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Views on Violence in Video Games
CBS News' GameCore site is running a series of articles discussing the ever recurring debate about video games and violent behavior. They start with prominent anti-gaming lawyer Jack Thompson. From the article: "The heads of six major health care organizations testified before Congress that there are hundreds of studies that prove the link. All the video game industry has are studies paid for by them, which are geared to find the opposite result. Lawyers call such experts 'whores.'" Tim Buckley, of the webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Del, had the chance to put forth an opposing viewpoint on the subject. According to the site there will be more coverage on this topic next week from other gaming community members.
I find it funny that Jack Thompson is calling the experts that don't agree with him 'whores'. Seems like that's a pot-kettle-black issue to me.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
And to sound like a broken record, but it must be done, that is correlation, not causality.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
From the article: I'm sure that at one point or another a golfer snapped and beat someone to death with a 7-iron.
Let's ban golf, shall we?
Wow, how witty. I completely saw past the simplisticness of the allegory there. My mind sure is made up after that comment! Now just throw in a catchy slogan, and I'm hooked!
-- (Score:i , Imaginary)
That violent games can translate to aggression in young boys I think is fairly easy to illustrate. I don't think that means there needs to be wholesale bans or anything but there should be ratings and limits. We don't allow 12 year olds to see rated R movies (okay, we've all snuck into a movie that aside...). We don't allow them to view porn. We shouldn't allow them to buy violent video games.
A lot of people compare this whole issue to television and movies. They say that violent games are no worse then the violence that kids see every day on the news and in the movie theaters. I disagree with this greatly though.
When I watch a movie it is a fairly passive activety. I sit back, enjoy the flick without much involement. When I play a game though, such as grand theft auto or the like, that is a very active thing. I look for pedestrians to run over, I look for police to beat up. Now, I don't think that this nesassarly translates into violence in real life but it is definetly worse then what you see in tv and movies.
Be better in bed. Wikiafterdark!
and do something about the idiot parents who let their kid hang a swastika in their room and collect empty gas canisters.
Think about it...of course major health care organizations are going to find some sort of link between video games and violence. Think of the BILLIONS of dollars in potential revenue to be had by "treating" kids who play too many games. Now who's the whore?
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
You are always going to have people who cannot distinguish between make believe and reality. We should commit these people, not punish the sane people.
It's the battle of the minds, and everyone's unarmed.
Video games don't teach kids how to kill. Absent parenting combined with social retardation (as in the case of Columbine)lead kids to kill. Bad parenting or no parenting is behind most if not all teen murderers.
I am wondering why these studies are not done in Japan? A place with zero crime rate and an overwhelming dose of video games.
Ooops... could it throw off their theory/lame hypothesis etc etc.
I have no earthly idea, and no one can guess at that. I can tell you that some crimes would not occur but for the violent entertainment. For the families of the deceased, that is the only statistic that matters.
Francis Schaeffer once said "Art reflects culture". The fact that so many people buy and play violent video games (which is an amazing art form) tells more about who we are as a culture than will the history books. To blame the manufacturers isn't getting to the root of the problem.
I don't know what the answer is. I think there probably is some link between people being desensitized to violent and playing violent games, but I also don't think laws will do anything more than to fuel debate and make lawyers wealthy.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
Sure, they may play Grand Theft Auto and shoot at people. But they could just as easily get inspiration from the latest 50 Cent album or even a TIME magazine article detailing the Columbine massacre. Hell, there are enough wackos blaming their crimes on God speaking to them, shouldn't we point the finger at religion too?
The bottom line is that you never know how the mind of a sociopath is going to interpret something - so video games hold no more blame than anything else.
Personally, I want to see these studies that show there is or isn't a link between real violence and shitty parenting.
I love violent games, I've been playing them as long as I can remember. I've boxed, wrestled, competed in jiu-jitsu and submission wrestling tournaments. Those may be sports, but they're as violent as sports get.
I just love the visceral feeling I get when I blast an imp that jumped out of the shadows and scared the crap out of me. I get a similar visceral feeling when I land a nice punch or tap out an opponent.
All of that being said, these are just games. Repeat after me: "IT IS JUST A GAME".
I absolutely detest "real" violence. Every time they showed people in the comforts of their middle-class existance cheering as bombs went off in Iraq I felt sick to my stomache. I am not desensitized whatsoever.
If people didn't have games to blame things like this on, they would just find something else.
Look, to prove the concept you have to do the following:
One take a random selection of at least 100 people, divide it into two groups of at least 50.
Force, and I do mean FORCE one group to play violent video games for a period of however long you think is neccesary to make them violent. 1 year, at 1 hour a day seems reasonable to me. If they don't enjoy playing the game, tough. They have to do it.
Prevent, and I do mean PREVENT one group from playing violent games for the same period.
Compare both groups violent tendencies, IQs, etc. etc. with the people deciding who is "violent" etc. having no idea which group the subjects belong to.
Such studies have been done before. They found ZERO, NADA, NO increase in violent tendencies.
So of course the fools claim "you got the age wrong" or "You didn't force them to play enough" etc. etc. etc.
Not a single study has demonstrated causality. I personally think this is because there is NO causality. People that like violent games grow up to be violent. People that watch violent games think violent thoughts for a short period after (24 hours is the max tested). But neither of those things means that watching the games makes you act violently.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Take a random selection of at least 100 people, divide it into two groups of at least 50. Force, and I do mean FORCE one group to play violent video games for a period of however long you think is neccesary to make them violent. 1 year, at 1 hour a day seems reasonable to me. If they don't enjoy playing the game, tough. They have to do it.
Prevent, and I do mean PREVENT one group from playing violent games for the same period.
Compare both groups violent tendencies, IQs, etc. etc. with the people deciding who is "violent" etc. having no idea which group the subjects belong to.
Such studies have been done before. They found ZERO, NADA, NO increase in violent tendencies.
So of course the fools claim "you got the age wrong" or "You didn't force them to play enough" etc. etc. etc.
Not a single study has demonstrated causality. I personally think this is because there is NO causality. People that like violent games grow up to be violent. People that watch violent games think violent thoughts for a short period after (24 hours is the max I have seen tested). But neither of those things means that watching the games makes you act violently.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
By "social retardation" do you mean "emotional abuse at the hands of their peers"?
Back when I was a young lad, I went through a "white boy being a G" phase. This involved a strong appreciation for Snoop Dogg, NWA, Fuck The Police, etc. I dressed up more like these guys, talked a cracker-assed form of ebonics, and hung around with the like crowd.
One day, while out with "the crew", two of the guys decide its a good idea to steal a couple of handguns from a small mom'n'pop gun store we were driving by. Sure I listened to violent music, had an odd fascination with pimps and ho's, and all that shit, but as soon as it came down to these guys ready to steal a couple of handguns, my better instincts took over.
We all listened to the same music, so by this logic we all should have been piling into that gun shop stealing what we could. Instead, only 2 guys did, and the rest of us got the hell out of there. I attribute this to good parents that gave me the right tools and skills to handle random situations in life (and I am eternally grateful). It was plainly obvious to me even then that those two guys came from some severely f'cked up homes.
I wish parents would do more to take personal responsibility for their kids, instead of trying to place blame elsewhere. I know I am.
Actually I had the urge to commit violence and did it. But not by playing a game. I just read a book. In fact I duplicated various human sacrifices mentioned in the Bible. Actually I was playing the game, "The true Bible," and got it from there.
*Not this is not really true but what if someone said that.
** This game does not exist but if it did then it would contain more violence than most movies. If, "The Passion of the Christ," the game came out, that depicts torture, though it was for "good" reasons. Would playing that be a factor? Is it because it is real? Because it is religious or Christian? What about a game where Christians fought back against ancient Romans in the 100's AD? You try to kill as many Roman guards to allow you religion, Christianity, to flourish.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
My 11-year olds saw at least one R-rated movie years back. "Waiting for Guffman" was rated R (thanks to the totally surreal fundie/Catholic world of the MPAA's ratings board) but I thought it was watchable for them. Tonight we've got a copy of "The Big Night" from Netflix, and it also has an R, probably for language. I have no trouble letting them see that.
The limits on games right now are advisory, and stores sell according to them basically in order to keep their reputations. That's the way I want it. The power in this situation is with the parents if they will only exercise it. That's as much as we can really hope for.
(In general I think tons of social problems in the US today come down to economic pressures that force both parents to work without giving us as much flexibility as we need to raise families. Nothing against women working, it's not a gender thing -- but kids need adults in their lives, and it's just plain a bad economic situation when there's this much pressure drawing the attention of adults away. Personally, as someone who's benefitted from it, I think flex time is a much more effective solution to a variety of social ills than most of the "scary problem!" legislation that gets suggested.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The problem isn't so much bad parenting as it is Fundamental Attribution Error.
This is a term in psychology where basically, bad things that happen to me are attributed to external causes, and good things that happen to me are attributed to internal causes.
For example, if I do well on a test, it was because I studied hard. If I didn't, then it's because the teacher failed me or didn't like me for some other reason, or because I was tired.
Being a parent myself, one of the last things I would want to do is admit I'm a bad parent. If my son went off and killed some people, it would be very difficult for me to admit that it was my bad parenting that caused it.
Because I tend to be more open minded then the average Joe in America, I think I would admit it eventually.
But someone like Jack Thompson is just another ambulance chaser. He just aggrivates the situation the parent is going through by telling them that their kid killing some people isn't their fault, it's the video games' fault. Everyone is prone to Fundamental Attribution Error, and Jack Thompson is just helping that process along. When you're in a state or mourning, it's easy to not see the truth clearly.
Or, if the group that had NO previous history of violence had a rate of engaging in future violent behaviour higher than the control group, then that would be meaningful.
The most interesting thing to know would be how they selected the two groups. If there was any self selection involved, it's just as likely that those with a latent tendancy towards violence will tend to self-select to play video games at a slightly higher rate than those without the tendancy. Do you have a link to the study?
Other factors could also come into play. For example, kids with less parental interaction will be more likely to sit in their room playing video games. It could just as easily be the parental interaction that matters.
Given that it's an 8 year study, I imagine that the two groups were, in fact, self selected.
Broadcast media slams games. They have since they first began to show up. They do it now. They always will.
Their newsrooms hype every study purporting to show a connection between violence and games (while simultaneously burying any making the same connection between violence and TV). Ditto between anything else bad and games. (Low test scores, low income, alcoholism, etc.)
Their made-for-TV movies have main plots or subplots slamming games. Their sitcoms have episodes on games. Their commedians make cracks about games.
They did it to RPGs and the did it to video games. They do similar things to home computers, computer programming, and a number of internet activities (blogs, news outlets, mailing lists, online entertainments, file swapping, social contact facilitating 'ware of every sort, etc.).
Why do they do it?
Because it's their COMPETITION!
Video games and RPGs compete for eyeball time against their shows. This costs them advertising revenue. Online entertainment ditto. Social networking also takes time away from viewing, AND may lead to other non-TV-watching activities far beyond the time spend in front of a screen.
Network news outlets and news-related blogs scoop theirs regularly and expose their errors and malfesance. This reduces both their audience-related revenue and their effectiveness as a political tool.
TV networks are part of media conglomerates. So online "content" production/distribution tools (in addition to the "piracy" issue) pose a threat to their own offline operations.
And so on.
So when you hear them claim things are bad you need to consider the source, and dig down to the underlying meat, to discover whether there's anything behind the hype - or whether it's just something that either matches their current templates for an eyeball-attractor or promotes their own interests by slamming their opposition.
Which is, of course, what we're doing here. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Violent video games, do not teach kids how to kill, only to be more used to violents.
I completely disagree. There is a huge difference between viewing simulated violence and real life violence. I have been playing so called violent video games for a long time now. Yet a while back I witnessed the direct aftermath of a horrible accident on an expressway that turned my stomach. A guy on a motorcycle wiped out after a car had side swiped him. The sight was one that I cannot forget. The blood pouring out of him like the Nile River only made the hunk of ground meat that used to be his head stand out from his white undershirt now half soaked with blood. And I can tell you there is a big difference between virtual bloodshed and the real thing. If I was desensitized to violence and bloodshed don't you think I would have just shrugged it off? And have you ever been in a bar and a fight breaks out? Witnessing someone getting cracked in the face and smash there head on a tile floor and convulse from the concussion is very unsettling. Think about it, how real are GTA/Quake/Doom/Half-life etc.? Even with the half-life 2 physics engine a shotgun blast to the head doesn't shred it to bits splattering brains, skull fragments and blood all over with real life detail. Go to rotten.com and look at what real life violence looks like. No matter how much counterstrike I play those pictures still disturb me.
And my good friend just returned from Iraq just a few days ago says he doesn't even think that all those hours spent playing quake 2 online help one single bit. The shit he saw there doesn't compare to what we see in movies or games. One thing that disturbed me was his recollection of an incident when a rebel popped out from behind a building holding an RPG. He was on the gunner's position of a hummer with the m240 bravo 7.62MM machine gun. He says it was slow motion as he paused and squeezed the trigger of the gun and lit the guy up. The blood spray and spatter from the bullets punching holes through the unarmored rebel was less disturbing then the guys' actual body motions as he danced around with about a dozen holes in him then doing a 180 and dropping like a sac of potatoes to the ground. That guy was his first kill.
Violence in movies can almost compare to real life but still its fake and you know it. Seeing the real thing is a whole different experience. And there is no other like it, you can't simulate it.