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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
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
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.
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
Not content with your slaughter of innocent virtual entities, you then proceeded to disembowel the English language?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
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.
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.
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)
Kids pointing their fingers at each other and yelling "bang!" are simulating murder.
It is bald stupidity or complete intellectual dishonesty to equate gross (of, relating to, or dealing with general aspects or broad distinctions) stylizations by children who have never seen a gun, much less blood or a serious wound, with photorealistic hi-def video of death, agony and gore.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I don't know if you realise, but you just used the words 'abuse' in regard to you interaction with the video game with the intention to cause 'terror'.
Your depiction of the actions in itself blurs the frontier between reality and virtuality.
You aren't 'moving pixels arround', that's what happens in tha game, but that isn't what you do when playing. When playing you provoke suffering and take pleisure from it.
Ask 8 slackers a question, get 10 awnsers (a citation, but I can't remember from who)
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.
The dead rarely complain (except for zombies - they're always frickin' moaning).
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
... 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,
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.