the States, medical evidence did not prove any causality between breast implants and all of the medical problems that were attributed to them (note: the lawsuit was still lost by the breast implant manufacturers, though). During the trial, the breast implant manufacturers conducted a study where they showed that people that wear nail polish are more likely to have the medical problems that people that had breast implants. Their point was not that nail polish caused the medical problems (a correlation), but that the was no causality involved.
Correlation and causality are not the same thing. Yet this misconception is common throughout the public (note to medical equipment manufacturers: go with a trial by judge instead of a trial by jury next time).
--Be human.
ROFL! Now this is funny!
--Jim
Canada hasn't been attacked since those American bastards tried it almost 200 years ago (War of 1812). In reply, we (well, we were part of the British Empire at the time) burned their President's house, which had to be whitewashed to hide the smoke and scorch marks.
That's tellin' him. I think the word you want is "causally".
This is what happens when people write but don't read.
It is the adverb form of causation... uhh, well, OK I just made that up, but I think that is what the writer is trying to do.
Q.
This oft-cited study is a load of horseshit.
All it proves is that kids can be made to hit a plastic clown ten minutes after watching violent cartoons. You have not proven they will turn out to be criminals, nor have you even proven they will hit the clown a week later.
And my grandfather spent lots of time engaging in simulated violence. It was called training. And it kept him alive during 21 months of combat while stationed in North Africa during WWII. I'd call that a benefit.
Praise the Force Field! Praise the Laser Project! Slackware Loon #19830573
Uhh, no. ALL advanced infantry and special forces teams train in "shoot houses" which have a mixture of good guys and bad guys. This sort of training is becoming more and more commonplace as military forces are more frequently deployed to accomplish non-traditional missions.
I defy you to find a soldier who would voluntarily and intentionally take an innocent life. Of course in any population, you have sociopaths, and there may in fact be soldiers who have sociopathic tendencies. However, my (unfounded) suspicion would be that the percentage of sociopathic soldiers would be LOWER than the percentage of sociopathic civilians, due to the camaraderie that all phases of military training instill in the recruits.
Your posts smack of somebody who knows little about the military beyond what you've learned from Oliver Stone flicks.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Desensitization is not necessarily a bad thing. I very much want my ER doctor to be very desensitized to the grievous wounds s/he encounters on a day-to-day basis. Desensitization simply means that you are able to have rational, rather than emotional, reactions to stimuli. Seems like a good idea to me...
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
If guns promote violence, knives promote violence. Cars promote violence. Tire irons promote violence. Screwdrivers promote violence.
You want to know what the least common denominator is? HUMAN BEINGS promote violence.
As far as European gun advocacy, we can continue that discussion when you explain how Switzerland manages to not explode in gun-crazed frenzies, considering that most households are equipped with an honest-to-God assault rifle.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
My grandfather used handguns his entire life, and never managed to kill anything. Just because you don't think target shooting is an OK thing doesn't mean you're right. The framers of the Constitution also disagree with you, but for reasons other than target shooting.
As far as your argument about Switzerland goes, do you really think a person who intends to commit murder (which is against the law) would balk at extracting their assault rifle from the closet (which is against the law)?
I don't have any trigger happy NRA friends. Come to think of it, I don't have any trigger happy friends, nor NRA friends. As far as the NRA goes, I'd be surprised if any significant fraction of the people who have committed crimes using firearms were NRA members, which brings me back to my original point: The most dangerous thing on the planet is human intent. Guns (and the violent video games being discussed in this thread) do nothing to change this fact.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Quake doesn't get people angry enough to kill their mother or shoot their high school teachers.
I agree with you 100% It wasn't Quake that made me angry it was HIGH SCHOOL!
Join me in my efforts to have high schools placed under public criticism - Perhaps we can even have them banned. Seriously, write your congressmen and tell them that it's those fucking smug teachers with their $24,000 a year salary that makes kids go ballistic - Not the games they play to unwind after coming home from a stressful day of school.
I have emmensly enjoyd movies like Pulp Fiction, Aliens, Brain dead and so on, which contain violence. For about a decade I have played role-playing games, and thus have a lot of respect for Gygax. In almost every game there has been a fight of some sort. I haven't gotten used to violence in any way for I haven't really experienced it for real. Of course I've had I've had my share of playful wrestling with my friends, but I would hope that thats all part of normal life or are we going to live in a world where, say red is forbidden color to use in for example art because it is the color of blood.
From what I can say, almost all of the most enjoayble moments of role-playing have been improvised, and I feel like being blessed by beeing receiving more than my share of really enjoyable gaming experiences. Most of them have even been non-violent, despite the "violent" nature of the role-playing games.
Even though this was labeled as Flamebait I have to respond.
I for one couldn't care less if role-playing games were a "dying industry". Role-playing games are a land of imagination. For those of us who are playing now, we don't need any more new releases from any company. There already exist the concept of role-palying, or story telling if you will, which is more than enough for us.
Wow! Between my reading your two posts, Voyager sped up dramatically!
Rick
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I don't agree with you. I don't think that TV violence desensitizes you more then computer games. In TV, and I would say mainly in the news when you know that the violence is real, you are watching real people suffering and applying violence. This would be an awful vision so you simply create a "wall" to block your feelings from that. The more you can relate to the subject of the violence the more you suffer.
It's very simple to test this, what kind of animal would you fell more petty when you watch it suffering, a dog or a cockroach, a cat or a fish, a monkey or a spider? You can relate more to the animal that have faces because they are more "human" then the ones that don't.
Computer games, in my humble opinion, are more like a violence attenuation. You fell pissed off with something you go then and play quake for a few moments and get that stress out of your system. There you have all the power to blow up any of the terrible pixmaps monster or players you see. It is the same with sports, mainly the openly violent ones like American football, people don't get more violent just because they play a violent game.
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes"
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Adcritic& lt;/A> has a GREAT spoof ad for the Sony Playstation and Tekken. (unfortunately requires quicktime...)
Hmmm... what about the flayer jungle in Diablo 2?
:-)
Ok, maybe games don't lead to violence, but malicious trolls attacking my humorous post was sick...
They make me want to take someone's head off.
I wonder how many flames/trolls lead to violence?
:-)
Nooo.... you don't get it (or are you trolling too?) The phony ad is a husband and wife saying how tekken helped save their marriage. They have it out on the screen ("This is for 25 years of Macaroni and cheese... whap!", etc)
The *troll* was the guy who said it was a picture of some guy's head cut up...
Go watch Summunor Geeks on ifilm.com now. That is about as realistic depiction of D&D as I've ever seen.
- Everything that you like, sucks.
The other thing most sims don't prepare you for is the fact that the other guy is shooting back.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
I haven't played in close to ten years but I always found that the best adventures, for me and my players, was for me to improvise 80%+ of the time. I'd prepare an adventure (just a bit more than an outline) ahead of time based on which characters were being played. I'd then choose out some good artwork (good --> stuff they'd never seen before), miniatures (players and monsters), and anything else I needed (I can't remember the name of the company now, but there's a company out there that makes styrofoam hexes that you can cut, shape and paint and put together to make dungeons, caverns, etc.). Choosing miniatures was fun because I usually had new ones each time we played and I generally would leave them out for the players to see before the game so that they'd get to "ooo" and "ahh" over what they might run into. But after I got behind my GM screen with my dice and outline, I'd start to weave a story (which usually started with the company in an Inn during a thunderstorm... cheesy, I know, but effective). I found that the more often I did this, the better the stories, the adventures and, thus, the evening was.
YES! Some sanity!
Would someone please moderate this one up, (I never have points when I need them.)
- "When I say dance, you'd best DANCE motherf*cker!" -Violent Femmes
Seeing violence does not make you kill someone. Being desensitized to violence does not make you kill someone. There are millions of people that are exposed to violence every day, and to greater extremes than murderers. While desensitization to violence is not the best thing, it does not cause violence.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Umm, am I missing something or did you just go and do the same thing by picking another easy target - the parents? *DING* You win 5 hypocrite points...
It's not so easy as that. Life is not black and white. There are a LOT of factors involved in what makes people able to kill others more easily -> envrionmental factors such as bad parenting, abusive relationships, military training, video games and media, etc. as well as genetic and mental disorders that are just part of who people are.
Noone can blame this stuff on any one thing. It all ties together in a complicated web of cause and effect. But unfortunately, we live in a society that likes quick and easy solutions. And politicians will latch onto that fact like crazy and give people what they want to hear.
We can whine and moan about it all we want here on Slashdot, but it's our representatives in government that need to hear our voices. They need to know that we understand that it's a complicated problem with no easy solution and we're not going to take their easy one-liners anymore. So go home and write your congress[wo]man today! Make your voice heard.
----
Lyell E. Haynes
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Scapegoats are always going to be needed because people in America right now just cannot accept that some people are freaks and mad dogs that will simply go off.
I don't know that I would say that this is limited to America, or that "some people are freaks and mad dogs," but I would definitely say that here in America, scapegoats are needed. You never see blame placed on individuals anymore, it must be a corporation, industry, or non-living entity (like the internet). It seems to the entire society refuses to accept that perhaps we have a lot of people becoming parents that aren't prepared to become parents. I am one who watched tons of the pre-hysteria Looney Tunes cartoons (ie, where they showed the characters blowing up, etc) but didn't go off and kill a lot of people, or stick firecrackers in my sister's mouth. Why not? Because my parents always reminded me that what I saw on TV was not reality! Children are a lot more intelligent than Society gives them credit for, they just need someone there to show them the way. I really wish America (and perhaps other parts of the world, but I can only speak of the USA) would buy a ticket on the clue bus.
For the record, I don't think the post deserved a flame of any kind, but if you feel you must flame, well, I commend your use of the word "fuckwad" (speaking of middle-school level diction...). This is a word that doesn't get the level of usage it deserves. Wouldn't CNN be better if they threw in a "fuckwad" every now and then? If there was even the slightest chance that "fuckwad" would be used in the presidential debates, I'd actually watch 'em. Show me the church where the clergy tosses out the occasional "fuckwad" during services, and I'm there.
Color me easily amused, but a well-placed "fuckwad" goes a long ways in my book.
"Asshead", too.
... 'course, it'd be better if it wasn't always ME being referred to by those words, but hey, ya can't have everything.
- things in the wrong uniform,
- things that are trying to shoot you, and
- things you were told to shoot.
Uh huh. Which Marine boot camp fantasy movie did you get that one from? The military sure as hell wants you to think. They want you to think military.--
This is not my sandwich.
Video/computer games are notorious for their gratuitous violence and lots of blood and gore, along with the fact that the primary users are children.
The fact is that the vast majority of computer gamers are adults. The myth that this is a youth market is part of the problem.
>>Well, I've had quite a bit of training in the Canadian Army myself.
What? Canada has an army?
...
Or, as one of my online friends from Canada said, "When I was a soldier in the canadian army (and we do have one)..."
To which another replied, "Hey, now you're giving away the size of our army too!"
Attempting to inject some levity, don't flame me too much.
--
Communication is only possible between equals
10 minutes after the interview Gary rolled a 6, which meant for him to keep his dying industry alive by being geekier than anyone else possible.
I'd probably need a good dose of biblethumping or therapy after reaching the zero-self esteem point which lets me say stuff like, "Okay, I'm an elf with turquise eyes and a +1 midget slaying dagger hidden in my garish coat of many-pockets" without extreme embarassment.
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
In the 19th Century we repelled an armed invasion of Upper Canada (Ontario, Manitoba) from the American Libertarian forces (I'm sure it was some kind of deal with France due to The Napoleonic War, yes at one time Americans were friends with France and vice versa). Also during this century (as a member of the British Commonwealth) we sent troops to other regions in the Commonwealth (like India) and oddly enough, we produced beer for the British millitary forces in India (Alexander Keith's India Pale Ale, still available)
The 20th Century brought the World Wars. When Canada entered the war it was shown that our soldiers could carry more (per capita) than our European counterparts (because of a backpack system developed by the native populace and used by Canadien Voyager's & trappers for the last 300 years or so. Basically the backpack had shoulder straps AND a head strap, on average a Canadian soldier could carry up to 3 times that of a British soldier. This ability to carry coupled with the fact that Canadians were not fazed by France's 'bitterly cold' winter we were relegated to the work parties and rail crews. After much complaining to the war leaders Canadian regiments did see battle action in WWI and actually swung the tide of victory in our way at the battle of Vimy Ridge (Vimy Ridge).
World War II was filled with triumph and tragedy for Canadian soldiers (now completly autonomous from British rule) to read a brief summary of our exploits during WWII check out this page
Since WWII Canadian soldiers have seen action all around the world. And while true that Canada does not have a large standing army, if the call comes again to defend ourselves or our allies we shall rise to arms and fight for freedom.
What is my stake in all this? Well, my Great Uncle was a gunner in WWI, my Grandfather was a submariner with the Royal Navy in WWII, my Uncle was with the Merchant Marine in Korea and my father was a LRRP in Vietnam (with the American army) yowza!
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
Does it affect society? Maybe, there just isn't enough solid data to make conclusions. (IMHO)
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
The point of games like Quake, just like Laser Tag, LARP, etc, is catharsis.
IMHO, this entire debate is marred by the simplistic idea that violent games either do, or do not make their users violent.
Obviously such games could never be the sole cause of any given behaviour, how they effect any particular user will depend on who that user is. Is it not possible that a game will be cathartic for some individuals, while adversely (from the point of view of society) effecting the attitude towards violence in others?
>If you shoot without thinking, you might as well start shooting innocent people.
..ahh, a common mistake to make. That is the difference between the Army and the Police force. As demonstrated when you see there training sequences. The police force have innocent bystanders pop up, which you aren't supposed to shoot. The Army have no bystanders, you shoot everyone.
>Well, any military worth it's rounds would train to think before shooting.
..no you are not supposed to think before shooting. If this was true, you might decide not to shoot, for various reasons. The people in command dont want members of the Army to think, just follow their commands.
Not if you've got really good hearing! You know, triangulate the position of the target, etc etc.
:)
Unfortunately, you do have to either take your hand off the mouse, or your other hand off the keyboard...
Causation: the act or process of causing
Seemed pretty self-evident to me.
When I played D&D in the past, my friends and I have always found it much more fun for the DM to improvise a story in real time than to follow the prewritten script given in some book. I'm wondering, do most people prefer to improvise, or to plan out a detailed scenario including maps etc. beforehand?
It seems unquestionable that humans are by nature a violent and aggressive species. So, if those tendencies are sublimated, acted out in games, it is beneficial, not harmful, no?
Oh, the popular release-of-energy myth. You accumulate {violence, stress, vigor} until you find a channel for it, so release those energies on a game before you fill up your quota and explode (i.e. better to kick footballs before you fulfill the universal urge to kick other human beings).
Phooey. I hate to beat up a straw man, but that just isn't how it works. Hitting stuff won't reduce your amount of violent substance; it will make you "better" at being violent. Now you have plenty of violent details to recall, so you're more likely to think that way next time.
So, you're saying children will do as they see, or imitate. Wouldn't that also mean that if they saw violence, whether it's TV, on the streets, or in a semi-realistic video game, that they would imitate this? And wouldn't that mean that 'violence begats voilence'?
I'm not saying violent games or TV cause kids to become murderers. I AM saying however that I believe it contributes. Many households use the TV as a replacement for time spent with parents, and therefore expose their children to things that the parents may not yet have addressed as being morally or even legally right or wrong.
Just look a simple example of de-sensitization. Far back in history, women in america (european america) were not allowed to show very much skin. Now you can see scantily clad women in what would generally be considered thread with some nipple warmers. Obviously that would not have been acceptable then, but it is now because as a society we are bombarded with sexual images all the time and therefore are desensitized to it, so now as a whole it is morally accepted.
Free Online Woodworking Resources Directory
One of my favorite things about my new LEJENDARY ADVENTURE game system is that players can select skills so that it is really easy to create characters that "fit the bill" in regards to a well-balanced and potent adventuring party.
Well, his description of LA sounds like he finally, after all this years, catched up with RPG development. It's sorry to hear though that he thinks he's original.
In fact, I think that the original D&D spoiled RPGs for years by convincing people that an RPG would need character classes, experience levels or hit points.
Censorship on Slashdot
Racism has no place on slashdot.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
You probably won't be but someone should
say something about this.
I nearly spit up my adult beverage reading your post.
Please keep it up.
I need the laffs.
Limey? Limey?
I fall on the floor laughing. No one has ever mistaken me for a limey before. You've just set a new lower limit for stupidity.
And just WHERE did you get the idea that I am a caucasian?
Just because I've been polite to you doesn't mean I don't have skin pigmentation.
Dolt.
Strunk, William, Jr. (1 July 1869-26 Sept. 1946), educator and grammarian, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of William Strunk, Sr., and Ella Garretson Strunk. He graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1890 with an A.B. and was an instructor in mathematics at the Rose Polytechnical Institute in Terra Haute, Indiana (1890-1891). He then went to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he was an instructor in English (1891-1898) while earning his Ph.D. there (1896). He spent the 1898-1899 academic year studying at the University of Paris.
Strunk returned to Cornell and remained there for the rest of his professional life; he was to die in Ithaca. Named an assistant professor of English in 1899, he was promoted to full professor in 1909 and retired in 1937. In 1900 Strunk married Olivia Emilie Locke; they had three children. During his early years at Cornell, Strunk produced editions of Thomas Babington Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle's Essays on Samuel Johnson (1895); John Dryden's Essays on Drama (1898), All for Love (1911), and The Spanish Fryar (1911); James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1900); Cynewulf's Juliana (1904); and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1911) and The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (1915). Through the Cornell Co-operative Society, Strunk published his English Metres (1922), a down-to-earth explanation of the subject. He also coedited a festschrift, Studies in Language and Literature in Celebration of the Seventieth Birthday of James Morgan Hart, November 2, 1909 (1910).
By far the most challenging of Strunk's editorial tasks was his work on Cyenwulf's Juliana, written in Old English, which Strunk had meticulously studied. The most pleasant result of his editorial work was his being hired in 1935 as a consultant by Irving Thalberg for a Hollywood film production of Romeo and Juliet (1936). Strunk's function was to assure that the spirit of Shakespeare's play would not be violated. Although he expected to be in Hollywood for six weeks, Strunk was so genially accepted as "the Professor," and had such a good time, that he remained almost an entire year. In 1937 he reduced Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra to a two-act format. Excessive cutting, however, which included the omission of Enobarbus's suicide, caused the Broadway production to close quickly.
First and foremost, Strunk was a classroom teacher. His courses in English composition at Cornell, over a period exceeding four decades, made him a legend. To enable his students to write correct, concise, and vigorous prose, he put together The Elements of Style, a little textbook of forty-three pages. Privately printed in 1918, it succinctly spelled out rules of usage and principles of composition, discussed form, and offered a common-sense approach to punctuation and rhetoric. In parallel columns, Strunk gave examples of sloppy style and then correct style. A proponent of writing in the active voice, he encouraged the use of definite, concrete language, keeping to one tense, and other means of achieving a lucid, compact style. He also discussed such mechanical matters as margins and references and how to deal with colloquialisms.
The Elements of Style proved to be so popular, and so much in demand, that it was commercially published in 1920, and (with the assistance of Edward A. Tenney) Strunk revised and updated it in 1935. The little textbook was destined to become a classic, however, when in 1957 E. B. White, who had been one of Strunk's students at Cornell in 1919 and had gone on to fame as a writer, published an essay about his former teacher, "Will Strunk," which appeared in the New Yorker on 15 July 1957. The editors of the Macmillan Company located with some difficulty an old copy of The Elements of Style and persuaded White to reissue it with an introduction. He did so by modifying his New Yorker encomium in 1959. The book became a runaway success. In a second edition, published in 1972, White explained that in 1959 he had "tried . . . to preserve the flavor of [Strunk's] discontent, while slightly enlarging the scope of the discussion." He replaced outdated examples with fresher ones, making use of a few revisions Strunk himself had noted but never added. White did the same again for a third edition (1979). In going over Strunk's rules, White says he could visualize Strunk's "puckish face," short hair with middle part and bangs, blinking eyes, steel-rimmed glasses, nervously nibbled lips, and repeated adjurations to his students to be concise.
Strunk was a skillful scholar-educator but will be remembered almost exclusively as the author of The Elements of Style, which is now known as "Strunk and White" and which has improved the writing of countless thousands of grateful writers. In 1999 the editors of the Modern Library placed The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White number twenty-one on their "List of 100 Best Works of 20th Century Nonfiction," considerably below The Education of Henry Adams but just above Principia Mathematica by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, a work all but unreadable except to highly trained specialists. The Elements of Style will endure for precisely the opposite reasons.
Bibliography
The Cornell University library lacks papers by Strunk but does have a small number of letters to him by William Dean Howells. A final revision of E. B. White's "Will Strunk" is in White's The Points of My Compass (1962). Essays by three scholars in Cynewulf: Basic Readings, ed. Robert E. Bjork (1996), make brief references to Strunk's edition of Juliana--one in indirect praise, two in disagreement. Bob Thomas, Thalberg; Life and Legend (1969), mentions Strunk's work in Hollywood. An obituary is in the New York Times, 27 Sept. 1946.
Robert L. Gale
I believe Hemos should have typed "causally" instead.
But, as the old saying goes, correlation is not the same thing as causation. If I was bored enough, I would dig through my books for it, but there was a long-term (12+ years?) study about violence in television and violence in children. The results of the study were: violent children liked violent television, non-violent children liked non-violent television.
Good correlation there, but the question remained: did violent television cause violence in children.. or did violent children just like violent television more? The world may never know..
There are probably many other studies about this subject, since it's so popular in this day and age, but that's the one I think of most. One day I'll research it more.
Eric ze Kidder
A friend and I decided that if a word got a least 1000 hits in Google, it would qualify as a "real word" (no matter what Webster says).
Dynamicity is a real word.
Causationally is not.
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
The US military uses flight sims, tank sims, etc. As a compliment to their training. Simulation prepares them for real world incidents. But that isn't what people are griping about. Its the shotgun to the face, blodd everywhere, that has them so uptight.
illenium.net - ultimate sk8 shop online
Let me know when some kid takes a chainsaw to his classmates. Then I might believe that Doom made him do it.
There are some good studies that indicate that social behavior must be learned at an early age or else it is never learned. That is not unlike the children that are never spoken to in their childhood (classic: Wolfboy, and the girl in LA) never develop speach beyond very primitive levels.
So it is clear that how we raise our children is very important. If we raise them in antisocial environments we end up with sociopaths, as is clearly the problem with some of the people who have posted on this thread and the person who was interviewed. These people are not unbiased and they are destructive and they are blind to that. They simply don't care.
As parents and people who care, we have a right to protect our children from them by whatever compassionate method is available or necessary. Encouraging them into other lines of work is one of them. I'm sure he would make an excellent funeral director or sewer engineer.
Game violence is just another form of pollution that has to be taken care of. And it will be.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen. Ludwig Wittgenstein
All forms of media (TV, movies, music, video games, books . . .) can and do influence viewers to change their behaviour. Corporations spend billions of dollars each year to influence the behaviour of people. They take up my time and they attempt to get me to spend my money. I believe most people "avoid" ads as much as I try to avoid them, however companies still believe that ads are cost-effective. Therefore if people are influenced by "unwanted" media, what about the media that they willing seek out and pay for? Products placed in movies can be HUGE!! (Like Reese's Pieces in ET.)
Now it isn't that simple. I don't buy a Big Mac every time I watch a McDonald's commericial. Nor do I shoot someone after having played Jedi Knight. But it does influence. Every little bit influences. And that is why I don't buy the "media violence doesn't influence viewers" arguement. Violence is not entertaiment. If you think that it is, you should see a therapist. Now.
Thanks for your opinion doc, oh wait, you aren't a doctor either? Maybe you are that 1% who aren't affected by what you read, see, hear or play, are you? Well congratulations.
I've played Doom, Quake, Warcraft. . . and I've never gone Columbine on anyone either. But maybe now I have been desensitized to it. Hmm, what sort of "goal" is it to blow someone up with a rocket launcher? Or sneak up on someone to shoot them in the back Rainbow 6 style? Does that help you build your socializing or "team" skills? Do you even understand how bad that sounds?
As for science, I studied physics as an undergrad, so I know a little bit about it. It is very difficult conclusively to prove anything. Global warming is a good example. It is hard to prove without a doubt to SUV driving suits that they are changing our atmosphere. Or even 20 years ago to have the tobacco companies admit the health hazards of smoking. But there is a very, very good chance there has been an increase Greenhouse affect and smoking does kill.
Am I a hypocrite? Well yeah. I like to play games also. But it is much too simplistic to argue that "there is no effect". And remember corporations spend billions of dollars a year on media to affect our collective behaviour. Just because you don't buy a Coke doesn't mean that 40 others won't.
Frag is a noun an adjective and a verb that is slang for 'fragment', 'fragmentation' or 'to fragment' respectively.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
Not forgetting the cool magic items.
Anyone remember the +5 back scratcher from the DM's guide ?
You forgot the effective alliance that the smug teachers had with the jocks and their cheerleader bimbo girlfriends. Public schools cause violence, not Quake, not guns.
Look at the history of public schooling. In Massachusetts 120 to 150 years ago, nearly all parents opposed public education. Many were willing to use guns to support this opposition. They knew what would happen. Unfortunately, these heroes were unsucessful, and we now have the mess we currently have.
Public education causes people to become angry. This is a legitimate anger whether it was parents over 100 years ago, or students now. People get angry when their rights are violated.
If public education was ended tommorow there would be a sizable reduction in violence. The problem is fighting a battle against people who will slander you by saying that you hate children, and that you are the problem because we all need to solve this together, or some other BS.
I don't see how being desensitised to 'killing' things you know aren't real, and have no emotions, and feel no pain can possibly be the same as being desensitised to hurting and killing real people.
I am a mental health professional, and the research I am aware of shows the above statement to be false. There have been many, many studies on modeling of behavior that absolutely shows an increase in violent behavior when exposed to media with violent content. The simplest and most well known of these was an experiment exposing children to movies of other children hitting life-sized dolls with a control group of children doing regular play without violent content. The children where then placed in a room full of toys which also contained similar dolls and the children who had seen the violent movie would hit the dolls at a significantly higher rate than the children exposed to non-violent content.
None of the colleagues I know of say that people are likely to benefit from simulated violence. -- IV
http://www.LinuxMedNews.com Revolutionizing Medical Education and Practice.
Oh come on.
Thanks for that pointer, I hadn't heard of it. I will point out, though, that it makes fun of rednecks (half the intelligence/twice the humor) so it's a little candy-assed isn't it? Giving itself an excuse to hide behind?
So you reckon that fighting Nazis is morally equivilent to rape and lynching blacks. Not going to get much support for that idea.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Actually, that's pretty much it. When some friends of mine rented "Saving Private Ryan," so they could show me all the so-called "kickass gib scenes" ("look at that! His LEG flew off!"), I fell asleep several times during the movie because if you're not shocked by any of it, it's just a long, colorless, noisy, boring action scene. (Forget the "touching story," it seems to be a small excuse to show hundreds of guys getting gorily dismembered. Another "war is hell" movie IMHO.)
If you ask me, this (cliche warning!) "ultra-violent media culture" isn't turning kids into demented killers whether or not it desensitizes them. It is, on the other hand, kind of absurd when you step back and look at it.
("Check it out, in this game you can tear out your opponent's still-beating spleen!"
"Oh yeah? In this one you can rend his tonsils out!"
"Oh yeah, my character just did a root canal on the other guy!"
"Ha! That's nothing, if you press all the bottons at once you can do triple-bypass surgery!")
Anyone remember the +5 back scratcher from the DM's guide ?
Yeah, there are some awesome magic items. A friend of mine was in a campaign where the DM kept giving them cursed joke items from one of the sourcebooks. They managed to kill a dragon by giving it tons of their cursed items.
I can't remember the details, but it involved giving it "omelet of the plains" then "cloak of blending."
(Omlet of the plains: A typical airline food omelet in a styrofoam container. If eaten, another one shows up in the container daily. Very poisonous.
Cloak of blending: Not the kind that makes you blend into your surroundings, this one blends you (with spikes) if you put it on.)
In movies, guts and gore just don't seem to bother me anymore. And with games, it seems the entire purpose of games like Quake is to advocate violence. Basically, because the violence doesn't bother you anymore, you don't mind it. Personally, I think it sadistic. I don't want to see bodies being blown up anymore. It was exciting at first, but I've had enough. What's the purpose of increasing violent content except to entertain the cretins?
~ The Irony is, The only reason I'm not at Berkeley right now is because I was on acid during my SAT's..
What the hell does "frag" mean? Is that a real word, or did you make it up? And even if it is a real word, someone once said that good writers never use a five-dollar word where a fifty-cent word will do. Strunk and White would flay you where you stand.
The Midgaard Campaign is one RPG I know of that pre-dates D&D, but only be a few years. I've done some web searches, but can't find any mention of it so far. First came into contact with it in Australia in 72 IIRC.
But I agree with E.G.G. - He and Dave Arneson invented the first mass-market RPG, the first widely published one. I first played it in 75.
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
yeah, well, there's also (to my knowledge, i've only played the demo) no blacks, jews, or women worth raping in it, so YMMV.
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
i'm guessing that you've never played Redneck Rampage , eh?
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
which is why you use windows on your machine, right?
He means he invented the first really crap RPG
I have played A LOT of Quake/Doom and I have never killed anyone.
to the old Mortal Kombat "realistic violence" debates...and it's still bs....
How Jaded Are You?
...thanks to new technologies. In DOOM, there were realistic bloodsplats. In Quake, the first 3D rendered gibs, and the head had that very last facial expression on it before bodily explosion. And now, there's Quake 3, with the "so realistic, you can almost touch it" gibs that go SPLAT! The bloodcloud was also born in Quake3; it took a generation of 3D accelerators powerful enough to run hundreds of sprites suspended in the air before that feature was born. I don't miss particle-based blood at all.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
That's not a fair analogy. The question at hand is about a causal relationship between video game violence and actual violence. The point you make seems to center more on hate speech - a nasty side effect of free speech. A bit OT, but there was a hideously tasteless old Atari game called Custer's Revenge, where the object was to rape a woman. Again, if you want free speech, you have to risk people doing things like that, and just hope they'll exercise proper restraint and respect. And if you want to start on slippery slopes, is a game about killing Nazis a la Wolfenstein any "better" than the ones you describe?
And the tobacco company executives don't believe that smoking causes cancer either.
Let's remember where Gary's paycheque comes from, shall we?
"No way, dude, that's his liver"
"Or his kidneys or something"
Yup, that's horrific all right.
Your mind is squeezed by a blast of pain!
Wow. Almost 20 years ago I wrote a letter to the Washington Post after they printed the rantings of some Virginia preacher how DnD was an evil corrupting influence on the youth of America. To their credit, the Post ran my letter, and perhaps it had some small positive influence on parents worried that their intelligent computer-affinative progeny were destined for perdition. But now, again, 20 years later, here we are, explaining that FPS games are *not* training for blowing away the local jocks in the cafeteria... Ya suppose that the game of chess was interdicted during its first century due to it's theme of regicide?
Remain calm! All is well!
Oh, how original...the laugh to prove the other person wrong treatment.
.22 rimfire and a 7.62 (aka .308 Winchester) target rifle safely and sensibly. I also spent three years with the Royal Marines cadets while at school, theoretically learning how to kill people, including 45 Commando RM's 1993 annual four day exercise. I still shoot regularly and have represented my country at international level - does this make me some kind of sicko pervert who would want to kill people?
As a child of thirteen I was shown how to shoot a
Nope.
Do you blame the sword for the hand that wields it?
Nope.
Do I blame violent television or computer games for mass killings?
Nope (I'm also a Quake'r).
Grow up and treat the issue with the respect and seriousness it deserves. Arsehole.
Elgon
In the Napoleonic wars it was not too uncommon to find the Brown Bess muskets used by the majority of the British army loaded from breech to muzzle because the soldier holding it hadn't pulled the trigger.
Elgon
Wrong. End of story I'm afraid - none of the firearms users I know fit into that category (I do know rather a few).
Just a quick question Nico, where are you from?
Elgon
Ever since the first computer games incorporated violence there have been problems. People have argued against them consistently.
I don't know about you, but I have seen the power of violent video games to calm my roommates (okay, myself as well). This is based in the psychological practice called Augmentative Communication (communicating in ways other than verbally. This includes acting out frustrations with a video game).
Unfortunately the media never seems to pick up no the fact that augmentative communication is very important in people's lives and that video games are used.
Penguin Trivia #46: Animals who are not penguins can only wish they were. -- Chicago Reader 10/15/82
everyone should be taught about everything, and then (or before) taught how and when to use what they've learned... this would be a true society, and one i'd like to be part of. And to and extent i am.. i run Linux...
LordBlaa
Which puts the concept "defrag" in a whole new perspective, doesn't it?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Sure it'd make a good game, depending on the personal preferences of whoever was going to play it. I mean, there's nothing like blowing those filthy racists in Wolfenstein apart, now is there? The fact that you also kill an occasional German Shepherd has nothing to do with all of this. It's for the good of the western world, isn't it. Freedom for all, except the dogs. Stop being politically correct, we know the drill.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
"Granted, this is nowhere CLOSE to showing a causal relation..."
and further down:
"It's nothing to do with VGs, it's just developmental! Teenagers (and to a lesser extent 20-somethings) are still developing mentally and physically and emotionally. They're more volatile. It's this volatility that both makes them likely to commit crimes of "passion" and also likely to play violent VGs!"
I grant you that my example was not a very good one, but my POINT was that I'm not aware of anyone ever even TRYING to conduct a REASONABLE study that proves (or disproves) a link between VG violence and actual violence.
Could not be more wrong. Soldiers need training on how to hit a man size target that is only exposed for a short time, with a rifle. That is why they use pop-up targets with the shape of a human.
The reason they can and will kill another human in combat is because if they do not, that human will kill them or their budies. If they do not pull the trigger, they are letting down their buddies, their unit, and their country. It is their job. It is NOT because they have been conditioned to fire at man shaped targets.
[The above is based on the opinion tank crewman with 7 years of experience.]
"Freedom in cyberspace'd be fine and dandy if we happened to live there."
I am a mental health professional, and the research I am aware of shows the above statement to be false. There have been many, many studies on modeling of behavior that absolutely shows an increase in violent behavior when exposed to media with violent content. The simplest and most well known of these was an experiment exposing children to movies of other children hitting life-sized dolls with a control group of children doing regular play without violent content. The children where then placed in a room full of toys which also contained similar dolls and the children who had seen the violent movie would hit the dolls at a significantly higher rate than the children exposed to non-violent content.
And I used to be a game designer. In fact, Gary Gygax signed some games for me about a decade ago, when I was a SMOG.
We were talking about RPGs (Role Playing Games). In a role-playing game there is no actual attack going on, only a description in words of it. In a computer simulation, there might be some correlation if we had an electronic gun simulator, in that the neural pathways in the brain would be conditioned due to the actions and visualizations of pulling the trigger, but not in a paper RPG.
Another thing is social acceptability. In any case where you take someone with an amoral bent, they will not be likely to abide by societal restrictions. The more fantastic the event, the less likely they are to carry it through to the real world. If I let my son use his computer mouse to control figures in WarCraft or StarCraft, at an age of 8, and I reinforce that this is a game and that actual war is not that fun (from practical military experience), he becomes much less likely to act out these aggressive roles that are portrayed in standard TV commercials where jocks beat each other up in sports adverts.
Without societal feedback, we all are in danger of Lord of the Flies responses, especially from those children who are amoral or immoral. If there is inadequate parenting, you're pretty much in danger of getting an unstable kid, and all the mental health professionals in the world can only reduce the likely violent outcomes.
An example is the recent capture in Seattle of one of the youths who beat up a man in Belltown. The first one that was caught was avoiding child welfare and some counsellors had remarked that he was very bright. But because we spend money on punishment and not correction at an early stage, it was probably way too late by the time he received any useful societal feedback.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Simulations can help build autonomic reactions, help you to learn to be able to react without thinking, but it's still nothing like actual combat or actual death or dismemberment.
Give me ten soldiers with a shitload of training, but no actual combat experience. My bet is that only two of those will be fully capable in their first real combat situation, six will be partially capable (able to lay down cover fire and fire at half rate), one will be mostly useless (so panicky they're a danger to the rest), and one will be totally incapable of firing.
It's just not the same.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Actually, you are supposed to think, but there's reaction to ambush and offense attack. Very different. Our training was very focussed on 2-3 round bursts, since we didn't need the limiter the US marines and others use. Basically, after 2-3 rounds, you will drift off target.
You are supposed to think, but the objectification of your target is more of an American and Japanese concept. We knew it was real people, but that didn't make us any less effective. Of course, this is in Canada, whereas in the US, the training was quite different. The equipment in the US was always fantastic, though, and could make up for the difference.
My point is still that game violence might have a minor impact. Lowest impact - paper RPG or Magic cards. Moderate/low impact - computer game with simulated violence, run by keyboard or joystick. Moderate impact - computer game with force-feedback rifle, air blast as bullet whizzes by, that kind of thing. High impact - living in a gang area.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
If I may ask, who Is william Strunk? I live in Cincinati and have never heard of him (BTW my name is Logan Strunk, so I might have a tad better chance of remembering from somewhere as well)
Just wondering
Off topic? Lest you forget that Lieberman is a big pain in the ass about violence in video games.
Get a fucking clue.
BytesTemplar.com
If constant bombardment to violent graphical content doesn't effect our behavior, then why do so many advertizing companies make so much money selling graphic content that they hope will influence our buying behavior? This debate has always just seemed a waste of time due to the obvious answer to the above question - yes there is a positive correlation. I however find there is no room to dismiss responsibility just because there is one. Responsibility and accountability on the part of the person(s) carrying out the violence are more of the areas of thought that I subscribe to. Then even then it's a heart issue and that is not easilly coerced by attempting to control outward circumstances. If someone is interested in promoting their violent agenda, they aren't going to be stop pursuing that interest until they have a change of mind or heart. So materials are really just a matter of convenience, not a cause. doulos (too lazy to look up my password to formally login)
The man behind the magic--literally! It must be really cool to play the characters that inspired a lot of core D&D spells. (Bigby's Crushing Hand, anyone? :)
I could care less about the "violence in gaming", and it looks like Gary Gygax agrees, too. But the rest of the interview is great. (even if I liked The Realms better, because Elminster is the man, it was all still in the D&D universe...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Haven't you considered the possibility that you might be desensitized because you don't think there's anything remotely wrong with having fun blasting people to bits.
Yes, I've considered that. Then I rejected it. I simply don't see the connection between playing Unreal Tournament with my friends and actually killing a human being. For me, there is no connection between the two whatsoever. I have no animosity towards anyone I play with, many of them are good friends of mine. I know I'm not harming anyone. The game is great fun. You get to play as a team and that alone makes it better than most single-player games. I also play paintball sometimes. I don't consider that to be violent either. The field owners go to great lengths to make sure nobody gets hurt. Players also take precautions and play by certain rules so that nobody gets hurt. There just isn't any sort of violent mindset involved as far as I can tell. It's more a spirit of cooperation, teamwork and sportsmanship like you'd find in other sports.
I think many of these video games are very similar to sports. Football is quite physically violent, but people don't get upset that millions of kids play football every day. Yet they do get upset that kids play "violent" video games together. Why do you think that is? Many people get injured, and once in a great while even killed, playing football. I don't know of anyone who has been injured or killed playing a video game. (well, aside from some wrist strain after playing for too long at a time.) Kids who play real sports are (in my own experience) often violent towards other kids. It's never the math geeks going around beating other people up. It's the football players, the basketball players, etc. I'm not saying there is a causal link between violent sports and violence against others, but it would probably be a lot easier to build a case for that than to build a case for video games causing violence.
Second, while the article certainly didn't prove (or even try to) that there was any connection between the drop in real violence and the increase in violent games, the drop in violence is real. People are becoming more and more hysterical about violence among children even as the number of incidents has been dropping steadily and substantially for years. Why do you think that is?
And it's not their religion which tells them to do it - it's their culture - what everyone around them says is tolerable or even the right thing. They've been desensitized.
They've been desensitized by real violence, not by pointing a mouse cursor at a character on their computer screen and firing a big green ball of lightning at him. People have grown up with such violence being a part of their everyday lives. The boys grow up to be like the men around them who are their role models. They see how the men treat the women and they do the same. That's what desensitizes them. Real life.
You don't change whole nations in one generation, you do it in a few steps. And you usually start with the kids.
It starts with adults. Kids learn from them. They learn to be like the adults. They don't grow up in a vacuum. They usually have plenty of people around them. It's those people who teach them how to act (or in some cases neglect them which leads to a whole separate set of problems which can also lead to violence). Perhaps if kids were raised without proper guidance and in a bad environment, they could learn bad things from tv, movies, music, games, etc. But I don't think those things are to blame. It's the fact that the child is growing up in an environment where he/she is not given the attention and guidance needed to grow up to be a well-adjusted adult.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Either that, or do you think it has something to do with supply and demand? In WWII, people were being drafted left, right & center - anyone who was able was asked to fight. Nowadays, the armed forces is a career choice - only people who want to join are joining - so you get more people who join up becuase they, for lack of a better way of putting it, enjoy combat.
--
Oh, how original...the laugh to prove the other person wrong treatment.
To make things clear, I'm not trying to prove anything here, anything but that my contempt. Saying that guns don't promote violence is .. ahem ... just ridiculous.
What follows is not an argument either, it's just to explain my POV. In Europe, gun advocates are only found in one part of the political spectrum. Not amongst the liberals, not amongst the the conservatives, not among the communists, socialists, free enterprise supporters ... They're mostly found among the racist, foreigner fearing, paranoid far right activist.
That doesn't prove anything ... it just shows a lot.
--
If guns promote violence, knives promote violence. Cars promote violence. Tire irons promote violence. Screwdrivers promote violence.
The only purpose of handguns is to kill. Knives have many other purposes, from spreading butter to sharpening pen. So your bogus cliché does'nt apply.
As far as European gun advocacy, we can continue that discussion when you explain how Switzerland manages to not explode in gun-crazed frenzies, considering that most households are equipped with an honest-to-God assault rifle.
It's the reserve army. Plus the guns have to be stored in a safe place, and (if I remember properly) extracting them of it without a good reason is illegal. Not quite the same thing as your trigger happy NRA friends. Plus switzerland is not very typical of Europe by any stretch.
--
My grandfather used handguns his entire life, and never managed to kill anything.
My grandfather used knives and his entire life, and never managed to spread butter. MWAAAH AHA H. Thanks for the laugh.
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Watch my karma go down in flame on this one
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Actually I believe you have that somewhat wrong.
The point of games like Quake, just like Laser Tag, LARP, etc, is catharsis.
Most people have a certain amount of stress/tension that builds up in the normal course of their lives. Now some people are able to release these tensions without much effort. Others need something to focus in on so they can let off steam.
Some people use sporting events: C'MON! KILL THAT DAMN QUARTERBACK!
Some people drink. Sometimes excessively if their real life sucks bigtime.
Some people actually take up sporting passtimes like boxing, or martial arts to help work it out. Or go to the gym.
And a certain segment of the population turns to role-playing as a safe outlet for their anger/tensions. It's an area where they're able to stand toe to toe with the biggest and baddest, and slug it out.....yet still go to work the next morning without that side-trip to the hospital for broken ribs, or jail for disturbing the peace.
In character, they can do things and release in ways that would be socially unacceptable IRL (hacking things and people to bits, blowing things up with fireballs, sic'ing hordes of undead on a character who's just a bit TOO like your boss, and backstabbing some schmuck aren't generally considered polite).
It also gives the players the chance to explore social situations which they might, otherwise, not encounter. I've seen some really introverted, shy people become absoloute maniacs in-character. And you know what? It was fun as hell! Like improv acting...with magic missiles. And believe it or not, this doesn't disconnect them to society. It connects them.
Yes, it uses fighting and conflict as a facilitator. But what does better business at the movies? Sterile documentaries or action movies?
Some people can just curl up into a good book and live, vicariously, through it. RP is a way to share the book with people.
Also, all but the most delusional understand the difference between the fantasy of the RPG and reality. IOW, there's no cure light wounds when you shove a real sword through someone's chest.
Most of these things apply to Quake-style competitive games as well. Again, violence is a facilitator, but it's still cartoonish, and quite clearly deliniated from real world violence.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
What the hell does "causationally" mean? Is that a real word, or did you make it up? And even if it is a real word, someone once said that good writers never use a five-dollar word where a fifty-cent word will do.
Strunk and White would frag you where you stand.
--Jim
Cute... but wrong. Frag is the sort of word that Strunk and White would love. It's a nice, short, single syllable that explodes out of the mouth. It's simple, unpretentious, and gets the meaning across with effect. It's slang, of course, but is not made up.
Flay is a nice word, too (remember Silence of the Lambs?), but doesn't mean the same thing.
--Jim
In the fifties they nearly banned comic books for attributing to juvenile deliquency.
;->).
In the sixties it was the hippies and the drugs that caused all the violence. Yes, BTW, I know the stereotype of the peace loving hippy but then again every radical politico in the sixties were
referred to as a hippy.
In the seventies it was the drugs still (everyone really liked drugs around this time
In the eighties it was those satanic role playing games.
Today, they complain about video games.
Scapegoats are always going to be needed because people in America right now just cannot accept that some people are freaks and mad dogs that will simply go off.
They have to have a reason so we can prevent it. It is bull. Famous people cannot die without a conspiracy behind their death, John Kennedy, MLK or even freakin' Princess Di. Nothing random can happen and nothing can happen that is totally unpreventable. There are people that actually think that we can actually prevent a warped kid from shooting up a school or some weirdo from attacking kids or terroists from bombing our ships, etc..etc.. ad nausem.
We are not in control. Expectation is just a way of thinking you know what is coming next AND YOU DON'T. Get over it.
ACK
Dick Cavett said it best, when he said "Personally, I see more comedy on television than violence, but nobody is complaining about comedy in the streets."
I get so fed up with people using "common wisdom" to bring their points across... "If a drink costs less at happy hour, people will drink more. It's OBVIOUS!" (Why couldn't it be, "if a drink costs less at happy hour, people will simply save money?").
If it's so ****ing obvious, then do the damn studies, and do them with statistically meaningful numbers. And don't be afraid to publish them when they show that your "common wisdom" was incorrect.
"There's so much violence in these computer games, so they MUST be causing all the violence we're seeing in schools." (BLAH!!!!)
--
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
You feel it desensitizes one. Do you feel that way because you feel it has happened to you? If not, how else can you 'feel' that this is what happens?
I for one am still *horrified* by real life violence.
And I"ve played a *SHITLOAD* of extremely violent video games and watched violent movies.
I am 15 years old, and have played violent video games for a considerable time (not that long, maybe since I was 13 ;) I will NOT watch violent movies, and even can't watch the sicko-horror scenes in Monty Python (which I on the whole love, if they'd can the damn animations and b/g/g). I am in NO way desensitized to violence. I am well aware of the difference between a couple hundred pixels on my screen (and a couple thousand on another, not to mention packets and memory state) and a living human being. Hell, I have a hard time sleeping after reading my WWII books. Believe me, I play Counter-Strike and other 'killing' games at LEAST an hour a day (average, of course), but I don't think I'd even shoot at someone attacking me (thakfully, I've never had the chance to find out). In-game I'm a brutal terrorist, but in the real life I'm a soft fuzzy guy who loves his new kitten. There is a sharp difference there. Perhaps I'm different, but people seem to ignore people like me. Perhaps they should actually research non-killers (that is, people who aren't fscked up in the head to start with).
I'm not sure why Gary Gygax's opinion on this subject is really that valuable. A person who writes the material that has accusations leveled at it is hardly an impartial subject....
-Moondog
While video game violence may or may not be linked to real world violence, I can't help but feel it does desensitizes one with related violence in the real world through exposure. One essentially gets used to it.
- systmc
This guy has the Ego of Nerd-dom +3
Where are the keys to my whore?
Originiating in the armed forces, "Frag" means 'kill' in a FPS. oriignally, however, it referenced hitting your own guys with fragmentaion grenades accidentally
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ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
If you're sick and tired of video game violence, push nonviolent games such as Tetris on your kids.
Will I retire or break 10K?
End public education and you see a small decrease in violence by disaffected middle-class kids.
Then watch the riots start.
Then watch the revolutions unfold.
Pick your poison.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
It's funny to think back to middle and high school. I had a knife held to my throat by another kid once in 7th grade (he was "just joking around"). As far as I know, he didn't play any role-playing or computer games.
I saw a number of brutal fights in high school, including one between a guy and a girl where he knocked her knife across the cafeteria and started ripping her hair out. From what I knew of those two, neither played any role-playing or computer games.
The year after I graduated from high school, two kids who were suspended from school paid a visit with a pair of handguns. They shot three staff members, one fatally. No mention of computer or role-playing games.
But I have seen the other side of the coin. I knew a guy in middle school who was very much into role playing games who broke into the school and trashed part of it. He was later shipped off to military school where I understand he found a perfect outlet for his f-ed up emotions.
A few years after high school, I happened to meet a friend-of-a-friend who played some role-playing games and hung out on BBSs. At dinner, he ordered a very rare steak ("put it on the grill, count to five, flip it, count to five, then bring it out"). A couple weeks later he was arrested (and I believe later convicted) for brutally murdering his former girlfriend. The funny part is, I started playing with this guy's old gaming group after that and had a great time with a group of mostly well-adjusted geeks.
There are plenty of people in this world who's brains just aren't wired right. Not all of them can be ex-marines or postal workers when they dump core. Some will use a computer. Some will play role-playing games. Some will be in wealthy families. Some will be vice presidents at large companies.
Various groups of people always seem to be looking for the "magic bullet" when it comes to the cause and cure for crime and violence in society. Especially when the violence was committed by someone very young. Many people seem to just want a scapegoat, something that they can point to as the cause. I think it should be fairly obvious though, that there is never such a simple explanation for any specific act of violence, or for violence in general. It is a very common belief that exposure to violent movies, videogames, etc. desensitizes the viewer. Whether or not this is true, the affect that viewing anything has on a person depends very much on their set of values with which they can evaluate it. Studies have shown that when parents view television with their children, and discuss what they are seeing with the child, it greatly affects the way in which the child thinks about what he/she is watching.
Personally, I don't really play any RPGs or gory video games, but I don't really think there's any causation between viewing violence and committing violence.
I believe that many of the main causes of violence in our society are social and economic factors. Many parents don't spend enough time with their kids, and never give them any context with which to interpret the violence they see. This is much more of a problem than the fact that the kids are being exposed to violence. Inequality and oppression, both social and economic, also seem to sometimes lead to violence. There also seem to be people who for no apparent reason are just pre-disposed towards violence. Mental illness can sometimes be a factor. All of these things and many more can lead to violence. Any specific act of violence is likely to have its roots in several of these factors.
Trying to blame violence on television/movies/videogames/music is just a cheap way to opt out of asking deeper, more disturbing questions.
When books burn, people are next.
I don't think so, but I'm curious what you think.
I don't think that its the games which are really at fault for encouraging any violent behavior in youths. Violence starts mostly with dischord in the child's home and family life. Discontentment and frustration in his or her real life is what can drive them to physical violence. Keeping families working together and stopping the real-life abuse is where we should direct our efforts. Placing attention and blame onto violent games or television shows is not the right thing to do.
Quake doesn't get people angry enough to kill their mother or shoot their high school teachers. Violent games and TV shows just help disconnect offenders from the realization of their crimes, after they've been commited.
:)
Of course violent video games don't make people kill other people. To kill someone, you have to look away from your computer.
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
The reason people attack the gaming market is that it's an easy target...
Video/computer games are notorious for their gratuitous violence and lots of blood and gore, along with the fact that the primary users are children.
It's a lot easier to tell people that it's the "violent games" that are causing their children to become violent and socially maladjusted, rather than tell the truth, which is that they have bad parenting skills and don't teach their children the morals that they (children) need to learn.
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Is anyone aware of any actual STUDIES on the subject of video games inducing violence? Because I don't buy it, but it shouldn't be TOO difficult to determine. If you can show that (just for instance, I have no idea what the actual numbers might be) 25% of the population has spent significant amounts of time playing Quake III / HalfLife / UT / etc., and that a disproportionate percentage of violent crimes (like 35% or more) are attributable to people in this group, THEN I might begin to believe it. Such a study is not really possible with regards to violence in most types of media because exposure to them is too ubiquitous (how many people HAVEN'T been watching TV but are still "mainstream" enough to make a reasonable control group?) But it shouldn't be difficult with VGs - there's still plenty of "normal" people out there that have never fragged (I think - maybe I'm just out of touch!) Granted, this is nowhere CLOSE to showing a causal relation (which is really QUITE difficult in anything involving patterns of human behavior; this is why psychology, sociology, etc. are still considered "soft" science), but right now all we have is anecdotal evidence (which is no evidence). "Some kid(s) played a bunch of violent games and then went and shot up their school. When asked what they were all about, the kid(s) said "I play Quake lots"."
But think about it - although the video game industry is steadily extending its audience into the over-30 crowd, the main consumers of VGs, especially ultra-violent VGs, are the under-30 crowd. These are ALSO the people that are the most emotionally volatile. It's nothing to do with VGs, it's just developmental! Teenagers (and to a lesser extent 20-somethings) are still developing mentally and physically and emotionally. They're more volatile. It's this volatility that both makes them likely to commit crimes of "passion" and also likely to play violent VGs! I would contend that the "real violence" and "play violence" are both EFFECTS of an underlying CAUSE - plain ol' human adolesence! C'mon, seriously, how many people here over 25 can honestly look back at their years from age 10ish to 25ish and NOT wonder how on earth they made it through adolesence and pre-adulthood withOUT killing themselves or anyone else or just losing it and blasting things randomly?
I suspect that if my hypothetical study above were conducted that the results would be exactly the opposite - violent gamers are LESS likely to be violent in real life. I think this is because the outlet that it provides to get aggression OUT of your system more than offsets the desensitization effects. At least that's certainly how it works for ME. My bottom line has been stated over and over by others, but it's worth repeating: the dangers of violent games (TV, whatever) are marginal. The vast majority of people that wouldn't have gone on a killing spree or whatever had they never played, watched, read, spong-absorbed this input are NOT going to suddenly flip-flop because of it. The unbalanced few would be unbalanced without it. The slim margin of people that MIGHT flip because of it are NOT worth depriving the human race of its natural talents for creativity. Personally, I'd be MUCH more likely to flip if all I could play was the VG equivalent of "The Care Bears"...
Violent games and TV shows just help disconnect offenders from the realization of their crimes, after they've been commited.
Yes, but then we wouldn't have a handy scapegoat to blame, would we? After all, if we were to focus societal and economic resources on fixing the discord in the child's home and family life, we might get some real results.
Another example would be the War on Drugs. Back during Nixon's time, we spent two-thirds of federal monies on prevention (demand) and one-third on punishment (supply). Now we keep locking up more and more people, and it still doesn't change the behaviour. Because it's politically easy to be tough on crime, not actually go through, program by program, and see what really delivers results.
And this is to the point that over 50 percent of many counties budgets are spent on the justice system, where they used to be in the 20 to 30 percent range.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
The other thing most sims don't prepare you for is the fact that the other guy is shooting back.
... sims can make young punks think they know all this stuff and buy a gun and it's sooo easy to pull that trigger and be the big man. And then it jams, it's heavy, you miss and lots of innocent people end up dead. That's NOT good.
Severe duh. Man, where's the whiz and gusts of air from the bullets, the tracer rounds screaming at your eyeballs, the panic inducement of trees spattering as they're hit, the noise, the fires, the confusion even when you're calm and the world has slowed to a crawl and you realize that you know exactly what you're doing and it's happening while you're almost floating above it all.
Until they come out with home theater games with this kind of thing, you're still going to have people who think they know what to do, but don't. The sickening feeling of realizing that that body is a dead person, or worse is wounded, and what you had to do with the whole equation. The friends and what is happening to them. The reality that it really doesn't matter if you call for help, because by the time it arrives it will be way too late, but you do it anyway.
But
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Why did people kill each other before video games? Just curious.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Here's a fact. Being exposed to violence desensitizes you to it. That's any type of violence; verbal abuse, violent murder and rape, and everything in between. Hearing something horrible happen on the radio desensitizes you a little. Seeing it on TV does it more. Doing it interactively on the computer, where you make it happen, desensitizes you a lot.
If you are desensitized to violence, you are more likely to do it yourself. If violence is a viable solution in every aspect of your "play" life, then you will begin to see it as a solution in your "real" life.
The younger you are, the more pronounced the effect is.
Example: Normal people off the street will not, unless circumstances are extreme, kill someone. The US Marines need to train people to kill someone when they are not in direct personal danger. So they use pop up targets with the shape of a human. This trains people to pull the trigger without thinking. This is the same psychologically as playing Quake or Halflife.
However, it is true that video games are not responsible for much violence in society. The amount that they desensitize you is not massive and mind bending. Video games are only really a threat to people who are violent or already in a mentally suggestive state.
[The above is based on the expert opinion of the Chief of Psychology and Administrative Director of the local Phyc. Hospital.]
This is my opinion: I think that putting Solider of Fortune in the hands of 6 six year old should be a crime.
"You must do the thing you think you cannot do" E.Roosevelt
If I become desensitized to something, such as violence, that doesn't mean that I will be more likly to commit violence. It just means that it will have less emotional impact.
Example, I am desensitized to violence and I see someone shot before my eyes and they are now lying in a pool of their own blood. Do I pull out a gun and start shooting people too? No, I assess the situation and call for help. A less "desensitied" person would probably just stand there screaming. I don't have to have an emotional reaction to know what's right.
People are still responsable for their own actions. "Quake" doesn't teach people to shoot real people, it teaches them to click targets on their computer screen....
William Strunk Jr., abandoned by his parents and raised by wolves untill he graduated from the University of Cincinatti, and legendary author of English Metres, is highly cheesed because nobody cared about it. Now he's back with a printing press and a score to settle!
E. B. White was bitten by a highly intelligent radioactive spider that could write messages in her webs. Now he is more powerful than ever and is fighting on the crusade for elegant prose--but can his rage be kept in check? Or will he finally be driven to destruction by people who "done seen things" and don't know the difference between "its" and "it's"?
Find out on the next episode of--
Strunk and White, ActionTeam!!!
Your mind is squeezed by a blast of pain!
I am a mental health professional, and the research I am aware of shows the above statement to be false. There have been many, many studies on modeling of behavior that absolutely shows an increase in violent behavior when exposed to media with violent content. The simplest and most well known of these was an experiment exposing children to movies of other children hitting life-sized dolls with a control group of children doing regular play without violent content.
This is an example of the kind of boneheaded research that makes me wonder how the experimenters managed to pass their undergrad classes let alone get a Ph.D or M.D.
Firstly I'll comment on ivaldes3's misdirected ire. Repeat after me, "RPGs do not increase violent behavior". A Role Playing Game is a group activity played by a close circle of friends who exercise their imagination pretending to be wizards, warriors, gods, superheroes, etc. Several studies have shown that the one thing that links violent/suicidal teenagers is the fact that they are usually loners who feel isolated from their peers and family and are the victims of abuse either by their peers or their family.
Secondly, the boneheaded experiment you described is the most contrived piece of garbage I have ever heard of. Children imitate/mimic what they see around them, after all that's how they learn to talk. If you show children images of other children performing actions, it is extremely likely that they will imitate this behavior. The fact that they mimic the behavior of the children in the movie only shows that they are healthy and observant kids. To leap from the results of that experiment to then claim that RPGs cause violence is not only unreasonable but extremely illogical.
Second Law of Blissful Ignorance
Example: Normal people off the street will not, unless circumstances are extreme, kill someone. The US Marines need to train people to kill someone when they are not in direct personal danger. So they use pop up targets with the shape of a human. This trains people to pull the trigger without thinking. This is the same psychologically as playing Quake or Halflife.
Well, I've had quite a bit of training in the Canadian Army myself. Even with training, we still expect that more than half of all combatants will not shoot at another human being, but will miss. This is pretty much a constant.
Playing Quake or Halflife is nothing like using a force-feedback rifle simulator. They used to ban us from paintball games because we actually used weapons and knew about kickback, reactions, wind drift, shadow perception, and all the other factors necessary to complete a real kill. And even a simulator is a far cry from real combat. It's not quiet in real war, it's way more boring and way more exciting, and even the best game is jigged for playability, whereas real combat is a heck of a lot of misses and a lot of unseen targets, regardless of technology.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?