Why the Gaming-Violence Connection is So Comforting

Warm Coffee writes "It's is well-established that the science supporting a connection between video game violence and real-world violence is tenuous. A new article at Ars Technica examines why society finds a gaming-violence connection so comforting. From the article: 'Sternheimer suggests that gaming is simply the latest in a long series of media influences to take the blame. "Over the past century, politicians have complained that cars, radio, movies, rock music, and even comic books caused youth immorality and crime, calling for control and sometimes censorship." She terms the targets of such efforts folk devils, items branded dangerous and immoral that serve to focus blame and fear.'"

Comments

A problem as old as Man...

[Nephroth]

In ancient times on the holiday of Yom Kippur, Jewish tribes would take a sacrificial goat and symbolically imbue it with all of the sins and misfortunes of the village that year. They would then drive the goat into the wilderness as a means of expelling the misdeeds of the village inhabitants.

The point here is that for as long as we've had civilization, we have had the compulsion toward placing blame for the wrongs of society on some outside force, hence the term, "scapegoat."

Video games are yet another in a long line of popular items to blame the collective wrongs of society upon in order to keep us from having to confront the real problems in society. Whether these problems are those purely indicative of cultural shift over time, or more serious issues like teenagers murdering their classmates, something easy is always found to blame. Nevermind the fact that we live in an exceedingly materialistic culture (that forsakes the bonds of families and friends for monetary gains) or the fact that parents these days don't seem to pay the same kind of attention to their kids that they used to, it's just a lot easier to blame something popular for the decay of society rather than society itself.

A Witch Hunt

[KenshoDude]

Tracking the progress of a witch hunt...

1. Some creepy, undesirable trend starts to happen
2. The true cause is not readily understood
3. No personal responsibility is taken
4. Thus, something must else must be responsible
5. Fear ensues
6. The most superficial and convenient object of blame is identified
7. People start to feel a false sense of security knowing they are not to blame
8. People start to feel a false sense of security because the cause is now "understood"
9. The scapegoat becomes persecuted
10. After the typically innocent scapegoat dies, the undesirable trend continues
11. The persecutors suddenly reveal themselves as the creepy, undesirable monsters they were trying to eradicate

Also...

[urbanradar]

Simply blaming games (or, more generally, the media) for our society's problems with violence allows us to ignore the real roots of the problem -- which usually boil down to failures of societies as a whole. Which thought seems worse: "Video games are teaching kids to be violent", or "Our society's methods for protecting the safety and security of its members are insufficient and could fail again any time, and I'm probably part of the problem"?

How could such an evil species as us ever evolve?

[spun]

Humans are predisposed towards cooperation, not screwing each other over. How would a species that fucks itself over evolve in the first place?

The theory I've read is that genetically we have a cooperative side and a competitive side. Most of the time, we operate in cooperative mode. When things get really tight, we switch over to competitive mode.

Around 4500BC, the Sahara and much of Asia went from being grasslands to desert. The people that had settled there faced famine on a scale never before seen, as in times past, hunter-gatherers just picked up and left when things got that bad. With the surplus and organization that agriculture gave us, we had another option for the first time: go to war.

There is no evidence of fortified towns before this. No weapons that were only for killing humans, not hunting. No mass graves. After that, you see a wave of these things in the archaeological record, spreading out from that epicenter of violence.

The problem was that you had a generation of severely Post Traumatic Stress Disordered adults raising a generation of brain damaged children. Starvation means poor myelin sheath formation over nerves, and brain damage.

What happened is that the competitive mode got locked in, long after it was no longer the most efficient strategy. Most of what we call civilization comes either from this PTSD, brain damaged culture of violence, or the reaction to it.

You can still find tribes in the rainforests of the amazon that have not been impacted by this culture of violence and competition. Look for a book called The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff. It talks about her time with one such tribe, and the theory of childhood development she came up with. The kids in this tribe never act out, never rebel, and are completely loving and non-competitive towards each other.