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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. "
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...
Well, maybe he's as sick as a lot of us are that parents don't seem to ever shoulder any of the blame when some kid hauls off and shoots somebody. As soon as it happens, reporters and cops and everyone else start digging to see what games the kid plays and whether he spends time on the internet or not. Nevermind that his mom is a crack addict and her boyfriend is a dealer who leaves guns laying around the house. Nah.. it's gotta be the video games.
Parents are supposed to take responsibility for their children. That includes deciding what games they should be allowed to play, what they should be able to watch on tv, what they should read, what they should be allowed to do. You can't just point your finger at the games and declare that they are to blame. Trying pointing at the parent for letting the child play the games or for not taking an interest in the child enough to know that there was a problem and trouble was coming. Parents seem to think they can just have all the kids they want and society is supposed to make sure they turn out alright. Time for them to wake up.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Why did people kill each other before video games? Just curious.
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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?