Games Are No Cause For Murder

An anonymous reader writes "At Gamers With Jobs, Shawn Andrich speaks out against pointing the finger at videogames as a causative factor in a murder cases. He makes the excellent point that, though we may enjoy the metaphor, life is not a game. There is no simple connection between event A and event B. Our actions are dictated by experiences from a lifetime, and they should be addressed that way for good or ill. 'Life can't be framed up like a game of billiards. There is no easy eight ball, corner pocket shot to be made when trying to draw a line between cause and action ... Lasting, positive change will only come when we stop reaching for causes and start creating conditions that will support kids and teenagers who need it. We can't make anyone put the pin back in the grenade, but by supporting active, caring people who want to help, we might be able to influence some of those fateful decisions before it gets that far.'" GamePolitics on Joystiq has an editorial up looking at a similar question.

Comments

Re:Preaching to the Choir

[Rycross]

Its only a valid disproof if your opponent is saying "Violent games always cause violence." What they're saying is more along the lines of "Violent games can sometimes be a trigger for violence," or more frequently "Violent games can increase violent tendencies, which may have an overall effect of increasing societal violence when systematically applied to a large population." The whole I-play-games-and-I'm-not-violent defense is pretty much worthless against such arguments, and makes you look uninformed. Why would anyone take you seriously if you don't even seem to understand the basic tenets of the argument at hand?

Actually, it's worse than that

[Moraelin]

Disclaimer: although I did get drafted into the army, and in case of a war I'd be a sergeant, this was a long time ago and I don't think I was some expert even then. Also, I'm an AA guy, and we did less infantry training than the _real_ infantry. So take it with a grain of salt.

That said, I think that games offer an even more distorted view than even you credit them with. E.g.,

1. Tactical priority: games offer a massively distorted view of that. Sometimes stuff that's far away is of higher priority than stuff that's relatively nearer, especially if you're a specialist in some kind of weapon. E.g., as AA crews we'd give a lot higher priority to a bomber that's currently 75 km away than to infantry at 1 km away. ('Course, if said infantry is currently assaulting your position, the priorities change a lot.) E.g., a sniper has a helluva lot of priority even when he's farther away, and for suppression value (and therefore priority) it ranks up there with a heavy machinegun.

Weapons and priorities also are mis-represented in games. E.g., in Counter-Strike someone with an AK-47 at 200m is as good as guaranteed to miss, due to weapon spread. You can just strafe lots and ignore him. In real life that weapon can be aimed pretty damn well up to 300m or so, after which trajectory curvature starts to be a problem. E.g., in most FPS there are whole classes of weapon (e.g., any SMG) which take 10-20 rounds to kill you, and which you can pretty much plan around taking a few hits to get the gunner with a more powerful weapon. IRL even one shot can kill or disable you. Etc. It's stuff which games actively teach you to give a low priority to, although IRL you wouldn't.

2. Tactical Sequence: In a game it just doesn't work. "Get 'em all bleeding first" is a recipe for disaster in 99% of the games. A badly injured opponent can still move just as fast and hit you just as hard. Putting 1-2 bullets in each of 10 enemies still leaves you with 10 perfectly functional enemies. You don't even get "frags" (points) when one of them finally kills you. In games you'd want to kill them one by one, even at the cost of completely ignoring some.

For that matter, suppression just doesn't work in games either. A lot of what we were trained to do in the army had nothing to do with even making them bleed, but with pinning them down until the heavy weapons get them. (Infantry isn't there to kill any more, infantry is there 90% of the time to pin you down until someone shoots something deadlier at you.) If you will, it's not as much even "get 'em all bleeding first" as just "get them to hit the ground first". Not contradicting your "slowing it down first" point, just, if you will, elaborating on it.

Even if you don't have heavy weapons handy, the most basic military maneuver is pin-and-flank: you pin with 2 units and flank with a third. Whether it's squads, platoons, companies or whatever: pin and flank. Slow them down so you can flank them.

In most games that just doesn't work. Pinning doesn't work and enfilade fire doesn't work. When dealing with 4-5 people running around different routes, there _is_ no enfilade and defilade. You can't learn to understand why it's deadly to have the enemy machinegun sideways along your line, when you don't actually have a line they can shoot at. Etc.

3. Using Cover: You've nailed that one pretty darn well already, but methinks most video games are even worse than that. I can think of all sorts of sins of various video games, such as cover not working at all in some. E.g., as an extreme example, in Postal 2, if the enemy can see any bit of you at all, they'll hit you with 100% accuracy all the time. E.g., if you were in a bunker with a thin slit to shoot through, someone with a revolver at 100m will unerringly head-shot you through that slit. You're no better using any kind of cover than just running around in the open.

But generally, that's part of a bigger problem, that realistic tactics don't work well in games and viceversa. Half of them re