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. "

Comments

Boneheaded experiments galore?

[Carnage4Life]

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

An ex-Sargeant's opinion

[WillSeattle]

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.