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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.....
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.
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 ?
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.
And anyway, games are about competition
Not necessarily, unless you include "competition against yourself to have more fun" which you could apply to anything if you stretched it far enough.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing 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)
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.
Guns are inextricably linked with First Person Shooter games, for am extremely obvious reason.
Your error lies in assuming that the only game genre is FPS.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"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.
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.
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.
Surely they'd be better off striving to have the most enjoyable experience possible? Especially if you say that they'd still be "no substitute." A sniper game that involves hiding in the one place for 2 days straight, for instance, may be realistic, but why would anyone want to play it? Give me TF2 any day.
One of the most memorable games from my youth was an RPG called Ultima IV. In the previous games in the series, you just stole all the gold and levelled entire friendly towns for profit, once you got strong enough - no consequences.
In Ultima IV however all of a sudden there were consequences for mis-deeds. you could still lie, cheat, steal, and lay waste to the friendly citizens, but there were in-game consequences that cost you. Of course a central theme to the game was to become virtuous, but I think more games could do with some of these mechanisms - allow free action still, but make it have consequences.
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
I think this whole effort is incredibly misguided. Video games used to be peaceful, like Custard's Last Stand or T.E. or that Super Favio Brothers thing where you stomped the shit out of some turtles and walking mushrooms, or alternately set fire to them.
Violence is a fact of life. There is no power to protect; this is a thing I discovered long ago but have been agonizing over to the point of crying trying to understand... somebody spelled it out for me (it was in a book), I finally swallowed it but it was a big pill to swallow. Part of enlightenment is sitting around holding onto truths you've discovered years ago and trying to find the flaw in them, I guess. Unfortunately there is no flaw: there is no power to protect.
Power allows you to destroy, in its simplest and easiest form; more subtle, difficult applications of power allow you to create, and creation is just the careful application of destruction and preservation. People will seek to protect their own interests by force, by taking things that don't belong to them; they will seek to maintain dominance and strength by force of will--by instilling fear, with destruction. The only thing that protects you is the power to destroy: your entire police force functions on the principle that would-be criminals understand they will find you and they will beat and kill you if you resist.
Folks think it's so god damn 'virtuous' to refuse violence. It's insane. You want virtue? Stop being a coward. When you see someone being dragged off to be raped or murdered, go over there and stop their attacker--whether it comes to threats or beating someone's head in with a steel pipe. If you knew the whole damn world would suddenly come to kill you if you rape a bitch, you're probably not going to do it unless you're suicidal; yet sane, rational people will complain about all the violence in the world and then willfully strip themselves of their defenses, and espouse the virtue of having everyone who could possibly stand in to protect them do the same. Lunacy. A lot of good people are gonna get hurt. This is a side-effect of that: violence bad, we should hide it, pull it out of entertainment, teach people to all play nice.
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