Slashdot Mirror
On Realism and Virtual Murder
Gamasutra has an interesting article about how the push toward realistic graphics and extremely lifelike characters in modern games is making the term "murder simulator" — once laughed off for referring to pixelated dying Nazis — a concept to take more seriously. The author is careful to simply explore the issue, and not come to a specific conclusion; he doesn't say that we should or shouldn't prevent it from happening, only that it's worth consideration. (One section is even titled "Forget the kids," saying that decisions for what children play fall under parental responsibility.) Quoting:
"We should start rethinking these issues now before we all slide down the slope together and can't pull ourselves back up again. Or, even worse, before governments step in and dictate what can and can't be depicted or simulated in video games via legislation. ... Obviously, what makes an acceptable game play experience for each player is a personal choice that should be judged on a person-by-person basis (or on a parent to child basis), and I believe it should stay that way. As for me, I'm already drawing the line at BioShock — I can barely stomach the game as it is. Sure, I could play it more and desensitize myself, but I don't want to. And that's just me. It's up to you and a million other adult gamers to decide what's best for yourselves and to draw the line on virtual violence where you feel most comfortable."
Relevant quote that I saw on the bottom of slashdot a few days ago, this from Alfred Hitchcock:
TV has brought murder back into the home, where it belongs.
Qxe4
Expect another great piece by Martha MacCallum on FOX...
Sorry but this is very very silly.
We've had violent games and movies for a long time now. Take a look at the blood and gore in horror films. It currently does and will continue to outdo any realism a game can provide for some time to come.
Take a look at games where we play murderers. How to host a murder/murder mystery nights. What are you going to do next. Ban Murder She Wrote because some idiot might decide to copy one of the murders?
The solution is simple. You need to educate children about the difference between fiction and reality. It's really not that hard.
Will there be people who copy the fiction and commit murder? Sure. They're mentally unstable and would find some other reason to do it anyway.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The reason we have so much violence in games these days is that in the very early arcade games, that's how things were scored. Mario jumped on goombas for points and self-defence. The aliens in Space Invaders had to die to protect the Earth. That worked, from a gameplay point of view, so we kept going with it, never thinking that in 30 years' time the aliens in Space Invaders would have realistic anatomies and motivations and a family back home who's relying on them to bring Earth's cows back for dinner.
Which brings us back to the initial point: Why would you WANT to kill that alien? The first games, killing enemies was the moral equivalent of stomping on ants. Sure, they die, but how much actual life experience have they lost? Now the games are increasingly realistic, it's no longer ants we're killing. Sure, there are scenarios (like war games) which people want to re-enact virtually, but games like Manhunt are explicitly designed around killing defenseless strangers. Maybe it's time to put games like that on the same level as rape simulators?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Within the next 10-20 years, your virtual victims in Grand Theft Auto 6 could look, sound, and behave exactly like a real human would if you stabbed him in the neck or shot him in the gut. There'd be plenty of blood, screaming, and carnage to go around. You could watch as they bleed to death in agony.
The funny thing is -- and I'm just guessing -- you wouldn't want to do that in real life to a real human, so why would you want to do that in a video game?
I think in most people there is a side that actually would want to do that to a real person, sick as it sounds. You probably have that side, even if you haven't recognized it yet. How much do you want to bet Jack Thompson does? There's probably a reason he's so scared of it. I'm not trying to be judgmental, but that's the true reality of life.
I don't know what playing games like this will do to a person; probably no one knows. But we are going to find out soon, I guess. They aren't going to stop making these games.
Qxe4
When there is no lines separating what is right from what is wrong, anything goes, but the final choice is made by the buyer (client, visitor, whatever). But once put a line somewhere, limiting the freedom of both producer and client, it always ends putting the wrong things in the right places, or being redefined to be more restrictive, but rarely loosened or removed. The same could happen with most things in internet too. Will the FPS be replaced by FPPS (First Person PhotoShooters)?
I know there are rebel kids that get the games anyway, but punishments have gone out to for kids.
Leading to the "just let them do it" conversations that occur, thinking that there is no way the game is that bad.
However it will only become a bad influence when people do something that is a "bad thing", which it often to late.
Overall, the system has low and high points of what is the social norm, and certain levels of violence in games are normal.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
Come on, people. If you can't see the difference between a game and real life then you'd better go see a shrink. Or just remove yourself from the gene pool. That's the idea behind all violent games: do it in the game, not in real life. Relieve you anger were nobody gets hurt.
Ive been playing games since i was a 1 year old, im a perfectly normal human being (other then having A.S and Dyslexiea) Killing human beings and killing pixels ARE NOT THE SAME in any way shape or form, infact you could narrow it down to killing electricity, becuase quite honestly, what powers your computer? HOWEVER: I do notice and accept that preforming these acts in/on the computer screen does stimulate your brain as to say "This is a possible outcome, I shall prepare myself for it" it is then barried into your sub-concenious, you dont think of it like that but that is the way your brain handles it On top of that i do have to notice the crimes commited by "so called" GTA players (now we all know its BS that its just GTA, thats just aload of mass media ass-hattery) I am a good human being, ive done nothing wrong and i sware, the day the government tells me what i can and cannot do on the net or in/on games is infact the fact i eather die or take up arms again those that will suromvent my RIGHT to view stuff that i wish to view (or do) As to where i draw the line: anything that deals with rape or anything of the forceful nature done on human beings OR pixels that is not wished to be done to them, and no that does not mean i wont kill you in team fortress 2 if you ask me not to, ill still gladly flame your ass from here to timbukto and back again :D
And violence on the playground? I draw the line at cops and robbers, man. Murder simulation right there. I couldn't stomach one kid lying down pretending to be dead. Hell, I threw up when my friend made an over-the-top death gargling noise. Shit's unreal, man, surely our Congressional Overlords must step in with sweet blessings from Barack Obama.
I mean... they get better, right? So how can it be murder, virtual or otherwise.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Further more, one cannot commit murder against an artificial intelligence or even an alien (at this moment in most countries).
To confuse 'killing' avatars in an MMO with murder is rediculous, at its best, rendering an avatar useless against the law would be property damage.
The photorealistic qualities of games do not change the law, or impart more permanent consequences. Even if a computer peripheral sprays blood on my face after shooting a digital representation of my mom on screen, it doesn't mean I killed her. It may not be great for one's mental health, but neither is entertaining to many realistic daydreams about similar topics.
Page me when I can actually press a button while playing a game, and a handgun mounted on top of thier monitor shoots someone in face.
From the article;
"With each act of violence, a piece of us grows cold, calloused, and uncaring towards the well being of others. Repeat that, and we become slowly desensitized to pain and suffering."
Perhaps the part of us that finds violence towards an on-screen representation of someone or something, but I have yet to see any evidence that this translates to a callousness towards real people or events. The implication that increasingly realistic graphics are somehow going to cross this divide is neither argued nor proven in this article.
Games are designed as entertainment. Entertainment is not realistic. No matter what the interface (I will even allow some futuristic neural hookup) there are going to be clues and cues that what you are engaged in is not Real Life. It is this very knowledge that is part of what makes games enjoyable. We are freed of the normal consequences of our actions, free to explore a new environment, to discover the rules of cause-and-effect and to enjoy the difference between these and the world we normally live in.
Perhaps when we have the tech to seamlessly mimic reality there may grow a market for entertainment that deliberately blurs the line between Real and Game, but that relies on both an increase in technical realism and a deliberate move away from what makes a game a game.
Perhaps the author has forgotten what it means to play.
Kids pointing their fingers at each other and yelling "bang!" are simulating murder. So what?
Hundreds of millions of kids play cops and robbers or cowboys and indians, and never hurt anyone at all.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
We could simulate murdering Tom Cruise over and over and it would just never get old.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Read this by Dave Grossman http://www.killology.com/print/print_teachkid.htm
It's about teaching kids to kill. I'm sure there are many anecdotes out there about how "I played games for years and I haven't killed anyone" but the man has a point...
Some quotes from the text:
"Healthy members of most species have a powerful, natural resistance to killing their own kind. Animals with antlers and horns fight one another by butting heads. Against other species they go to the side to gut and gore. Piranha turn their fangs on everything, but they fight one another with flicks of the tail. Rattlesnakes bite anything, but they wrestle one another.
When we human beings are overwhelmed with anger and fear our thought processes become very primitive, and we slam head on into that hardwired resistance against killing. During World War II, we discovered that only 15-20 percent of the individual riflemen would fire at an exposed enemy soldier (Marshall, 1998). [...]
That's the reality of the battlefield. Only a small percentage of soldiers are willing and able to kill. When the military became aware of this, they systematically went about the process of âoefixingâ this âoeproblem.â And fix it they did. By Vietnam the firing rate rose to over 90 percent (Grossman, 1999a).
[...]
The training methods the military uses are brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and role modeling. Let us explain these and then observe how the media does the same thing to our children, but without the safeguards.
Brutalization, or âoevalues inculcation,â is what happens at boot camp. Your head is shaved, you are herded together naked, and dressed alike, losing all vestiges of individuality. You are trained relentlessly in a total immersion environment. In the end you embrace violence and discipline and accept it as a normal and essential survival skill in your brutal new world.
Something very similar is happening to our children through violence in the media. [...]
Classical conditioning is like Pavlov's dog in Psych 101. Remember the ringing bell, the food, and the dog could not hear the bell without salivating?
In World War II, the Japanese would make some of their young, unblooded soldiers bayonet innocent prisoners to death. Their friends would cheer them on. Afterwards, all these soldiers were treated to the best meal they've had in months, sake, and to so-called "comfort girls." The result? They learned to associate violence with pleasure.
This technique is so morally reprehensible that there are very few examples of it in modern U.S. military training, but the media is doing it to our children. Kids watch vivid images of human death and suffering and they learn to associate it with: laughter, cheers, popcorn, soda, and their girlfriend's perfume (Grossman & DeGaetano, 1999).
[...]
The third method the military uses is operant conditioning, a powerful procedure of stimulus-response training. We see this with pilots in flight simulators, or children in fire drills. When the fire alarm is set off, the children learn to file out in orderly fashion. One day there's a real fire and they're frightened out of their little wits, but they do exactly what they've been conditioned to do (Grossman & DeGaetano, 1999).
In World War II we taught our soldiers to fire at bullseye targets, but that training failed miserably because we have no known instances of any soldiers being attacked by bullseyes. Now soldiers learn to fire at realistic, man-shaped silhouettes that pop up in their field of view. That's the stimulus. The conditioned response is to shoot the target and then it drops. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, repeated hundreds of times."
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
This will probably be on the next Martha MacCallum show on FOX...
The closer games get to simulating reality, the less reasons & excuses there are to do bad things in reality. With full immersive VR, the collective id of humanity can be contained in the sandbox "Matrix" where it belongs. Reality may finally become the exclusive domain of our higher nature, unpolluted by our base, obsolete animal/tribal urges.
People are so quick to fear the "corrupting" effects of virtual reality, but it may very well be that VR is the key to establishing an unimaginably better reality.
I agree with the self restriction. I personally can't stomach games like gears of war because its too nasty with blood and guts, and I'm 14. People need to draw the line for themselves, and parents need to actually talk to their kids, not just sit them in front of barney... because that is even worse.
Chess is not a "King murder simulator"/"King murder strategy planner".
You don't "GET IT". Games are not simulations, except these that are simulations (like ArmA 3 or American Army, Flight Simulator, etc). Games are... games, and his conexion with reality is just ...settings. There are rules on a videogame, much like there are rules on a table game. These rules "remenber" how the world work in some ways, but are way too artificial to be a real world, more like separate the game from real world.
In esence, all videogames are still ... Games!.. the fact that could be visually modeling a city, or a battefield, is just eyecandy, the reality is that these games are not citys-like or battlefields-like that any "Tag" game you have played with other childrens at 11 years old.
So games are nor real, nor simulations. And share traits with stuff everything else on our civilization, movies, books, everything. Helll... as children I use to play "cops and thiefs", a game that is much like counter-strike... nope, a game that is counter-strike.
-Woof woof woof!
In the early 80's when VHS became popular there was a strong movement in Sweden for banning all video imports. The reason cited was that the children would become hooligans at best and mass murderers at worst if they were to exposed to so much violence. Until the early 90's, there were no private TV channels in Sweden. There were two state owned and controlled channels that were very proactive in censoring violence. Movies in theaters were heavily censored as well.
In a way the fear of video was more justified than the fear of video games - there was no prior data on how people react in general when exposed to displays of graphic violence on a regular basis. As it turns out, photorealistic video did not make mass murderers out of the population, so there is really no reason why we should expect the video game generation to be any more violent than the VHS generation.
The video ban in Sweden? It was never introduced, but not for a lack of trying. The reason why it was scrapped was because a ban would have violated some trade agreements. It is a rather remarkable human trait - the desire to stop *other* people from doing something they like. Note that it's always stopping others for their own good. You'll never find somebody saying: Please pass this ban so that I'll stop doing that thing that I know I shouldn't be doing.
Watch Virtuality (new show on Fox), it seems to cover this same issue.
short story:
Back in the 90's I there was a 'virtualpet' game/simulator/timewaster app that I played with. You could create a virtual pet and abuse it until it would cower in constant terror. I told a girl I worked with about it, and she though that was an awful thing to do. I pointed out that all I was doing was flipping 1s and 0s in a computer's memory, and she still thought it was a bad thing to do.
This is the sort of problem we face with this fight. The people who have problems telling the difference between real and fantasy AREN'T THE GAMERS. How can you fight that kind of stupid?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have killed more people than Hitler. It's true. I have murdered millions of Nazis and slaughtered as many dragons. I have raped Native Americans and killed hundreds of thousands of cops. I have killed aliens that looked like pigs dressed as cops. I have destroyed feminism by flashing cash at strippers. I have committed genocide. I have wiped the earth clean of barbarians, Romans, Egyptians, Germans, and the Mongols. I have brought sword to creatures great and small because they may be carrying gold. I have killed creatures and then thrown away anything they were carrying because I did not deem it worthy. I have lied, cheated and double crossed denizens of the wasteland, a fairy kingdom, an ancient alien race and time travelers. I have shot mutants and bounty hunters in the groin and face. After killing someone else who I have never met and who had done me no wrong I crouched over his dead body and tea bagged him. I have enslaved a star faring race and then traded those slaves for military secrets. I have spied on other countries, planets and star systems and sabotaged numerous public works to cause strife and disorder. I have starved cities and brought whips down on my workers so that they may finish great works in my name before someone else did the same. I have stabbed kings and rezoned miles of pristine wilderness into ash spewing city hell holes. I have built nuclear reactors and then let them go critical so that I may laugh at the death toll and then, while the people were still putting out the atomic fires, I have unleashed Godzilla and a hurricane onto them. I have built swimming pools and then removed the exit ladders to watch people drown. I have smashed buildings to grab people inside and then eat them.
All of these simulations have trained me well in the off chance I am ever presented with the ability to be an omnipotent, immortal, time traveling, alien, city building, world conquering, sword wielding, post apocalyptic, giant fire breathing, car jacking last great hope for humanity...who also happens to be a complete and total bastard.
There will be screaming, but no crying. In GTA or anything similar, there are groans, shrieks, and most of them are a little "overdone" to be comical. A real death is less gory, but far more traumatizing. They would have to plead for their lives, start praying, or simply mutter the name of their child or their mother until their life leaves their body. I think only a very small subset of the population is going to want to see real death simulations.
Recently I ran over a fox, and I thought it was a small dog so I pulled over and I got out of the car. It was twisting in agony, gushing blood from it's mouth, and I watched it as it died. It tried to get up a few times, the rattling in it's throat grew louder, and I recognized the moment it gave up. That was the most terrifying part to watch, not the actual death at the end, but the moment were it seemed to realize that it's time had run out.
Death and suffering are something we have a natural aversion to. That's why Shock and Awe was shot from miles away. That's why hamburger arrives in little white styrofoam trays with no pictures of cows on it. That's why we've made it as a species - we've needed each other to survive, so our evolutionary morality led us to the point where we more or less share a similar set of values. And that's why I don't think the simulations will come close to reality, because few people want to see it, and many who think they do will realize that they don't.
In most games, there is a clearly defined good vs evil arrangement. I dont think many would view the baddies in Bioshock as anything other than baddies. In fact, it seems there are three categories of bad guys in games that are always a safe bet that people wont mind killing. Zombies, Nazis, and aliens. Some games break out of that and have a morally gray story, especially RPGs. Fallout 3 for example. You can be a saint and save Megaton from the bomb, or blow them up in the first 30 minutes. I always tend to be the good guy myself, I just dont see the appeal of being evil, even in a game. Taking it a bit further, games like Manhunt (never seen it nor played it I might note) and GTA (same, no interest) are an even darker gray. I dont know squat about Manhunt, but from the little I do I know I dont want to know more. I think wanting to play that crap already shows signs of being a sick bastard, not that its going to turn you into one out of an angel.
I draw the line at servers where gruesome graphic murder is OK but swear words are not.
Think of the children? Seriously??
That's just too messed up to support.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
If video games continue to blur the lines between the real and unreal, we need only instill a more intrinsic sense of right and wrong into people.
Further, we may need video games to have "watermarks" once they hit a certain level of realism, ie the matrix type, to help people distinguish between a video game and reality. Watermarks could just be marks in impossible places, like a giant wolf fighting a flamingo in the sky, or by making it so the game breaks the laws of physics in order to show how virtual it is. At the very least make sure they're fighting impossible monsters or possibly robots.
Before games are indistinguishable from reality, we need to make sure we keep them separate. Or, we need to make it so that you'd never do things in a game that you'd do in real life. I'd prefer the first because video games are a fantasy, an escape and a challenge. They're not supposed to be real.
Ever notice that the vast majority of violent games players are males? And more often than not, males seem to take more satisfaction in the actual 'kill' than a woman? (I'd LOVE to see a study on this, as this is 100% anecdotal).<p>
I think it's natural for a man (and some women) to get their fix of 'violence' - a tendency perhaps inherited from centuries or millennium of justice being doled out with the sharp end of a pointy stick. Maybe we're making up for it now in a super-protective society by simulating it, to an extent.<p>
But yeah, this is all anecdotal. I'm not a sociological scientist.
Video games gratify and glorify violence. Period. When headshots are rewarded with easier challenges and further progression, when there are no options to not kill, when killing gratuitously is a function required to progress a story or an experience, then it can not be argued that games provide positive reinforcement.
In the past year, I've played three games: Gun, Billy Hatcher, and Shadow of the Colossus. In Gun, you can scalp innocents in town and they scream, BEGGING YOU not to do it. In Billy Hatcher, there in practically no violence as even the grunts get away. In Shadow of the Colossus, you have to proactively kill sixteen living creatures which do not bother you for absolutely no net benefit to you as a person, or your character. There are even a couple of instances where the creatures do not fight back.
Needless to say, of the the Billy Hatcher was the most boring and less stimulating of the three, despite it being a great game..
We, the players, have become desensitized to the point that there is no longer cognitive dissonance between the ingame logic which allows or compels me to kill innocents and benefit compared to the real world logic which doesn't allow me to. Instead of saying that it isn't bad, that it isn't real, shouldn't we be asking ourselves how is it that we are unable to recognize it as real in the moment we are doing it.
We've become so far removed from it that games where one does not kill do not sell equally.
I'm in my early 30's. I've spent a great number of hours playing Wolfenstein, Mortal Kombat, Doom, Quake, every incarnation of Grand Theft Auto, Street Fighter, Killer Instinct, and so on. Although I don't have reasonable numbers to work with, I'm comfortable saying I played these violent games more than the average person. I watched a lot of gory movies, too. I've had a healthy dose of Three Stooges and Warner Brothers cartoons to boot.
There are a couple of things about me I'd like to say about me. First, I don't think anybody would ever describe me as violent. It takes a lot to even get me to shout at somebody. I don't bang my fist on the keyboard or steering wheel. I don't threaten to hurt people. I have a real calm demeanor. You've all heard that story from other people before so I'll leave this point here.
Secondly, I'd say I'm about as desensitized as it gets. I really cannot imagine that my exposure to all of this media is anything but 'higher than average'. I didn't even find beating up hookers in GTA all that shocking. (Or fun, either. Despite what the noisy people have said, you start avoid killing pedestrians when the cops come after you and make completing missions difficult. Compare that to, say, Crazy Taxi, and well I can tell you what I'd prefer my future kid to play when learning-to-drive time comes along.)
When I was in college, though, I made a surprising discovery. Somebody mentioned Rotten.com, a site where you can see actual real dead bodies. (Do not go there unless you're really to see something like that. NSFW) Two things really struck me about the content of that site. First was that I gasped and made a bitter-beer-face. Second was that this shit didn't look like anything I had seen in Hollywood. (Although I dare say Starship Troopers was awfully close.) Part of it is simply knowing that this was real and not made up baloney, but part of it was that damaged flesh is a very complex... and goopy, swelly, discolor'y. In other words, I reacted to actual murders and accidents in a way that is significantly different from the way I react to them in video games.
Since observing that, I realized that knowing that something actually happened makes a huge difference. I went by the Television Department in college and saw a safety video that was part of the orientation that rail-road workers were required to watch. I wanted to watch it because I caught part of it and was like "That guy got his foot smashed! Neat!!" So the instructor was like "Okay, watch this..." The video I saw had a train come to a stop and put these legs down on the ground, I assume to stabilize the train while cargo boxes were lifted off it. This guy had his hand in the way and the engineer didn't see it. He extended the gear and *goosh* caught the guy's hand. It was just pushed into the ground so hard that the guy pulled his arm back only to find it hand-less. This was not gory, really. There was no real blood or anything visual, it was all covered up by his jacket. But somewhere in the back of my head, a thought made itself heard: "This happened to somebody. It has probably happened a lot." That little clip was far more disturbing to me than anything in Robocop or any other of Verhoven's movies.
I do not believe violent video games desensitize kids because violent video games are not even heading in the vague direction of reality. I don't care how much better the graphics get, they do not touch on the real horrors of violence. I've yet to even really see a movie that managed this.
I think I understand where the fears of this come from. I think we've all seen kids imitate what they see on TV. I think the experience a video game provides, though, is being given way too much credit. All this talk of 'murder simulators' and the like... but if you were on an airplane and the pilot died, and a teenager volunteered to fly the plane with thousands of hours of Playstation time under his belt, would you take it seriously?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
If you still want a real live bar fight, I guarantee you that you can find a bar that will meet your needs. Probably within walking distance of wherever you happen to live.
Rule #1: You do not talk about the fight club.
Somehow the author missed the point about graphic violence and photorealism, especially considering Bioshock. The "fun"-part is not slaughtering human-like monsters and cute little girls throughout the game, it's rather /not/ doing it.
While I have no problem whatsoever killing Monsters that - if at all - look just remotely human all day and all the way long, when it comes down to more and more real looking humans - maybe I even can identify with them - I, as the player, have to make an /ethical/ decision. Which in return adds a whole new dimension to gameplay. We should'nt be looking at graphic violence as a risk or danger to the game industry, we should see it as a chance to create deeper, morally and ethical challenging games. Maybe with a little character-development thrown in.
Take "Fable" for an example. You can go around slaughtering as many humans as you wish and to show that you are "evil" you get horns. Its boring. I as the player have no real ethical choices to make, I don't /get/ as a human that I'm doing evil. I "understand" it, because I get the fuckin horns, but on an emotional level I dont /get/ it. /BioShock/ on the other hand has made a tiny step for me to be morally inclined in my actions in an "murder-simulator", which is a very, very good thing about the game.
Simulations don't directly kill (duh, its in the name). Its always drawing a connection from simulation to the real thing that takes some convincing. It's what the politicians sell when they offer up cooked up statistics or the latest school shooting for voting parents and elderly.
There are still people in our communities who are exposed to massive violence on a daily basis ... slaughtermen ... Do they have a higher than average likelihood to commit violent crimes?
There's at least one family in Texas I would definitely say that's true for...
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
You know, I used to laugh at the term "murder simulator" when it was bandied about by knee-jerk opponents of video violence some years ago. Preposterous, I said: video is video -- easily distinguishable from reality, and reasonable people know the difference between fantasy and reality. That was in the Gunsmoke Night Of The Living Dead, where the violence seemed cartoonish in black&white. And I love those movies and TV shows
Then I watched The Adventures Of Robin Hood. The blood was in color, and it was red. For the first time, hell started to freeze over, and I found myself beginning to understand the critics' point of view. As videos inched ever closer to absolute photorealism (which some industry professionals believe to be no more than 10-15 years away), violent video critics' arguments are slowly beginning to look more sane. And yes, you're reading this from a life-long video fan who staunchly opposes institutional artistic censorship.
But censorship is peanuts compared to the conundrums we'll be facing in the future with our favorite hobby. Once our video of the real world (still called, somewhat quaintly, "movies and television") begin to effectively duplicate reality, the issue of video violence won't be a matter of artistic merit or censorship anymore. It will quickly become a matter of morality, ethics, and law.
The coming storm is inevitable: turn one way, and you'll see ever-more realistic portrayals of graphic, gratuitous human violence in movies and television like The Adventures Of Robin Hood, Pearl harbor, and Fox Television's 24. Then turn the other and observe the exponential explosion of recording media and High Definition video rendering potential driven by technology. Put two and two together, and you've got quite a mess brewing.
Welcome to the Slippery Slope
Within the next 10-20 years, your virtual victims in Survivor, Gaza Strip could look, sound, and behave exactly like a real human would if you stabbed him in the neck or shot him in the gut. There'd be plenty of blood, screaming, and carnage to go around. You could watch in High Definition COlor as they bleed to death in agony.
The funny thing is -- and I'm just guessing -- you wouldn't want to do that in real life to a real human, so why would you want to watch in video? The violent scenario above seems silly now, but the stunningly realistic, color-era violent video we watch today would have seemed unthinkably graphic just fifteen years ago.
At the moment, we rationalize our simulated violence with statements like: "It's just a movie, it's just television. It's not real. The people don't suffer." All this is true (at the moment); but as the experience of virtual murder becomes ever more realistic, I believe that we as watchers will begin to suffer emotionally every time we view realistic suffering to any virtual person, just as if we caused suffering to real living creatures.
With each act of violence, a piece of us grows cold, calloused, and uncaring towards the well being of others. Repeat that, and we become slowly desensitized to pain and suffering.
As movie and TC fans, we've already begun desensitizing ourselves to simulated murder, or else we wouldn't be able to watch the violent video we have now. Video featuring endless violence is nearly as old as video movies themselves, with heavyweight title prizefight between Jim Jeffries and Tom Sharkey (1899) probably being the most influential. Back in 1998, Saving Private Ryan was the most graphically realistic simulation of murder you could find in video. It shocked people (including the author) at first.
But as the body count racked up, each death became easier to watch until we no longer had a second thought about it. The same desensitizing effect stretches back to every violent video that pushed the limits of realism -- all the way back the early horror flick The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , where a psycho mowed down people "gremlins" with a chain s
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The film Avalon describes violence in games nicely. It is a film about a "hero" in an illegal computer game that has a mysterious "final" level. Below that level, all people dying explode in a cloud of pixels. In the final level, they bleed and die realistically. That is where the game stops being funny or even being a game.
This feeling that the article, and most of the top-modded posts in this thread, are concern-trolling so sincerely that the writers themselves almost believe it.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I, for one, welcome our new murder loving grandchildren. ;)
The problem with self regulation or self control is that it is even worse than governmental controls. Think about it in terms of crime. How many criminals believe that they are doing the right thing whether it is driving drunk or molesting little children the last thing a criminal mind worries about is whether it is doing the right thing. The notion of self control particularly over long range effects of watching violent content is just not something that many people worry about.
You see the same attitude in illegal drug use. People feel that it is not them that can become the wretched addict. They feel that somehow they can handle it. So how many people feel that they will be the one to strike out in totally uncalled for violence when they subject themselves to huge doses of game and movie violence?
Why would more realistic computer graphics have a stronger effect than the highly realistic special effects used in splatter movies?
Sure, you will find some kooks who say "the gamez made me do it". They used to say that about EC comics, about Hitchcock movies. Loonies will have no problem finding something to trigger them. There's plenty of gore in the Bible, and a lot of nutters have been inspired by that to commit heinous crimes.
You can save the girls! I mean, are you just gonna let them sit in the game and die?
I beat it once by saving them, then out of curiosity I went in and "extracted the worm" from them (AKA KILLED THEM)
I may be desensitized, I couldn't kill them the first time around...but the second time was easy ; )
he demonstrated by A plus B minus C divided by Z that the sheep must be red, and die of the rot
The article does recommend self-censorship rather than government censorship as a solution. I sincerely do believe though that this is a new frontier and we will have to adapt to it with modern thinking. I would rather say that it is a "Simulated Murder Simulator" as the murder is not really happening though!!!
...the rule is clear:
1. Everything is allowed.
2. Except if it hurts someone.
3. What hurts, is relative, and defined differently for everyone.
4. To work as a team/society, you, in advance, agree upon a set of rules for what is defined as hurting someone. This is called the "law".
So the descision about "virtual murder" is also clear:
Absolutely nobody gets hurt by it. There is no link between killing in games and killing in real life.
Statistically, you could even say, that there is a link between killing in games, and not killing in real life.
(In Germany, there is roughly a likeliness of 1 in 32 million of a player of such a game going on a killing spree (German Blog.) It's not much different elsewhere.)
So one could build on that, and argue that those who want to stop those games, want more killings to happen.
But I will not. ^^ I'm just saying...
What I'm asking myself now, is what advantage anyone could gain from banning those games? The votes of badly informed people? Or is it, because that person is badly informed itself?
The only one who got hurt by the sale of the games, is the music industry. I'm not kidding you. Here is the chart: http://11k2.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/090612games-music-dvds.png
People just don't have the money for both.
Now I could of course wildly speculate about a link... ;)
But I think I will not go down to that level. I leave that to others.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
We have had a steady downward trend of violent crimes in America, and most other industrial nations too, for about 3-4 decades now. Despite the media fear that tries to make it look more dangerous, society is in fact less dangerous. There are less murders, less rapes, less assaults and so on.
Now this time has been during the video game revolution. This is the time period in which game machines came in to homes and have grown to a massive cultural phenomena. They went from being niche geek things to kids toys to mass entertainment for all ages. All the while, violence has slowly ebbed.
So, I think its pretty safe to say that no, videogames DON'T lead to an increase in violence in kids or adults. We've had nothing but more and more games out there, and more and more gamers, but we are not seeing an upswing in violence, we see a continual downswing. That tells you that the theory that more games equals more violence is bunk, no matter how you try and spin it.
I think the problem is that most people who look at this lack any sort of historical perspective, both recent and long term. They seem to think that society is more violent now, and that violence is the exception not the rule. That couldn't be further from the truth. Have a look at Roman history, where blood sport was very popular. You had real fights often to the death for the amusement of the masses.
Until someone can point me to some real, valid, research that shows that videogames cause more violence I just don't want to hear this BS. It seems every new form of media is cause for people to say "Oh god it'll make everyone so violent." However that never happens. Why should video games be any different?
You seriously underestimate how easy it is to psychologically indoctrinate a 'normal' person to do all sorts of horrific things. The reason ex-combat soldiers rarely go on killing sprees is the indoctrination is surrounded by discipline... which while it allows them to stop killing when they get home apparently, as we are finding out, has a major psychological cost.
And even if you doubt the psychological evidence, such as from Milgram and the Stanford prison experiment, do you really think everybody actively involved in the Holocaust, Siberian prison camps, Cultural revolution, Rwandan genocides, Darfur,Bosnia/Serbia, Armenian and Kurdish genocides, My lai, the Killing fields, etc, etc etc were all psychopaths?
Or just maybe, it's not that hard to desensitize a person towards killing. And if it's done in a non-disciplined setting, especially something like a video game where you get some type of reward for instigating indiscriminate murder, the line will get blurry for quite a few people if they get upset, or are in an emotionally charged situation.
I think that glibly writing off any possible consequences to 'well, they were psychopaths anyway' ignores both what we know of psychology and history.
For one thing, any time someone gets in to the whole operant conditioning thing as though it controls human behaviour, it tells me they have a very outdated knowledge of psychology. Humans are way more complex than that. We are not stimulus-response machines. That isn't to say that doesn't play a role in human action, but it isn't how humans work. The philosophy of Skinner et al has long since been shown to be far too simplistic. In language, for example, any sort of "blank slate" assumption for teaching doesn't work. Humans have an innate capacity for language as has been demonstrated time and time again. That doesn't, of course, mean that they will develop language without outside influence, but it does mean that there's more to it than "conditioned response."
Then there's also the fact that despite all his chatter about WWII, it was the deadliest one in human history. None of the post WWII wars even break the top 10.
Finally there's the fact that if media, in particular video games, are teaching kids to kill, why is it that violence is dropping? Have a look at the BJS page on it (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/viort.htm). Looks like violent crimes have been on a major downward trend in the US for some time. This is the same country that has plenty of violent movies, tons and tons of video game systems, and so on. This is during the period when videogames went from a niche kids toy for geeks to a major entertainment for the masses of all ages.
So if this conditioning is supposed to be happening, why is the trend the opposite? That really screws the argument right there. There is greater access to video games, and they are getting more realistic, yet the rate of violent crimes is dropping. That means it is pretyt silly on the face of it to say "Violent video games lead to more violent crime." No, they don't seem to at all. The evidence falsifies your theory, revise it or throw it out.
I must agree with the article though, which I haven't read.
as a 15yo I've spent most of my days playing carmageddon. Now when I, as a communiting adult, see pedestrians on my way to work I tend to drive them over while I scream "woaaaaaa!" and pronounce a splat-bonus. The face of bysitters is priceless if I scream "extra points for the old lady!" when they stare in shock to the bloodcovered windshield.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Virtual murder might be fun, but as long as it is a game, we will get over it. No game lasts forever. Not even Tetris.
We are all interested in murder. We draw it, write it, film it, then read it, watch it, dream it... Yet, we can safely say most of us won't ever do it. These games won't change that. All the game is is yet another outlet - a safe outlet. One of many many many.
Remember, almost half of all people are less than average. I don't feel comfortable knowing that only average or better aren't negatively affected.
Even if it were only 1% of population, it would still be too much. Video games get easier to get into all the time and profits have already surpassed film industry. Soon, everyone will play some kind of video game. And if 1% of everyone plays violent realistic games in hopes to become the next Perfect Soldier...
They ban games like Rapelay leaving all the murder simulators untouched. I guess rape is worse than murder
Though i mostly agree with the article, just a quick note on Bioshock: You don't choose to murder every opponent in Bioshock, they keep attacking and you _have_ to act in self-defense.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I remember playing Golden Eye for the N46 and having a blast obviously you killed people but the graphics were part of the separation. But fast forward to now I start feeling... weird, playing any of the recent games for example take any recent call of duty game. Right now I think it was much easier for generations growing up and seeing the transition from 8 bit graphics in to simple 3d, into better 3d and son and understand the difference between game and reality but even though its been what only 12 years ago? For people jumping in now the lines are already starting to disappear, other then threat of punishment when the lines between what can be seen in a game and reality are the same how the hell is someone who grows up with that going to be able to distance themselves and say its only a game? Granted we arent there yet but I think its a legitimate question.
Take these two examples. A generation grew up playing this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUYDasbkHcY&feature=relatedurl and a generation having only seen on a level like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6-LUTamWko .
Maybe I just don't like the idea of consequences of war or death being transformed into a game like perception so I may be a bit biased but I think some consideration into the effects of this should definitely be discussed.
If watching violence doesn't have any "real life" influences, what exactly was the problem with watching pr0n again?
Now before you all go cheering "right on!", how would you feel about games where you'd have to rape someone ("hey, it's not a real person!") to advance to the next level of gameplay?
I'm honestly not trying to troll, I'm seriously interested in why violence is considered "OK". I personally haven't played computer games since Xevious on my Atari myself (because I know I would get addicted to them) and haven't really kept up with them, but I was shocked when I saw my nephew play some game (sorry, I forgot which one) where he shot an innocent bystander - some kind of secretary of librarian or something. I was expecting this to be a major no-no, costing him points or something, but it turned out to be just fine. I also saw him repeatedly shoot some already-dead guy "for extra points". I just thought this was pretty weird from the game developers.
Just imagine this game where everybody hates each other in a war or some kind of domestic or interstellar conflict and then you get more points the more lives you save through your actions.... er... wait a minute, I just realized the best way to save lives in the long run in a conflict is genocide. Geeee... Just when I thought I would look like a cool a peaceful guy.
Dear
If this is your true opinion, then it's no wonder you're running into "glib" attitudes from people who aren't as clueless.
You mention a number of atrocities that each had *nothing* to do with video games. Instead, they had to do with ethnic tensions, economic inequality, unscrupulous politicians and - most importantly - a populace that believed that blaming everything on scapegoats would solve their problems. It looks like video games are your scapegoat.
Is there any indication that non-systematic murders are being committed by gamers? No, these are predominantly people with low violence thresholds, no education and a dysfunctional environment.
The ultimate virtual reality simulator is of course our own mind when we dream. So do you do the same things in real life as in your dreams? Probably not. This is because the mind knows when things are real and when they're not. I myself have never felt the need to hurt a person in real life, yet in GTA4 I went on killing sprees against fleeing civilians, blew up cop cars, hijacked all sorts of vehicles, etc. I imagine it's exactly the same for the many other millions of gamers.
There is also another major difference: inconvenience to your own person. Even IF you were completely desensitized, you would still know that there will be very negative consequences for you if you commit such acts, particularly pain and loss of freedom.
You know what desensitizes people? The news. When you keep hearing reports of X people being killed in a suicide attack, do you really have exactly the same feeling of shock as you had, say, 10 years ago? Heck, you can hear a report of hundreds of thousands of people drowning in a flood, followed by a report of how Britney Spears is doing and not lose sleep over it.
But hey, let's not be "glib" about discounting the dangers of news reporting!
see a Text Widget
I guess that if people are confusing video games with real life, then maybe we should just not let retards play games.
... for example in the ESRB 12 years rated World of WarCraft WotLK there's a quest where you have to torture a prisoner to get intel...
What about this? Is it morally acceptable for 12 yrs old kids?
Are all them children of torture supporters like the previous american administration?
Cheers,
If anyone has seen the pilot of Ron Moore's new show, there's a (spoiler) virtual rape sequence. It's not shown, just the prelude and after effects. But as graphics and interfaces get more and more advanced, (with the holodeck being an example of the distant future possibilities) these are issues (virtual rape, virtual murder, virtual crimes) we'll continually have to face as a species, unless we can move beyond our more base instincts.
"Sure, I could play it more and desensitize myself, but I don't want to. And that's just me."
i see it differently. he see's desensitization, i see immersion. and no matter how much i play manhunt, i never become desensitized. i still stop every 30 minutes and think, "wow, this game is sick." i think he was just scared of bioshock, and hey, it was a scary game. better not try playing condemned.
"Show BioShock to a non-gamer -- someone who hasn't been desensitized to killing virtual people -- and watch their reaction. Show them how you bludgeon people to death with a pipe wrench. If they don't wince and express some form of shock at what's taking place on the screen, they're either seriously disturbed or they're a seasoned gamer."
I think video games (and movies) have violence because it is an easy mechanism for engaging emotion and stimulating people. We evolved as humans to respond physiologically to violence (e.g. with adrenalin), and that's easy to manipulate, probably indicating lazy or less-talented writers.
As to whether repeated exposure to violence is harmful, I think it's hard to argue that it doesn't desensitize us. Whether that's bad or not is a judgment call. We know that when we visualize something much of our brain reacts as if we're doing that thing. We also know that our brain can change as we repeat activities so that something that caused one physiological reaction at one point does not cause the same reaction later. That's desensitization to the original stimulus.
I think it's interesting that on slashdot every time this issue comes up, people who support violence in entertainment are frequently very emotional on this issue and people who are against it are shouted down and often not given much rational consideration.
TFA says:
Show BioShock to a non-gamer -- someone who hasn't been desensitized to killing virtual people -- and watch their reaction. Show them how you bludgeon people to death with a pipe wrench. If they don't wince and express some form of shock at what's taking place on the screen, they're either seriously disturbed or they're a seasoned gamer.
This is incredibly true, and is exactly the thing that makes me resistant to gamers saying that video game violence is totally normal and acceptable and that people who are opposed to it have something wrong with them.
I recently was exposed to Gears of War for the first time, and the violence and hatred in that game was so horrific to me that I wanted to vomit. I was incredibly, incredibly troubled by it. And it wasn't just the brutality, the incredible realism of the violence, the curbstomping, but also the attitudes of the players online. People were not laughing and sharing something positive over the in-game chat, nor were the players in the house laughing and working together - they were expressing violent, hateful feelings.
Now, whether this is acceptable in the sense of free speech is one thing, and I think it is. But there's another question to me: is this the right thing? Is this healthy? If it's true that to non-gamers that the games being playing induce feeling of sickness, pain, and emotional trauma, which personal experience can attest that they do, then I don't believe it's reasonable to dismiss the concerns of the non-gaming population.
It is like free speech. Exercising your right to say whatever you please is not a good idea, even though it's legal to be constantly hurtful and hate-filled (and should be).
Again - I'm not arguing that gamers will kill people, or that these games should be banned. I'm arguing that there's definitely something to the belief that playing these games is not psychologically healthy.
Flame away, Slashdot.
Bioshock is a cool game with cartoon violence. I've seen more violence in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Someone needs to let go of their binky and grow a pair. I'm waiting for games like Bioshock times 10 on the realistic graphic violence scale - and I let flies out of the door instead of "Baracking" them. It's just a game just like Saw and it's ilk are just movies. I understand children not being exposed to these games at too young of an age, but ultimately they are still just games.
While I think the position is pure drama king, all of you will be screwed when I, a forgotten octogenarian who can only control his body with a d-pad and eight buttons, make my way out of the Alzheimer wing. Just look out for the short guy who is warning everyone about zombie Michael Jackson and the hamburger lady, he may be armed.
You are wrong. All of those visceral experiences are still available to you. Want to fight? Go to a bar & pick a fight. Want excitement, drive fast. What's changed is not that these things are not available to you but that the society in which you live (for good or bad) has increasingly attached negative consequences to them. So what's really happened is that you can't have those experiences without the risk of negative consequences. What videos/games etc... offer you is the ability to "experience" those things without the negative consequences. The "problem" (and I use he term advisedly) with violent games/videos is the danger that habit of "no consquences" violent actions in-game will slip into violent action IRL.
I can read about any subject in gruesome detail. I don't see why we should limit the video game market. I have friends that love to read horror stories (or heck John Norman's Chronicles of Gor) and others that like fluffy bunny anime stories; however I do not see the government stepping in to stop these. I think the difference is the variety of the market. If there were as many video games as there are books, the focus would be more defused. About the only ESRB like rating for the book industry outside of genre is Adult or not Adult. Why we make that distinction when over in the romance section, books as graphic in words as any picture in playboy are being sold, I'll never know.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Last year i wanted to kill a chicken and eat it so I could experience the whole process. All my life I have eaten chicken and never even SEEN the animal - I felt detached from being a meat-eater. So i visited farm friends - they said they were having chicken for dinner. I killed it (with an axe on a tree-stump), gutted, plucked it and we all ate it for dinner. I don't have nightmares, have not become an axe murderer and am not planning my next kill. Friends and family thought I was mad, insensitive and cruel. I told a Chinese friend and he just said, "Yeah, did that all the time as a kid".
Can the Slashbot please automatically append this to all such posts?
I'm just throwing it out there, but my point seems to be whooshing over everyone's head (the slashbots are out in full force today!).
I'm not saying that violent video games are the -cause- of school shootings.
I'm saying that it appears that the school shooters, in terms of body count, have become more effective in the last 15 years or so.
If anyone has a compelling theory about this increase in the -effectiveness- of school shooters, I'm all for hearing it.
Yes, I know that shooting in a game is not the same as shooting a real weapon. But I have seen people who have combat training who are much more effective in games than people without combat training. Conversely, the military does use simulators as part of training soldiers for combat. If it wasn't effective, they wouldn't be pumping millions into simulation software.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Gamers have such a strong reaction to threats of censorship because most of us understand that it's not real. I don't know about you, but I find it infuriating when I hear about some random politician saying "Games are bad. Vote for me. Blah blah blah blah blah!", but has never even played the game. It's like that woman who tried to stir up a bunch of controversy on Fox News with the XBoXXX scandal over Mass Effect shortly after she'd just published her new book by saying that there was full frontal nudity and sex in it, and everyone on the program was eating it up until her counterpoint speaker, Geoff Keighly bluntly asked "Have you even played this game?"
For those who didn't see it, her answer was no. And yet, even when she admitted that she'd never actually had any face time with the game, she kept jumping up and down about content that didn't exist in the game, and at the end of the segment they asked a bunch of random people what they thought of Mass Effect and they all basically said "Well clearly it's a sex simulator and I won't have anything to do with it."
THAT is why gamers get so ticked off about censorship. Because the ones doing the censoring more often than not don't have the slightest clue what they are talking about, and we have to suffer for it. Most of the time, the only effect it as on them is how many votes their uninformed soapboxing garners them. What's worse is that by in large gamers can't defend themselves from this because whenever we do, we are brushed off by society as immature video game addicts who can't think rationally. As fluffy and happy as the notion that everyone will figure out the true facts eventually may be, historically this isn't how the human race works. Sadly, the more realistic scenario is that the people who shout the loudest and throw the most money around get to decide what the facts are until everything goes straight to hell. Want proof? Just look at medical trials, the persecution of science by religion, politics, the "Separate but Equal" doctrine. In each case, it takes the instance of all hell breaking loose before the masses will question it in even the slightest capacity. I mean, how many ads have you heard talking about some major class action lawsuit over big drugs that were being advertised on every station imaginable in the last ten years. And some of those are major issues, causing death, blindness, or a whole host of other complications. Looking at them now it's easy to wonder, "How in the hell did this drug get approved when this kind of seriously detrimental side effect existed?", and the answer is simple; The drug companies had enough money and a loud enough voice to drown out the dissenters for years. But hey, just sit back and people will figure it out eventually right? Nevermind what casualties may be incurred in the mean time.
You do have the right idea behind actually being engaged in the lives of your children and saying "No, you can't play this game because you aren't mature enough yet." It's simple, and requires minimal effort. But it's so much easier for a politician, or a third-rate lawyer, or a parent who can't be bothered to read the back of a box to throw out the blanket and yell "GAMES ARE BAD!!!!" than it is to be a responsible, mature adult about the issue. So go ahead and just sit on the sidelines waiting for everyone to figure it out on their own. I'll be in their faces trying as hard as I can to keep the ignorance of the masses from destroying one of my favorite hobbies.
Funny the OP should mention that -- I came to the same conclusion myself. That game is simply disgusting.
But I'm much, much more concerned with games that portray realistic violence against recognizably *human* figures. Complete with realistic "death animations", and plenty of virtual gore. These are, in my mind, right up there with "horror" movies: incredibly damaging to the human psyche.
I'm sorry, but if you like games where you murder people in a realistic fashion, or movies that present realistic images of people being butchered, then you are a sociopath.
These games are not just games anymore; these movies are not just movies. They are not harmless entertainment. They have crossed a line. I am a strong believer in free speech, but there must be a limit.
This reminds me a scene I have often thought about from AI where the people in the arena are destroying androids a la Roman Colosseum. Even if you take a Weak AI view (which I do), this is still a disturbing scene. There's nothing actually wrong with the disassembling of a electronic circuits in the least bit (again, taking the Weak AI view), but to tear apart a creature with pleasure that just looks and feels so alive says something about you, and I would say it's not a good thing. And yet on the flip side I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with giving an old computer or copier a good beating in your backyard for the heck of it - even one that didn't give you trouble, just because harmless destruction is fun (think pinata). :)
I should have made clear, I'm talking about the subject of the article, which is not video games made today, but possible incredibly vivid, detailed and immersive games of the future.
And while I agree that there are many other things, some of which you mentioned, which are more desensitizing, corrosive and dangerous today -- that doesn't mean that we can write off the potential for future games to lead communal harm.
The main reason for this is because our brains behave very differently when passively observing, than when we are interacting directly with our environment. You put people in an environment that requires little willing suspension of disbelief for long enough, and have them act within that environment, massive psychological changes can occur rapidly. I think video games are far away from this threshold at present, but I'm fairly sure that they'll eventually get there.
And in terms of consequences deterrence, there's a reason that I qualified the possible problems to upset/emotionally charged situations, which is that people don't evaluate consequences in emotional situations rationally.
(As a personal aside, I'm not anti-video game in general at all. Not only do I play them quite a bit, but I'm also a neuroscientist who in part models the effects of gaming on vision / motor control. Action video games have considerable positive effects if you're a regular player.. they increase visual acuity, dramatically improve visual attention, increase spatial awareness, shorten reaction times (video games are better than actually playing sports for this), and may mitigate several types of reading disability.. )
Here's a take on this that most will disagree with (but I believe):
If it's bad for your kids, it's bad for you, too. If you are covering your kid's eyes/ears on a movie, game, whatever - that your own should probably be covered as well.
I'm not saying all entertainment except Dora and Barney should be eliminated and I'm also not calling for massive censorship of games/movies/etc.
But I am saying that hearing cuss words on TV is just as harmful for an adult as it is for children.
I'm afraid I found this article quite shallow when it comes down to it, although a lot of that is because last year I wrote a piece on this subject that was published in The Escapist as "The Anatomy of Violence." It covered why some people call first person shooter games "murder simulators," what the psychological underpinnings are behind the theory, and what impact it can have in the real world.
There are two versions - the one The Escapist published was edited down a fair bit, and can be found here: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_153/4960-The-Anatomy-of-Violence
The "extended" version - the one The Escapist didn't edit down - can be found here: http://garwulf.livejournal.com/38455.html
Not to put down the author of this article, but I think mine is really worth looking at here, and adds a lot that is missing (the SLA Marshall link is what makes the "murder simulator" theory make sense, among other things).
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
Just think of a guy playing one of these photo-realistic games for a month or so. He's running about taking damage and healing himself by eating random Turkey legs of the street. When this guy steps out of his house will he compulsively eat every food he sees on the ground?
1)The movie Brainscan, if you haven't seen it you should. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109327/
2)The game Hitman. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitman_(series)
A steady diet of crap will only make you sick.
Anyone prone to do the stuff that's done in videogames would never make it past 5 years old.
- Darwin
I am speaking as an indulger of violence and gore. There is a physical stimulation, an adrenal reaction when I am creating bloody messes in Fallout 3 or watching a person get sawed in half in High Tension. We like violent games because the more realistic they are the more they stimulate us.
To people that cite the fact that they are still able to feel something when they look at images of people who have been violently killed I have to question how proud one can really feel about this. Whether violence between people has been reduced throughout the world or not, the fact that we are constantly exposing ourselves to violent stimulus and even simulating them ourselves shouldn't worry us as much about how the player will then act out violently himself but how he views all of the pain and suffering of others; essentially, the player's ability to feel compassion.
People suffer every day whether it be from poverty and hunger or disasters or suicide bombings. These are true tragedies but we are able to ignore them all too easily till the images are plastered in front of us. Sure this isn't solely from violent video games but it is certainly among the factors contributing to an overstimulated, desensitized society.
You can talk all about the instinct of man to be violent and the survival of the fittest and all sorts of nasty aspects of human nature but shouldn't we try a little harder to cultivate the parts of our nature that make us a more loving, caring and generous society?
I guess I should just speak from my own experience and that is that I will continue to expose myself to these stimulations for the time being but there is a part of me that wishes I actually didn't feel the addictive urge to watch guts splatter across the screen.
I agree we shouldn't stop engaging those pundits and politicians who are waging war on choice, since that's clearly not reasonable. But we go beyond that to attacking things as censorship when they're not. N'gai Croal said he was uncomfortable with race in resident evil 5, the gamer response was incoherent rage one would expect if N'gai were saying "you can't play this game." But he wasn't saying that at all. I'm saying lets be reasonable, and open to the possibility that videogames may increase violent tendancies, and that we may have to moderate somewhat. Not censoring games for adults mind you.
Anyway, as far as the pundits go, you raise a point that drug companies have so much money they force their way through. I'm not worried about the "censor videogames" crowd for the same reason: there's money to be had in the videogame industry, the money and lobbyists here are on OUR side.
Im not here to write out a long paragraph about how video games dont or do promote violence in people. Im just here to state how I look at it and deal with it. Im 21, dont have any kids, yet, but when i do im just going to treat video games like I do movies. If the movie (i.e. the Saw series) is to violent for me i just dont watch it or if the video games seems to graphic for me I just dont play it, not that big of a deal. I believe that a big part of this is up to the parents to "monitor" what their kids play i dont mean stand over their shoulder every hour of every time the kids are playing video games. Maybe follow the ESRB ratings, they are there for a reason. If u think thats the ESRB rating is not correct dont complain about the game, thats ESRBs fault, bitch to them plz. Also i read earlier about the rating of the new WOW:WOTLK, and letting 14 year olds torture a man to get information out of him, you do realize that their are thousands of quests to do in that game and u dont have to do All of them or even half of them for that matter. And if u think that torturing that man is bad. Before you had to kill alot of his friends in order to get to him. So i guess killing his friends is not as bad as torturing that one man.
Im getting off topic here, all in all if u dont want your kids to play violent video games, then dont buy them. I just cant stand how people complain about violence in video games when it all comes down to the responsibility of the parents. So basically if you dont want your kids to see violent movies dont let them, and if you dont want them to play violent games, dont let them.
I don't know of a single video game that actually trains you to use a weapon.
Silent Scope, an arcade game with a realistic sniper rifle. Silent Scope had a small LCD screen in the rifle's scope which provided a close-up view. That bothered some people, and no game has used that idea since.
And, of course, there's a whole series of "Deer Hunter" games, popular in red states.
But what else could be responsible for this spike in "spree-killings?" The only other thing that I could think of that would likely inspire such a cluster, would be if such events were widely reported and obsessed over in the media, with numerous fawning reports inquiring into the "motivations" of the killers.
Oh wait, that happened, didn't it?
And real-world violence overall has decreased as video games have become more popular and more realistically violent, and decreased most sharply in the very demographic (young males) that are the heaviest consumers of videogames.
Does this conclusively prove that violent videogames are the root cause of our society becoming safer? No.
But what it does prove is that the pro-violence effect of videogames (if, indeed, there is any such effect at all) must be so small that it is utterly swamped by other social, economic, and demographic factors that impact rates of violent behavior.
We don't have enough satire games (something I'm hoping to make at some point) to counter this trend. Especially detrimental is the steady growth of games which glorify the murder-in-war simulation.
I can certainly relate. I played a lot of games like Doom, Quake, and Hexen as a teenager. I loved the "splatalogical" gore and the like. Likewise for UT, Doom 3, HL1 and 2, and so on.
I hadn't played many games (make that "any") since after beating Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 until recently, when I picked up Fallout 3. I was initially blown away by how realistic things had gotten - very impressive. But after a couple hours(++) of play, it became somewhat dissonant when I entered VATS on a female Raider (and then saw their head break into a dozen chunks after a successful kill). I became desensitized to it by the time I beat the game, I think, which is somewhat perplexing/disturbing in retrospect.
And then I saw all the 'nude' user-contributed mods out there. Topless painstake armor? Please, guys, no need to air your extreme fetishes. That's just disturbing.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
That I have become desensitized to organizing my desk everyday.
One of the last bosses in Metal Gear Solid 3 is the Sorrow, who you cannot shoot or blow up or stab or do anything to. You have to walk down a river which is populated by the ghosts of all the guards you've killed throughout the game - and in MGS killing guards is optional, only bosses are sometimes necessary to kill - and each time their ghost passes through your body, you lose health. The guards are scared, screaming, and suffering from their fatal wounds. How many guards you kill determines how far you have to slowly trench upstream. I almost didn't make it - I died about fifteen times because there were so many ghosts that I just couldn't avoid them. That's what this article is talking about. Why do people go into stores and ask for the goriest game available?
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
For as long as we have to prepare to do battle with other countries/planets there should always be training simulators. That said, let us not debate this any further, lest I be deprived of that as-yet unwritten simulator that lets me become a cheerleader --- that at night wields a chainsaw against zombies .
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
And to think, you did all that while not wearing pants!
We have two words for a reason. In something like GTA, you're largely murdering. In Bioshock, you're fighting for your life. Killing a prisoner at your mercy is murder. Killing an enemy combatant on the field is not.
Some games are a bit to violent and a bit to gory. But let's not use the wrong word to provoke an emotional response.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!