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Neuroscience May Cure Videogames Industry's Obsession With Guns
An anonymous reader writes "Leading developer Chris Stevens tells Edge magazine that neuroscience researchers will soon find 'non-violent triggers to mimic the rush of pleasure gamers feel when firing guns.' Researchers can now use functional MRI scanners to monitor what is going on in a player's brain and search for more optimistic and non-violent pleasure triggers. 'For decades it's as if developers have been driving a car with no speedometer,' Stevens claims, referring to the reliance on reported emotions rather than empirical measurements in game development. The functional MRI now gives a much more accurate indication of when peaceful triggers light up the brain's pleasure regions, opening up alternative game designs, without crude weaponry. 'I would like to see many more beautiful games like Fez and Limbo,' Stevens says. 'When I was a kid, games were more beautiful and magical and immersed you in fantastical, peaceful and enjoyable landscape.' The functional MRI could make these peaceful titles provably superior — no mean feat in a mass-market games industry currently obsessed with the crude dopamine-triggering effects of simulated weaponry."
I misread the title as "Neurosurgery may cure videogame industry obsession with guns".
Now I must admit to being slightly disappointed.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
It's called an orgasm, produced by a hand motion similar to squeezing a trigger. You typically fire one of these at a simulated woman in place of firing a gun at a simulated bad guy to get your rush of endorphins. There's actually quite a thriving industry on the internet involved in this gameplay, so I'm not exactly understanding what the scientists hope to achieve.
Anyone else think there is a subtle irony in the fact the chap that killed 14 people in the Batman movie in america was studying neuroscience.
This obviously wasn't his thesis.....
A good lot of videogames are not about guns or even about fighting. Those that are about that, unless they're SF or fantasy-based, should strive to have the most realistic experience as digitally possible but there is no substitute for the firing range. And anyway, games are about competition so "peaceful" is a four-letter word here. Take your hippy theories and fire them up your bunghole with an Angry Bird slingshot, loserboy.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
Really. I would have thought (not being up to speed on the latest in neuroscience) that we know of large numbers of things that stimulate and enchant us, and that one big reason video games seem to follow the simulated fantasy warfare model in their multitudes is that it's a proven money-maker, and coming up with new concepts that you can either develop on your own or find the resources to develop is a very hard creative endeavour that awaits the right people to bring to fruition.
If it's just a matter of identifying which brain loci can be triggered with other stimuli, then I'll have all that data on my rss feed so I can inform and update my educational video-game efforts.
You can't take the gun out of games, but you can make the gun non-violent. Take Portals for example. It's an extremely fulfilling game with a gun, that doesn't kill anyone.
The reason why players enjoy game have gun that kill other characters so much might stem from the fact that we as a society know that in real life they kill. Therefor we turn to shooter games to play the hero, and save the people from the evil terrorist, and not harm a soul in real life doing it.
Try all you want but the fact of the matter is, guns are part of the gaming culture and an even bigger part in story telling. That is untill something more harmful and destructive comes along.
For science? A noble goal, but it isn't as if this is necessary (for science!) or that there are any problems with violent video games.
All people want is some false sense of achievement. There are literally thousands of games that do this without guns. And do so successfully.
"no mean feat in a mass-market games industry currently obsessed with the crude dopamine-triggering effects of simulated weaponry" -- This quote just shows another person knowing absolutely nothing about the gaming market, but having an opinion on how to "improve" it anyway.
The mouse and the gamepad are very good to simulate 3D-Dimensional motion, as are the Graphics Cards. Having a game that works with space is easy because it is modelled after reality.
So having a game around the notion of moving things through space at a specific target is an easy concept. Acquiring control over said space through excertion of force is easy to grasp as well.
I think there was an article on RPS some time ago that talked about how the video game controls are specifically suited to manipulate a world physically instead of emotionally or through dialogue. And what better physical interaction is there than punching?
If someone actually does the research to find what game mechanics are the most pleasurable, that likely won't lead to other games usurping shooters as being the genre that publishers feel safe pumping $50 million into each.
It's also not just a matter of the intensity of pleasure, but also the frequency. If a shooter is very pleasurable when you're shooting things, but a puzzle game is only very pleasurable when you solve a puzzle, then you get more pleasure per minute from shooting.
Those making manipulative 'social games' who have studied psychology to understand how people feel rewarded already understand this (in theory), and have made games with a variety of methods of pleasing the player. It will probably be found that the theory matches the results of the experiments. This means instant rewards, periodic rewards, sparse rewards, novelty, and different game modes.
What would be interesting is to use fMRI to figure out why certain people consider a game fun and others don't. Then, those elements which prevent people from enjoying your game can be alleviated so that the game's audience can be widened. The trick is doing this without dumbing the game down, of course.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I'm reasonably sure they can safely and successfully replace "shooting guns" with "swinging swords" and other bladed weapons. Remote-control explosives, lassos and whips, Force-lightning and gravity-guns would probably also work. I'm unsure about their untold, implicit objective though, but then, science is about testing hypotheses, and not fulfilling fantasies about human nature - now that's what simulation video games are for !
Well of course the game designers wouldn't need external measuring tools, not when their own brain can tell them what they, themselves, enjoy playing. Apparently they found out on their own that the most efficient way for getting "crude dopamine-triggering effects" was "simulated weaponry".
I'll even go out on a limb and say that the researchers will find "triggering peaceful-triggers" is best done by solving puzzles that are challenging but not out of reach, repeating a timed sequence of memorized or interpreted actions to a sufficiently close match of a model (like, say, jumping through perilously placed platforms) and the sort of things that have spawned entire casual videogame genres.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
One anonymous reader needs to sit down for a spell and drink some tea to calm his or her nerves.
They don't know what they're doing, they just put some electrodes on your head and try to explain what they see : )
When I read the summary I thought "what would compete with guns would be pr0n".
I find it quite amusing that their "solution" to violent video games is Limbo.
They obviously never stepped one foot into that world. If anyone got through that game without being impaled or decapitated at least a dozen times, I would be very impressed.
The functional MRI now gives a much more accurate indication of when peaceful triggers light up the brain's pleasure regions, opening up alternative game designs, without crude weaponry. So, fix your < $100 car (i.e game) with... someone remind me, please... how much for a "functional MRI" speedometer? ('cause, I s'ppose, each driver is be different, thus the speedometer would read something else)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
This is just a BIT ironic, or at the least bad timing, considering the Colorado shooter was in grad school for neuroscience.
But let's not forget, you could use it to make the FPSs more fun. I still think if you were to engineer the perfect video game neuron by neuron, you'd still end up with Quake III.
But what will cure researchers obsession with political correctness?
These researchers need to try to be more like this guy
Remove just the word videogames, and imagine how much ridiculous NRA'esque rhetoric we could expect to see (even here on /.) about how "they" (big brother, gov't, democrats, Obama etc.) are literally trying to brainwash us and take away our rights!
1. I would prefer if these scientists "cure" peoples obsession with guns - in general. 2. Anyone who calls Limbo a peaceful game hasn't played it any longer than 5 minutes (great game, but peaceful? no.)
I realize this is off-topic (mod me down if you must), but I think it's important. Bad indie developers continue to receive a free pass, and it's something that bothers me intensely because it marginalizes good indie developers.
I don't like Fez, and I don't want to see more games like it. To start with, Fez borrowed heavily from a much better game (Cave Story) by a game designer who isn't a complete jerk (Phil Fish makes me embarrassed to call myself a gamer). And while Cave Story felt like it had a point, moving the player forward toward some sort of ultimate conclusion, Fez meandered about doing not much of anything. Playing it feels like a chore. There's no challenge involved because death is meaningless (you respawn at the last patch of solid ground you were on with no negative consequence) and all there really is to do is collect stuff that feels meaningless while exploring its blocky, unoriginal, and uninspired world. Adding to the feeling of being a cheap knockoff game is the fact that Fez takes advantage of a gimmick that has been done much better in several other games (the perspective shift mechanic was most likely ripped off of Super Paper Mario, a game which came out in the same year as Fez began development).
Some of the indie crowd seems to think Fez shines most in the exploration aspect (like the author of the story here most likely does). But what fun is exploring when there's nothing interesting to see? See, Fez uses what a lot of indie developers are terming "retro style graphics" and what I think would be better termed as "lazy graphics." When I think back on the games from my childhood, I remember them having fantastic graphics that made really interesting worlds in the constraints of some highly limited technology. Look at what Sonic the Hedgehog did on the 16-bit Genesis. There's a game with some interesting art direction. Even in games constrained to 8-bit, you have some classics like Megaman and Final Fantasy that had some really interesting art direction and some varied and colorful settings that really felt alive. One of my favorite games as a kid was an NES game called Faxanadu, a game about a world decaying because the world tree had been corrupted (if I remember correctly). The art direction in that game was fantastic; the outside world really felt like it was drying up and dying, while the inside world felt like something evil had taken ahold.
I understand independent game developers are usually teams of only several people, but that doesn't excuse the downright laziness present in much of the indie community. For example, take VVVVVV. I felt like the designer released an unfinished game. The graphics looked like one man designing an Atari 2600 game. While the core gameplay was solid (if somewhat unoriginal) and the music was good, the game overall felt sloppy because of the poor artistry and I was left disappointed. Contrast that with Braid, which had some of the best art direction I've seen in an independent game. The core gameplay was solid there, too; it really felt like a finished game, a vision of a world by someone who had something of worth to say. I want to see more games like that. Not games like Fez, where the only reason it sold was because the developer had a big head and rode the hype train to cash town.
But games ARE a non-violent alternative. Well, except for Wii-games, but those can be made non-violent with some simple safety tips, like always having the left-handed person standing on the left, and the right-handed person standing on the right.
So if they've identified pathways they want to target and have some good fMRI evidence of what's going on, why use games as the drug delivery mechanism, instead of a more conventional method?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
personally i think guns are shit "irl" but who cares about in video games. are you going to telling me smashing things with a giant hammer in diablo should be replaced with something "nicer" too? spare me the bullshit.
This is not an obsession with guns but simply a question of game mechanics and story.
A game must deliver two things:
a) the player must be able to "do" something for a long time (hours for a game).
b) there must be some sort of threat or excitement in the story. Something you must overcome or else why play?
In a) and b) it becomes obvious we are not talking about casual games here. Many casual games have a simple non-shooting mechanic and no story or explanation at all ("Just solve those box-riddles, will you?". This works to keep someone interested in a game for an hour, maybe two but then it gets boring. The story is no motivation ("I just helped all smiley-balls and evaded the mean red boxes") and the game mechanics come to an end as well (the three variations are done to death).
For a):
You need a mechanic that is relatively easy to create. You can code it with 5 programmers in three to six months and let them finetune it for the next 12. You cannot have a level of variety in your game. So the same set of basic mechanics must be repeated over and over.
Having a mechanic to swing a sword and shoot a gun at various enemies would be an interesting start. If you go beyond that, it becomes quickly less and less than you can do. You can throw balls at people, shoot them with an arrow, with a gun, with an energy blast... games use violence because it's one of the few concepts that holds for hours.
You create the shooting mechanism, then enemies and spawn those in various environments and setups as repetition of the basic principle.
The available "basic principles" games had in the earlier days are not available today anymore, as we'd consider many of them for casual gaming (classic jump and runs etc).
For b)
You need a threat for a good story that is beyond what people usually do in their lives. A game that is about getting the last onion (you need it for your food) in the shop before some old grandma snatches it is not interesting for a game that needs to entertain you for hours.
You need a threat above that. Something that threatens what your are, maybe the entire world and you with it. If you are threatened, then the usual response is running away (there can be two, three games that do something like that) or fighting. Boom, you are at violence again.
Games do use "guns" (swords, magic, whatever) as a mechanic simply because it's a very simple and one of the few ways to blend a) and b) into each other.
As closing notes: I do find guns in games not problematic at all. I find it problematic if military action is seen without any critique or even is heroised. But in itself, shooting at people in games is not worse than throwing bubble gum balls at those evil green monsters.
The context how those guns are used matters much more than the guns itself, and in all honesty, in all but the most extreme cases this is a non-issue as well.
Apart from that: games do not focus that much on guns. There are a lot of games out there that do other things (swords, for example ;)). There are many, many MANY games that do not focus on guns (in some do guns appear, but I guess the people talk about shooters here; a blaster in a Star Wars RPG isn't what I'd call a "gun game"). The gameworld does not consist of "gun games". The layout of this link sucks, but check out how many of those top ten lists have less than 50% gun games: http://www.filibustercartoons.com/games.htm
There also are games that have guns, but that really are not about them. As DeusEx or something. I would not put that in the same gun-category as for example Battlefield (which is about using your guns at people).
The people here overlook this. And I think the REAL question is "Why are they overlooking it?"
If it's not on purpose, it's because they are biased. They wanted to find red cars in the traffic and therefore found a lot of red cars in the traffic and did not notice all the other colours. In that case their findings are useless.
Or they did it on purpose and then ignoring them is even more important.
where i played hours and hours of 'DOOM' day after day
i did not turn into a massacring monster. the worst thing on my record is a speeding ticket. i am nonviolent
in fact, i am for much stricter gun control in the USA. the second amendment was written before semi-automatic firearms existed
i enjoyed the escapist violence in 'DOOM' because it is just a game, i can tell the difference between real life and a game. everyone can except a few nutjobs
the point is: violent videogames, movies, books, or any media do not turn certain people into nutjobs. certain people are just already nutjobs, and yes: certain media may set them off
however: in a world where all media is unicorns and flowers, the barking dog next door or the roommate's weird style of laughter or the burning red eyes of the toaster oven would set them off instead. meaning they are going to be set off, one way or another, no matter what media exists
so let us enjoy our first person shooters and batman movies. these media might set off nutjobs... nutjobs who would be set off anyways in any media environment regardless
to get quite pointed here about how silly it is to focus on media: if you are concerned about some media creating violent people, then the bible and the koran are the very first things you want to destroy, as those two books have served as the inspiration for the murder of millions. the contents of those two books are very violent, and suggest that an almighty invisible power has absolute authority to command you to obey its violent teachings. great, that's just what you need to tell a crazy person
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You really need to get out of your mother's basement more often and find out by personal experience why there are two sexes.
Only two? Pffft. You obviously haven't seen my browsing history.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
where can I get a gun here?
But I have to wonder about "neuroscience" ASSUMING that an affection for guns has to be "cured".
Other video games have other forms of violence, whether it's punching mushrooms or dumping barrels on somebody's head.
I think there are a number of assumptions here that are probably unwarranted.
They all share a theme: you don't have to destroy. You can build and explore and create instead. Games as a celebration of creativity really speaks to me on a deeper level than Call of Battlefield #7113.
There will always be a market for thrilling escapism, but as long as there is an alternative, there is hope.
Geez, if all you expect from games is to be shown stimuli that trigger pleasure receptors, that's a very impoverished idea of what games could be! Imagine if someone wrote the MRI-perfect novel, so that every page would trigger some neural activity in the pleasure center. Would that even be a good book? I'll answer that rhetorical question: No, it would be a completely pointless, manipulative piece of shit. That happens to describe too many video games already; I don't want this to get even worse. If all we are after is some sort of specific neural stimulation, why don't we just do it directly with wires and be done with it? But, fuck that. I'd rather read an interesting book.
Would not be cheaper simply legalize prostitution, gay marriage, et all?
Violence is one possible (and probably the most common) symptom of repressed sexuality!!
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
And I don't mean tossing a few grams of simulated Lead, at a simulated target, a few simulated feet away.
I mean tossing picograms of Heavy Ions, sometimes Really Heavy Ions. Ions that are maybe accelerated to a few GeV, and finally hitting a target a couple of millimeters wide from the equivalent distance of a maybe a few million Kilometers. Repeatedly, with 100% accuracy. You are in control of thousands of devices, a few dozen computers, dozens of monitors, or if you have an Old School Control Room, just a few computers, a few monitors, and a few thousand switches, knobs and meters.
There are a couple of hundred people worldwide who are competent enough to do this. Some of them, I was one, could stay up for 72 hours just to see the results start to come in. (It may take a couple of years to grok all the data.) But even I couldn't deal with Bragg Peak Radiotherapy. This time, if your 2mm target being cooked was buried deep in somebodies brain, such as an AVM, being just a couple of millimeters off, or if your energy is just a little off, or if you toss a few too many Ions, this means your target may die. For real.
Accelerator people are strange. The divorce rate is staggering. Strangely, there isn't much drug abuse or alcoholism. You just can't, and still do your job. Now that is the kind of Neuroscience that should be studied. Not that the studies of antisocial gaming minds isn't worth studying.
It's just not interesting.
My bet is the rush of sensation comes from killing the others instead of being killed, not from the tools used to achieve this. Replace the gun by whatever you want, it will still be violent because it triggers some primal feelings deep in your DNA.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
"When I was a kid, games were more beautiful and magical and immersed you in fantastical, peaceful and enjoyable landscape."
When exactly did Chris Stevens grow up?
Obviously, it wasn't in the Atari era, where half of all games were space shooters.
Obviously, he didn't grow up in the 8-bit or 16-bit era, where every game involved you killing everything within sight - either with guns, or swords that have the ability to shoot.
Obviously, he didn't grow up in the 64-bit era, where first person shooters became the biggest selling games.
Obviously, he didn't grow up in the modern era, where a good shooter sells a console.
So, obviously, Mr. Stevens either never grew up, or he didn't grow up with video games.
I'm struggling to see something that would be that much fun short of... well... boobs. It's primal. You get an adrenaline rush. Your heart beats fast. Time slows down. And you dodge death by inches to kill your opponent.
Try to come up with a kittens and cream version of that.
Are we sick? Is this anti social behavior? I couldn't say. It seems pretty common and normal. It's deep in the blood.
And all the studies have made it clear that people make a clear distinction between make believe killing and real killing. It doesn't make us monsters just because we enjoy slaughtering orcs or whatever.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
This is a falsified article, there is no disease associated with weaponry. Please review you facts before posting this drivel!
The purpose of existence is to make money.
We recently bought an Xbox 360. I downloaded some demos and one was Bulletstorm. I was playing it and my 10 year old son was watching. My 7 year old walks in, watches for 3 seconds, and says "I don't think this game is appropriate for kids". Just then I finished the level and the guy in the game said something where he drops the f-bomb. My daughter walks out saying "Yeah, definitely not appropriate". I said "yeah I think you are right.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
TAIA - maybe have the game controlled by the Shake Weight (as seen on TV)
Sounds like he would be uniquely qualified to study this and has some spare time on his hands.
Pyro Vision.
http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Meet_the_Pyro
Problem solved.
I'm actually worried that they will succeed in creating a completely new platform for craving that you can only get satisfied by using their technology.
So instead of crude blasters and guns, they are going to use an elegant weapon for more civilized ages? Like what this woman is showing off?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Otherwise he would have noticed Minecraft and shut the fuck up.
All the guns and so on in games isn't surprising: It is the human version of play fighting. It doesn't take long watching animals to see that pretend fighting is the #1 form of play out there. Kittens stalk each other, puppies wrestle and chew on each other. Well humans are the same way. Plenty of our games are "play fight" type of games, and videogames are no different.
May well be evolutionary reasons for it (perhaps play fighting helps yo be better at real fighting). However given that it is the kind of thing we see from a lot of animals, not just humans, it shouldn't surprise us. Yes ours is more sophisticated, big surprise there everything we do is.
Then also there's just the bullshit of "peaceful". No, there haven't been many games that would qualify as that. Part of the reason is that there needs to be something to do, and in many environments that means a conflict that needs resolution. There needs to be something for the player to do. In some cases that can just be an inherent part of the environment, like a builder game where people just build whatever they like or a puzzle game. However in many cases, it is going to involve a conflict that needs resolution of some kind. Doesn't mean guns are going to be involved, but conflict of some kind.
Finally if this bullshit is in response to the Aurora massacre, as I suspect it is, then maybe they need to actually L2game and do a little research. To the extent I've seen games reported as something the shooter did (there's rampant speculation all over the spectrum as to what his motivations were) it was World of Warcraft. For those that haven't played, that is a fantasy game where you use swords, cast spells, or just transform in to a giant bear or the like. To the extent there are guns they are flintlock, and very much secondary.
However I'm sure the morons who know nothing about it saw "Warcraft" and said "Oh my god a game about war! Clearly this made him a shooter!"
After violence, the other thing that can trigger pleasure is anything that is somehow related to human sexuality. When I was younger then reading manga where boy and girl were kissing aroused my hormones and I could feel it in my blood. Same with playing visual novels / hentai games. In order to get rid of "bad violence" we need to embrace more sexuality. Even soft pornography or hidden sexual context might work. Make a virtual game where boy is going throught the process of dating and girl and getting at her, describe all the events and signs of progress quickly and often enough and it will work. The girls can be cute or have various personality. In the end there should be virtual sex, so that yougnster can onanise over winnig a game (and try another route...). We need to change laws to legalize soft "child" pornography, meaning animated 17-years old boy fucking (girl from the same school | female teacher | nurse | office lady | young ladies from nearby university | ducth wife | /b/ ) and having fun from that. Then yougnsters in this age instead if firing with guns in virtual reality or bullying someone will spent even more time onanising. The morality of western society must change! What is bad on getting high on getting hard on? I have been onanising almost every day for more than 10 years since I was 13 and I love it!
As I noted in another post: Get some animals together, see how they play. A big part of it is play fighting. They wrestle, chase, chew and so on. Many of their actions are the precise same ones they take when actually hunting or fighting, they just are gentle with it.
For example many cats (which is what I've owned the most of) like to chew on your hand, grip your arm with their front paws, and pick it with their back paws, while laying on their back (often while purring up a storm). This is what they do in combat, just with more force and claws out. They try to bite the neck/face of the other cat and use the back claws to disembowel their opponent.
How they fight and hunt relates to how they play. You see this all over nature. Thus you start to think maybe this is not coincidence, maybe there's an evolutionary reason that play mimics combat. Also you start to realize that humans are not unique in this regard, just more complex in our kinds of play.
But what does the SALMON think of violent video games?
http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2009/09/fmri-gets-slap-in-face-with-dead-fish.html
(The comedic scanning of a *dead* salmon with fMRI, showing that - without careful correction - fMRI can give you data from absolutely nothing. In this case, "...the salmon was shown a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations. The salmon was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing...". "Studies" like this - purporting to explain some sort of human behavior - always remind me of this result.)
-Styopa
The unsurprising result will be that men find porn more pleasurable than violence.
The really surprising result will be the revelation that women enjoy porn more than men, causing another sexual revolution, this one of biblical proportions.
They can use this for inspiration...
...like Contra, Rush N' Attack, Combat, and Ikari Warriors. Sad that today's games are so obsessed with violence and the military.
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
'When I was a kid, games were more beautiful and magical and immersed you in fantastical, peaceful and enjoyable landscape.'
Yeah, I hear that Contra and Ninja Gaiden were all about peace and love. I guess this guy only played Mario when he was a kid.
We played war, threw real rocks at each other (so cover was important). We did lots of violent stimulating activities. Riding bicycles as fast as we could and jumping off to grab a tree branch and swing while the bike sailed off. Running to the edge of the bayo with card board boxes and jumping off the edge onto the 45 degree slope and sliding down (could have broken our arms).
And our video games as they appeared had guns almost immediately. It was like pong, pac man, then shooters.
My favorite games were
Crazy Climber (no gun), ROBOTRON 2084, Defender. Two of three involved shooting and killing things.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Mmmm.... triggers ;-)
How many people go on a shooting rampage play a lot of violent video games compared to those who don't? Even then, the number that do are so small that you can't blame video games.
The best way to stop what happened in Colorado is to 1. harsh punishment, painful and fast instead of waiting 30 years in jail before actually killing him. and 2. More open Gun laws, if a few people had guns in that theater, he could have been stopped before the death count got that high. More gun laws will mean only the criminal will have guns, and he feels safer to go on a rampage.
Is there a cause and effect issue here? For example, meditation changes our brain. New pathways, connections are made via learning, focusing. We generate this, we drive this and can control it. We somehow decide these directions, if we choose. The specific neural signals are the result of these choices, the result of our activity, driven by personality or consciousness. This take seems to miss the forest for the trees.
They said gamers but what they meant was males. Females of course have universally not given a crap about big weapons firing off in games. So if they take away alpha male, testosterone junkie, fake power trip crap, they might actually get some female to play big titles.
Basically half the article is him throwing out various reasons a game company might want to own an MRI. Over the course of the article it is suggested that by owning one a game company could "make more exciting games, could learn to sell advertising better and could learn to conduct business more efficiently". The outlier that makes you wonder what kind of companies we are talking about here is the "find better ways to interrogate people". Actually the interrogate part is the first thing Adrian Hon lists in his response. Makes you wonder how much interrogation is going on at his company and what their current methods are? Frankly by the time I finished the article the whole idea had moved into the "scary creepy" category.
Violence Sport or "Sporting" those are what drives men they have known this since The Dawn of Time
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Sounds like you need some stair dismount.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Why are there no high-quality high-budget immersive First Person Point and Click Adventure? It would be a top game instantaneously. You know, the idea that Myst had back then, but instead of static frames with Battlefield3 graphics, without guns. It would be awesome. Dear Esther was good, but missing the puzzle/adventure part. Only Heavy Rain got near this genre.
Relevant
An act is violent only if there is some perception that the act is harming something that has some level of intelligence. The more intelligent your target is perceived to be, the more heinous the act is. Is Bejeweled violent? Sure, if you consider all those poor gems you keep causing to self combust. Those goombas you stomp... those are actually robots with very simple programming. For some people, they realize that despite all the realism, they are just shooting AIs, and they have to move up to PvP to be more convinced that they are dominating, getting closer and closer to that alpha male spot. Sometimes that isn't enough, as it is still not real.
...brain's pleasure center? They'll invent porn.
It is the height of political correctness to even suggest that liking guns and shooting them is something that needs to be "cured," and as a gun owner, this offends me to my core.
Your error lies in assuming that the only game genre is FPS.
What genres are there on PCs other than FPS (violent), RTS (violent), and MMORPG (violent and spiritistic more often than not)?
Whether in video games or in real life, kids like shooting. It's partly about the power, partly about the skill, partly about the noise and feel, and maybe partly about other stuff, but shooting guns is great fun. I'm an NRA instructor and a Boy Scout leader, so I frequently get called upon to take kids out shooting (BSA safety rules require certified instructors be present at all shooting activities), and I have never -- ever! -- met a teenage boy who didn't find great joy in poking holes in targets with a .22 rifle. For that matter I haven't met many adults, male or female, who don't really enjoy shooting when they try it.
Of course, target shooting is very different from blowing the head off a zombie in an explosion of simulated gore, but the gun part of it is the same -- and guns are fun. It's certainly possible that neuroscience may find ways to make other kinds of games more rewarding (addictive?), but I really doubt that shooting games will ever die.
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Don't lie. Dance Dance Revolution doesn't exist [...] And Tetris was just a lie
Perhaps successful nonviolent video game concepts are so rare that their developers tend to be more litigious about enforcing exclusive rights (Konami v. Roxor; Tetris v. Xio).
"researchers will soon find 'non-violent triggers to mimic the rush of pleasure gamers feel when firing guns." Will it work for conservative gun-nuts who live by the 2nd Amendment?
Puzzles come to mind... Ever play Myst? The series did quite well.
And where is the point-and-click adventure genre now? I apologize for not stating up front that I was referring to new releases.
How about the multitude of pinball games?
I was under the impression that pinball had pretty much died. There's only one company making new pinball machines anymore: Stern Pinball, a spinoff from Sega that now employs alumni of Williams' shuttered pinball operation.
Mahjong?
I apologize for not stating up front that I was referring to the English-speaking market. I thought the game of mahjong (not mahjong solitaire, which is sold under the name Shanghai) was popular only in China.
Actually, it sounds like you are referring to the male 12-25 year old U.S. Windows-based user demographic. (maybe you meant that last part by "PC"?)
Yes on U.S. Windows-based, no on male 12-25 year old.
I wasn't suggesting these markets are LARGER than the violent games market
Thank you for clarifying.
Have you been to the game section of an Apple store lately? How about the Mac App store?
No and no. I can't view the Mac App Store without buying a Mac, and the closest Apple Retail Store is 90 miles away. Or by "game section of an Apple store" did you mean something other than an Apple Retail Store?
Any idea how much Zynga brings in on non-violent games? Facebook games?
No. Should I join Facebook before replying?
I noticed you ignored several examples I gave as well.
You have a point that Sim*, * Tycoon, and Solitaire are non-violent. But end users expect to get things like Solitaire for no charge, making it harder for publishers to derive revenue from them. That leaves Sim* and * Tycoon.
How about mimicking the euphoria from sex? Then we can just do virtual sex simulators like on Demolition man.
Much easier than picking up girls from the bar.
So give me my Soma and I'll perform my Beta 5 responsibilities without complaint for free.
This reminds me of the Star Trek episode "The Game", where the entire crew gets addicted to a simple game.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Because tortuously pulling the legs off a giant spider one by one then impaling the body on a bed of rusty spikes to use as a stepping stone is so much more wholesome than and beautiful than shooting various ethnic groups in various bombed out landscapes.
Yeah, bombing them with those'd be a great idea.
I can just see Ron Jeremy accepting his Mother Teresa Award...
What they are selling here is a way to measure stimulation while playing a game. The conclusion was that it would help develop peaceful games rather than even more stimulating violent games is simply subjective wishful thinking, or just press spin. The same MRI technology could be developed to tune the violence just the same.
"When I was a kid, games were more beautiful and magical and immersed you in fantastical, peaceful and enjoyable landscape."
yeah, pong and pacman absolutely took place in a beautiful and enjoyable landscape.
and mortal kombat / narc were definitely peaceful.
what games exactly was this chump playing?
Star Wars: The Old Republic?
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I seem to recall that it was a neuroscience researcher who just shot up killed tons of innocent people in Colorado. Maybe these guys aught to look inwards to understand violence instead of judging everyone else. Just saying...
I know plenty of gamers who play these violent shooting games, and in real life, they're some of the most non-violent pacifist people you'd ever meet. For me, I'm not an extreme fan of those games, but it has nothing to do with violence. I just prefer different types of games, that's all, but I don't think we should have some crackpot scientist dictating what kind of games we should play.
For one thing, the research is a waste of time, because games are fantasy and art...they're not just abstract trigger mechanisms in the brain. Grand Theft Auto may be a tad distasteful, but it's still fantasy and people buy it because it's fantasy. The vast majority of people in this world know the difference between fantasy and reality. Society is repressed, and a game like GTA allows you to do things you would never do in real life. That's why people like it. It has nothing to do with an obsession with guns or some kind of thrill-kill, at least for the vast majority of people. You know, as long as there is something taboo in life, there will be a fantasy about it. I imagine that real gangsters would find GTA quite boring. And people who know real violence would probably find it disgusting. But to everyone else, it's just fantasy, and there will always be a market for fantasy.
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