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Do Violent Games Hinder Development of Empathy?
donniebaseball23 writes "Although there's yet to be a study that conclusively proves a direct causal relationship between video game violence and real-life violence, psychologists are continuing to examine the effect violent media can have on children. A new study in the Journal of Children and Media notes that violent video game exposure can actually hinder a child's moral development. 'Certainly not every child who continues to play violent video games is going to go out and perpetrate a violent act, but the research suggests that children — particularly boys — who are frequently exposed to these violent games are absorbing a sanitized message of "no consequences for violence" from this play behavior,' said Professor Edward T. Vieira Jr."
I believe that only a few of them would get that message. But even if they did, instead of having parents ban the games for the child, why don't they teach them otherwise and then let them play them?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
For quite a while I was an advocate of the idea that since I've played games for years and it hasn't had an effect on me that its not an issue. However, one cannot ignore a drastic change in the behavior of kids today, empathy being one of the biggest changes I have noticed. I have witnessed some truly horrible things that have happened at my kids schools that simply didn't happen or were even thought of when I was young. I can remember when I was a kid shooting a bird with a bb gun, I felt so guilty about it that I don't think I ever used that bb gun again, but here in my neighborhood we had a couple of kids going around and killing pets repeatedly and after being caught they laughed about it.
One difference I have realized that I had ignored previously is that I didn't grow up with even semi realistic games, in fact when I was a small child games didn't even exist beyond pong, space invaders, etc...in fact the most violent games I can remember were things like death race and boot hill. While I know one of the popular arguments has been that movies, tv and books have depicted violence since their beginnings, but there is a big difference that I think is ignored. In other media the person perpetuating the violence is someone else, in modern games even if the character is visually on screen its still the player directing their actions. As adults we are able to separate fantasy from reality, for kids thats not so clear. While I would never advocate banning games, I do think that children can be far more susceptible to influence than we want to believe. It should be a parents job to mold and guide their children, I know that I try to, but many parents don't which brings up the dilemma of how to deal with it when parents dont do their jobs. The easy answer is to blame bad parents but that doesn't fix problem and society is still left to deal with it.
It's a valid point, you don't see people getting up in arms when it's a female protagonist beating or generally abusing male antagonists. I gave up watching most prime time TV because it was typical for the wives to behave like abusive bitches and for the husbands to more or less cower.
One has to wonder whether it's not as big a problem as is advertised or whether men just have that little value in modern society.
As a result children have less empathy. Empathy isn't rewarded in society. Look at this society and tell me why you'd expect any other result besides less empathy from children?
Do the corporations have any empathy? So why expect it from children?
The thing is, when you actually go outside with your friends and play swordfight or war, you learn a degree of empathy that you don't get from video games since you won't have anyone left to play with if you insist on actually harming people. With video games, there's an entire internet full of strangers for you to remorselessly frag/spawncamp/teabag so there's no reason to learn how to actually socialize with them or even consider them to be human beings.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
Every sponsor of the study has its own angle on the issue, as such the result of the study is already predestine to prove the sponsor right. It's largely irrelevant what the result is as the result is pegged long before any data is collected or interpreted.
Studies that disproved their sponsors' views have ways of disappearing into unfunded abyss.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
One has to wonder whether it's not as big a problem as is advertised or whether men just have that little value in modern society.
It has more to do with being at the tail end of a time period when spousal abuse of women was considered normal and was tolerated, so there was a big push to alter its depiction in the media to discourage it. Now that times have changed some, albeit not enough yet, one of the side effects of abused women finally being able to come forward and seek help is that the much smaller number of men who have been abused by their wives are beginning to be able to come forward. They're still mostly below the radar, but as public awareness of the problem grows, expect there to be a backlash against thoughtless media depictions of it.
There are always loud reactionaries associated with any kind of attempt to deal with social problems, but for the vast majority of reasonable people, it's not an us-versus-them thing. It's just a matter of directing limited resources at the most serious -- or just most visible -- problems first.
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