It's just a game people

[Blog of Reason]

Discussion thread for the blog entry "It's just a game people" by rabbitpirate.

Permalink: http://blog.leagueofreason.org.uk/news/its-just-a-game-people/

 

[Squawk]

It strikes me that as often as not both points of view on this subject rely on "common sense".

Ie, its obvious that nobody thinks computer games are real, nobody would go out and do stuff like this because of what they see on the game.

or

It's obvious that constant exposure to violence in computer games desensitises people, it might be enough of a push to drive some teens to carry out recreations.


I confess that my own opinion sways on the matter. On the one hand I am inclined to suggest that no reasonable person would ever mistake the stuff in a game for the real world and infer anything from it.
On teh flip side I know that simply listening to music is perfectly capable of influencing mood, hours infront of a computer game is likely to have some similar effect. Couple this with the frankly bonkers things that some peopel believe (if you are here you have probably been exposed to at least some creationism).

My conclusion is that I would like to see a lot of research done, published in respected journals. I'm not nearly clever enough to work out how to do this, but it's something that needs doing (if it hasn't already been done) so that we can stop relying on common sense. The more science I learn, the more I realise common sense is broken.

 

[Sarge084]

To a right thinking person, that's one who can tell the difference between reality and virtual reality, the whole idea seems preposterous, but generations of kids have grown up killing virtual enemies without a second thought, so it's not inconceivable that they carry this over into reality. It's only when they have shot up half their class mates and the police are dragging them away to a cell, that they realise the enormity of their actions.

There have always been people who seem to lack a moral compass, we've had mass murderers and child molesters since time began, but the upsurge in school age mass killers in schools is a new phenomenon.

I've been around long enough to see lawlessness rise, and a lack of discipline, coupled with a liberal attitude to law breakers is IMHO where we are at fault. Here in the Untied Kingdom the death penalty was abolished for all but treason back in the sixties, violent criminals get better accommodation than our soldiers, and parole is used all too often just to make way for the queues of convicted criminals at the gates to our overcrowded prisons. Teenage knife crimes are at levels in the UK that were unknown when I was a puppy, when every self respecting kid had a knife, purely for wood-craftsmanship.

Pete

 

[Sarge084]

It's obvious that constant exposure to violence in computer games desensitises people, it might be enough of a push to drive some teens to carry out recreations.


I confess that my own opinion sways on the matter. On the one hand I am inclined to suggest that no reasonable person would ever mistake the stuff in a game for the real world and infer anything from it.

There it is, no reasonable person! That's right, no reasonable person would kill another, but they do, and those who may just be the right side of reasonable can be swayed but the wrong influence, and cross the line of acceptability.

Pete

 

[SchrodingersFinch]

I'm with you on this rabbitpirate. Playing Pokemon Red as a kid didn't turn me into a Pokemon master. Sadly.

 

[derkvanl]

Just some interesting read from bbc news today : Games 'permit' virtual war crimes

 

[Atomicnumber86]

Good article. Actually I am in the progress of making a TV magazine about the social aspects of gaming. (Somewhat related).

Here is a video with the president of games in europe. http://www.thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/bt/benzaie/hardcorner/13657-intvvg01

 

[borrofburi]

My conclusion is that I would like to see a lot of research done, published in respected journals. I'm not nearly clever enough to work out how to do this, but it's something that needs doing (if it hasn't already been done) so that we can stop relying on common sense. The more science I learn, the more I realise common sense is broken.

There are a number of experiments, but the methodology is always fairly weak. For instance, one of them was have kids beat up on a pillow for a bit, then have them play video games, then they were both asked to beat up on a pillow and they found that, what do you know, they beat up the pillow even harder after the exciting video games...

I've been around long enough to see lawlessness rise, and a lack of discipline, coupled with a liberal attitude to law breakers is IMHO where we are at fault. Here in the Untied Kingdom the death penalty was abolished for all but treason back in the sixties, violent criminals get better accommodation than our soldiers, and parole is used all too often just to make way for the queues of convicted criminals at the gates to our overcrowded prisons. Teenage knife crimes are at levels in the UK that were unknown when I was a puppy, when every self respecting kid had a knife, purely for wood-craftsmanship.

Please provide justification for this paragraph.

Also I'm not surprised your knife crime is up, you banned guns (overly simplistic statement, I know), so of course that means knife crime will be up what I wonder is if your knife crime + gun crime is up, or if total homicides are up.

 

[Nogre]

I did a paper on this in high school, and in actuality, the rates of violent crimes have gone down, and significantly, while the rates of video game sales have skyrocketed. I can't find my original statistics anywhere, but here's a graph of violent crimes from the US department of justice:

And I couldn't find a good graph that covered video game sales, even just back to 1990, but I doubt anyone is going to say that they've dropped. They've most certainly gone way up in the last two decades. Now, correlation certainly doesn't indicate causation, but lack of correlation is pretty good indication that there's no causation. Unless someone wants to argue that video games have increased violent crimes, despite the fact that violent crimes were practically halved while video game sales were on the major rise.

Given the statistical data I've seen, it's almost more accurate to say that video games reduce violent crime. :lol:

Anyway, I decided not to leave it at that and look around for some scientific papers on the subject. In a study called "Prosocial video games reduce aggressive cognitions" conducted by Tobias Greitemeyer of the University of Sussex in the UK, it was acknowledged that playing violent video games increase aggressive tendencies (a long way from increasing violent crime or violence). But the abstract went on to say:

In fact, playing a prosocial (relative to a neutral) video game reduced the hostile expectation bias (Experiment 1) and decreased the accessibility of antisocial thoughts (Experiment 2). Thus, these results lend credence to GLMs assumption that the effects of video game exposure depend to a great extent on the content of the game played.

Another study, "The effects of prosocial video games on prosocial behaviors: International evidence from correlational, longitudinal, and experimental studies" by Gentile, Anderson, Yukawa, et. al. said:

We report three studies conducted in three countries with three age groups to test this hypothesis. In the correlational study, Singaporean middle-school students who played more prosocial games behaved more prosocially. In the two longitudinal samples of Japanese children and adolescents, prosocial game play predicted later increases in prosocial behavior. In the experimental study, U.S. undergraduates randomly assigned to play prosocial games behaved more prosocially toward another student.

In a review of a book advocating the causal link between violent behavior of children and violent video games, Joanne Cantor said:

Drs. Kutner and Olson, who are directors of the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media, Board Members of the Phillip Morris USA Parent Resource Center, and parents of a teenager who's an enthusiastic gamer, conclude that we need not worry too much about the effects. In fact, they argue that not playing violent video games may be a marker for problems.

So...I hope that's enough science for you. I looked through a bunch of abstracts, and it seems that it's well-accepted that violent video games increase aggressive tendencies, but whether it's enough for concern and whether playing other types of games mitigates or outwieghs this is disputed.

 

[xman]

We used to play cops'n'robbers and they said that about that game too. I've been listening to the harping on about video game violence for decades.

 

[Aught3]

Can someone tell me why we are so worried about violence only when it's in video games? Explorations of fantastic worlds and situations have been in movies for decades and books for centuries, and books aren't sold with age restrictions. It strikes me as plausible that video games could alter short-term moods but that doesn't translate into taking actions that are well outside the person's normal range of behaviour. The philosopher Eminem said it best: "They say music can alter moods and talk to you, but can it load a gun and cock it too?" In other words, there is only a scant connection between mood alteration and the action that a person takes. Violent games, movies, books, or music may push a person towards a certain type of behaviour, but it is a behaviour that they would have already undertaken in certain circumstances.

One problem with the culture of violence might be that it causes familiarity with certain actions that we should find distasteful. For example, we've recently seen fairly widespread acceptance (in the USA) of torture as a legitimate means of interrogating prisoners. It was by no means all Americans, but it was a substantial proportion. Often cited was the example of Jack Bauer who apparently tortured some people on the telly and managed to get the critical information in time to save the world (no, I've never watched the show). This is an example of faulty reasoning (I've termed it the Batman fallacy, but I don't know if it has an actual name) which might lead to acceptance of torture by the public but would not have lead to the decision to use torture by the government itself. Again the attitude and action are separated.

If we consider the negative points of our entertainment culture then we must also look at the positive aspects. Books, movies, and games can't get us to take righteous or good actions but they can provide us examples of people behaving in moral ways and thereby influence our own attitude to a particular situation. A violent movie could make us more aggressive, but a good book could make us more compassionate. The real benefit I see in our entertainment are the lessons that it holds. I was playing Dragon Age recently (warning spoilers!) and after hacking my way through a group of monsters I had to choose between killing a child possessed by a powerful demon or sacrificing his mother in order to drive the demon from his body. It was just a game, but it was an incredibly difficult dilemma and I really had to think about what I should do. If we purged our games of all killing then the opportunity to make that decision, and to learn that lesson, would be lost.

The bottom line is if we want the excess and gratuitous violence out of our entertainment then we have to stop buying it. Personally, I don't read books are know are going to contain high-levels of graphic violence, I don't watch the torture-porn movies like Saw, and I wouldn't play Modern Warfare. Would you? If you partake in this culture and then complain about its effects, you are part of the problem.

 

[monitoradiation]

Video games, like anything, can either influence you positively or negatively. It's all how you frame it.

I play violent video games almost constantly, yet I'm one of the mild tempered person that my friends know. Personally, they're a way to bond with friends both on and offline. We use it as a common topic and stress relief. While the argument that "I dont know anyone who shoots people because of a video game" is probably a fallacious one, I have not seen conclusive evidence that video games are anything more than entertainment. While it can be argued that the level of immersion makes them possibly a training tool for those who are predisposed to acts of violence, I would say that the society also plays a role in helping those individuals with those tendencies cope with them in a positive way.

I definitely wouldn't let my own children play the same video games that I do now, but then again, I don't think a child of the ages of less than 15 should spend any more than 30 minutes on the computer or in front of a TV.

The bottom line is if we want the excess and gratuitous violence out of our entertainment then we have to stop buying it. Personally, I don't read books are know are going to contain high-levels of graphic violence, I don't watch the torture-porn movies like Saw, and I wouldn't play Modern Warfare. Would you? If you partake in this culture and then complain about its effects, you are part of the problem.

Edit: As a side note, you should watch the Saw series if you're desensitized to gore. It's quite a good series, even when you remove the gore. The advertisements make them sound like they're only about the gore. I liked Saw better than, say, Silence of the Lambs or Se7en.

 

[Aught3]

Edit: As a side note, you should watch the Saw series if you're desensitized to gore. It's quite a good series, even when you remove the gore. The advertisements make them sound like they're only about the gore. I liked Saw better than, say, Silence of the Lambs or Se7en.

As a psychological thriller, Silence of the Lambs is an amazing movie. I doubt Saw is that good but I haven't seen it.

 

[monitoradiation]

As a psychological thriller, Silence of the Lambs is an amazing movie. I doubt Saw is that good but I haven't seen it.

I was going to say that Saw is a good psycho thriller as well; I found it better than Silence of the Lambs the way it messes with you in every movie. I'd just suggest watching it. I thought the Saw series was just a slasher gore thing - then I watched all the movies out on dvd in one sitting with my friend haha

 

[borrofburi]

As a psychological thriller, Silence of the Lambs is an amazing movie. I doubt Saw is that good but I haven't seen it.

I was going to say that Saw is a good psycho thriller as well; I found it better than Silence of the Lambs the way it messes with you in every movie. I'd just suggest watching it. I thought the Saw series was just a slasher gore thing - then I watched all the movies out on dvd in one sitting with my friend haha

It's not that good... And it's really hard to beat the character that is "hannibal".

 

[monitoradiation]

It's not that good... And it's really hard to beat the character that is "hannibal".

Hannibal Lecter is just... I don't know why, I don't feel at all sympathetic or empathetic towards him when I watched the movies. Could be just me, though.

And I do believe we're getting off topic T_T haha

 

[Aught3]

Hannibal Lecter is just... I don't know why, I don't feel at all sympathetic or empathetic towards him when I watched the movies.

Hannibal ate people, I don't think you're supposed to feel empathy for him. Except maybe in that last movie (Hannibal: Rising) but that was by far the worst of the lot. I had a look at all those Saw movies on rotten tomatoes none of them were rated over 50%

 

[Demojen]

I don't believe there's anything I can really add to this subject.
Penn and Teller did an interesting episode of Bullshit on this topic criticizing studies performed by interest groups pretending to know better. Ultimately, video games causing violence was deemed "BULLSHIT"...

They even had a kid, ten or so years old fire a real gun to see if he'd be more apt at the practice given his alleged desire to be violent by his choice of video games. The kid fired the rifle, but only five minutes after saying he didn't want to shoot it again he began to cry.

Video games are not reality and you'll find that individuals who don't already have a predisposition for violence don't become violent by playing video games. Furthermore, those who do, don't stop being violent in their absence.

In the same vein that guns don't kill people, people kill people:
Violent video games don't make people violent. Violent people make people violent.

 

[DrunkCat]

*Sighs* Every time a study comes out claiming finally they have linked 'violence' with 'games', it comes out months later that the study was either flawed, or done in a Freudian fashion (i.e. unscientific).

Whatever, for the most part they don't even mention how most of the games are open world. Meaning that it's up to the player to do what they want. Are they championing the notion that real-life has arbitrary blocks on peoples actions? That some GI can't just suddenly decide "Hey, that mosque looks like something that'll fall down for much luls" (or in a more common scenario that happens every day, that house has a bunch of cool shit, lets jack it).

Are they truly trying to demonize a medium that allows the venting of actions in a virtual reality? Would they prefer bottling up these actions for those who need to execute them until they blow up? Also, I find it very odd they would list a game like "Metal Gear Solid" and still make these ridiculous claims; makes me think they didn't actually play it.

Shit like this always ticks me off. :facepalm:

 

[cham826]

Meh, they said the same thing about the Bugs Bunny cartoons I grew up with.