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Long-term Study Finds No Link Between Video Game Violence and Real Violence
SternisheFan sends news that a study has been completed on the long-term effects of violence in movies and video games on violence in real life. A researcher at Stetson University found no link between the consumption of violent media and an increase in societal violence. The study was published in the Journal of Communication. From the article:
"Entertainment Software Ratings Board ratings were used to estimate the violent content of the most popular video games for the years 1996-2011. These estimates of societal video game violence consumption were correlated against federal data on youth violence rates during the same years. Violent video game consumption was strongly correlated with declines in youth violence. However, it was concluded that such a correlation is most likely due to chance and does not indicate video games caused the decline in youth violence. ... Previous studies have focused on laboratory experiments and aggression as a response to movie and videogame violence, but this does not match well with real-life exposure.
What?
So what you're saying is that humans can tell the difference between reality and video games??
Another long-term study found a link between empty wallets and gaming PC upgrades.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
This author (http://www.stetson.edu/other/faculty/profiles/christopher-ferguson.php) clearly has experience in clinical psychology. However, he's been talking extensively about videogame violence for a year only; first publications and *very frequent* publications in both peer and non-peer-reviewed (majority) journals. He's stepped quite significantly into the gun+violence debate in the US, too: "Viewpoint: Stop Tearing Ourselves Up About Mass Killings" - http://ideas.time.com/2013/09/... . In short, be sure to read authors with a much longer history on the subject before taking this at face value. But wait -- isn't that the common /. story?
-dC
Nerds declare it's long been obvious. Details at 11.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
And advertising has no effect on consumer buying habits. Political campaigning has no effect on the vote...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Of course not. Now that they've ruled out video games causing violence we have a new crowd attacking games from a different angle. Now Grand Theft Auto doesn't make gamers into violent crooks, it makes them in misogynists because the game contains hookers. Princess Peach isn't just a pointless bit of story to explain why you're crushing mushrooms and turtles, she's "teaching boys to keep women in the kitchen."
So conservatives may have finally moved on, but a new group is attacking video games as being "bad for us" from a completely different angle. So be prepared to hear even more about that. And once people prove that isn't true, I'm sure the goalposts will be moved yet again.
Television does not affect behavior. Unless its the network selling advertising time.
Have gnu, will travel.
New group? It's the same group: prudes.
I would actually have expected a reverse link -- violent video games having a cathartic effect.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Take that, Jack Thompson!
Thanks really. If video games make you violent, you're the problem. Thanks for stating the obvious.
I'd argue that was true for any object people commonly blame for their own violent behavior.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
which correlates neatly with the widespread introduction of violent videogames. 2014 is now, 1994(20 years ago), is the introduction of "DOOM".
but Anita Sarkeesian swears it does!
Oh, wait, no, that's sexism, not violence. I'm sure it's completely different.
She does, in fact, claim that. She just uses more words to do it.
Sadly, we have to do these or long held 'common' beliefs never get challenged even when they're wrong, and we'd still be believing witches and such cause disease.
I don't read AC A human right
Probably negative in both cases.
From what I've seen, violent types will seek violence, gun or no gun. There may be something to the idea that allowing them to play out violent fantasies on a computer is catharic enough to reduce real world violence(and who cares how many digital mooks that have to 'die' in the process).
What guns tend to do is increase the consequences of the violence. Complicating matters is how do you differentiate people who have guns as recreation -hunting, target shooting, and such, and those that have them as a criminal trade tool?
I don't read AC A human right
The blame game has always been popular. It is always some made up bullshit excuse instead of finding & treating the root problem. One small set (or sect/group/cult) of society tries to blame an inanimate object for all of society's woes and spreads their propaganda to anyone who will listen.
Every "next technology" is always scapegoated.
1900 Film
1920 Prohibition (Alcohol), Phonographs
1930 Jazz, Movies
1940 Radio
1950 Dancing
1960 Psychedelic Drugs, Sex
1970 Rock n Roll, Movies (again)
1980 MTV, DnD, Heavy Metal
1990 Computer Games
2000 Internet and "strangers online"
2010 Guns
Then you have idiot psychiatrists like this who say 20+ year olds playing computer games is not "normal."
http://www.destructoid.com/pla...
To which I'll counter:
1. Hey fucking retard -- the medium is irrelevant.
Why is playing a card, board, or sports game like poker, go, chess, or baseball / hockey / basketball / etc. considered "normal", yet playing a digital game isn't normal??
2. Well guess what -- all these people were not normal as well:
Leonardo da Vinci was not normal
Isaac Newton was not normal
Charles Darwin was not normal
Albert Einstein was not normal
Stephen Hawking is not normal
Normal people don't do exceptional things.
The real issue is:
Are _you_ balanced in your daily activities, responsibilities, and hobbies?
Is this really controversial? The proof is in the amount of money spent on advertising. Sure, some advertising just gets the word out, but, for example, McDonalds or Coca-Cola ads are all about behaviour modification, because everybody has already heard of both things, even though individual people widely believe they are unaffected by the ads they watch.
That's why things like this study are useful to establish that violence is *not* among the things that are easily injected into consumer thoughts. Now, of course, a key difference is that McDonalds and Coke are specifically trying to change your behaviour. Games aren't trying to make you more violent, they are mostly just trying to be fun and occasionally they might try to make you think about something when the game creators are feeling particularly artsy. Arguably that one US army game might actually be about promoting violence in some sense, but it's an extreme exception to the rule.
Sexism is like violence in that it can be part of a game, both purposely and incidentally, but it's very rare that the point of the game is promoting sexism. So is the salient difference here the intention of the media? Or is violence just especially repulsive? That would be a follow-up.
Part of it is also the reason that it should not be considered inconceivable that the way ratings tend to work for sex and violence has something of a schism. Now, generally I think the schism is bad - we can deal with this issue better. But at the same time, in thinking about explaining to children why something is or is not appropriate, violence is a lot easier to explain with far fewer edge cases:
Is violence okay? No.
Ever? Very rarely.
When? It is okay to defend yourself if attacked. You should try and avoid having to do so.
That will get you through 99% of individual life until you get to geopolitics and the diplomacy of nationstates, which a good deal of people will get through life without needing to know about anyway.
Sex on the other hand?
When is that okay? What is okay? Why do some people do that? What is normal? There's a neverending well of questions there, all of which have complicated answers, and which society has an active, ongoing and vitriolic argument about.
There is no concise answer. The simplest things get complicated fast, and very much unlike violence, people seeing depictions or media messaging about it don't have the option (in most cases) of dealing with it by simply not dealing with it. I can avoid most or even all violence and most of us will during our lives. But I and my children are not going to avoid issues of sexuality and it has the potential to be very much a defining element of how their lives will evolve.
To bring it back to the McDonalds and Coke point, this is very much the same reason they advertise. Because you have to eat. You do eat. They're not asking or trying to get you to do something so uncommon. And they know how your nose and satiation responses work. Unless you have an absolute policy of just "no" towards them, then all they've got to do is make "mcdonalds" or "I want a coke" come to the front of your brain with some type of positive feeling when you're anywhere near them.
> In short, the more you think you cannot be affected, the more likely you are to be affected.
This is a nice kafka trap because you can't deny it without making it appear true. That leaves you with science vs. rhetoric and, well, let's just say that rhetoric tends to win even if it shouldn't, logically speaking.
Can't wait for this latest attack on games to collapse under its own incompetence.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
And the last I looked, there's been violence in the middle east for a thousand years. They've just gotten better weapons.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.