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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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-)
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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.