The Gamer's Quarter

[Nana Komatsu]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061128/tc_nm/videogames_brain_dc

After reading this article I want to go kill someone. Does that mean reading news articles about violent video games will cause aggression?

[danger dangler]

[oligophagy]

It's pretty ridiculous to assume the only revelant difference between Medal of Honor and Need for Speed is representational violence. Probably wouldn't be hard to find a pair that reversed the violence / emotional arousal relationship. Way to use a big data set, Science!

[TOLLMASTER]

I'm not entirely sure what the article is trying to say. Other than the obvious, I mean.

Emotional activity activates the emotional part of the brain! Holy shit! I heard some people cried or got scared during Saving Private Ryan. Perhaps we should ban war movies, because war is too emotional? You don't want someone learning about World War II and then hijacking a schoolbus full of (orphaned, white) schoolchildren and setting off explosives around town.

I'm not of the opinion that children should be allowed to be playing violent video games; I've actually had heated (read: f-bombs were dropped) discussions with my mother about why my little brother shouldn't be allowed to play Grand Theft Auto. I'm not afraid that he's going to become a mass murderer, though. I'm more worried about the acceptance of violence at an earlier age, before the mechanisms are in place that allow you to make healthy decisions. You might have to punch a guy who's being a dick, but only after pursuing every other option available to you. Violent media kind of affirms the standard human response of "kill 'em all, let God sort them out" which isn't healthy until a child is beyond a certain age.

Of course, video games are a lot less guilty of these kinds of changes in young behavior than, say, drunken parents, but if you try to step in to protect the children by interfering with the "holy" family, you've got a political hot potato on your hands. Video games, conveniently, have no such emotional attachment in the public arena, so off with their heads, etc.

This whole backlash against violent videogames hasn't been about protecting the young, but about feeling good about our own society and how we're not responsible. That video games can actually be hurting our young isn't an issue and will never be addressed. Instead of rational actions designed to protect children, we'll get crazy lawmakers lobbying for bans here and there and more lame excuses as to why Johnny shot his school up one day. Will we ever stop and say "hey, perhaps we should seek out these emotionally unstable individuals and teach them how to deal with their anger?" No.

[GcDiaz]

Hey, you're supposed to encourage discussion, not eliminate the need for it. Selfish prick.

[Lockeownzj00]

[sawtooth]

[TOLLMASTER]

[klikbeep]

What if a life of isolation and violent media does make people more likely to act in violent ways? What's the counter-argument: that video games are totally awesome and super fun?

If someone proved to you a link between violence and violent games, what would you say to them?

[dessgeega]

don't play so many violent videogames?

i mean, i certainly don't think violent games make the world any less violent. but they certainly don't take away a person's autonomy or responsibility. are you sitting in a dark room all day playing doom over and over? consider going outside and planting a garden.

as for why videogames are violent, and as a kind of tangent, there's also something to the assertion that most videogames deal with fighting and killing because the videogame is a young medium, and the earliest and least sophisticated stories in any medium are stories of archetypes fighting for survival or conquest or love. see gilgamesh and beowulf, or most superhero comics. and weren't the first movies about cowboys and cavalries shooting each other?
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[klikbeep]

[Gouki]

So how long until the same thing happens to video games as it did to rock music and horror movies? The majority of people just get over it. Seriously.
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... Maybe Later.

[klikbeep]

[Cycle]

Too be honest, I'm pretty sure they are right, even if it is very little. It doesn't really bother me at all. It's not my responsibility to make sure my hobby doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

[Harveyjames]

[klikbeep]

[dhex]

except 100 years ago we had far greater inroads (in some areas, not all, but some) into civil and private life - obvious examples like jim crow and the sedition act come to mind. people didn't riot when lincoln suspended habeas corpus, nor when the income tax was introduced. etc. there are millions of examples.

games just ain't that important one way or another, independent of other cultural forces.

[klikbeep]

[dhex]

games become more popular; crime rates, even amongst juveniles, declines. do violent games cause less crime? i doubt that as well. (i think abortion might have something to do with it.)

also, they're games. i mean, fuck. they're fucking games. they're irrelevant on the larger scale. they do not mean what people want them to mean. people want them to mean a lot because they're easy and i too want a job at the nyu media research center talking about games and stuff. it's why academics want to believe that words construct reality, because it means their lives are very important. (and more importantly, that they too can be as gods. too bad the biogram owns the fucking logogram.)

games are not a civil right. they're not being infringed upon. they're not fucking important enough to factor into large scale behavior independent of far greater risk factors for violence; being young, being male, being poor, being a minority, living in an urban center.

if guns, of all fuckings things, seem to have a whackadoodlediddly non-effect on violent crime and suicide rates (as well as preventing or lessening the impact of rape, burglary and assault) and the main factor appears to be culture, then games mean fuck-all when it comes down to it.

also, who knows what the actual study measured and said? it's yahoo news!
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[Harveyjames]

[dhex]

riffing on robert anton wilson's riffing on a dialectic shorthand for "mind" and "body" (logogram is also a technical word in linguistics for a kind of pictographic writing, i think)

the old gnostic con, in other words. you cannot defeat the body, because it is older than you, smarter than you (the collective experience of millions of years of evolution) and because it runs your fucking brain chemistry, which is YOU.

this doesn't mean you're its slave, but that certain niceties need to be observed and certain realities taken into consideration. since religious and political orders are set on generally denying one or the other (or both if you're a buddhist of the therevada variety) they tend to ignore the realities which do not fit into their scope. (to use a homegrown example, many libertarians do not recognize that collective action and group thinking are a part of the biogram, and that individualism as they see it is a relatively new mutation; selling their ideas by pretending that the collective urge does not reign is stupid in the extreme.)
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[klikbeep]

[TOLLMASTER]

[Mr. Mechanical]

klikbeep, I will answer your question directly: If a link between violent media and real life human violence were ever found (and I don't believe it ever will be but for the sake of this discussion I'll concede it as a possibility) then I simply wouldn't let any kids of mine be exposed to that kind of media. I wouldn't do anything beyond that. I wouldn't try to stop people from making violent videogames for much the same reason why I'm not trying to stop people from making violent exploitation movies like I Spit on Your Grave (movies were the main role of women are as things to be beaten and raped to death for the amusement of the audience): That kind of stuff is out there and always will be, and it's simply not the kind of moral quandary that I'm keen on taking time out of my already busy day to day life to worry about when there is no real solution to it other than to simply do the things I know to be right to protect the people I love and who are closest to me.

See also: dhex's response about not letting anyone under 15 play stuff like GTA. I see no problem with that, as long as I'm the one making that judgement call and not some policymaker out for political advancement.
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Mr. Mechanical

[klikbeep]

[klikbeep]

[OtakupunkX]

[klikbeep]

[Lackey]

I respect your approach and support your questioning, klikbeep.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[Mr. Mechanical]

[Mr. Mechanical]

[klikbeep]

How about this question: do you think Saints Row should exist? Not "be allowed to exist"; just . . . do you approve of its existence? Do you think the people who made it should be criticized or commended? Why?

[dhex]

[Mr. Mechanical]

Asking whether or not I think Saints Row should exist is a bit moot because it does exist. Seeing as it already exists who am I to approve/disapprove its existence? If I lived in a world where it didn't exist and somebody proposed the idea of it to me and asked if I thought it should be made I'd probably say no. Not because I am opposed to the idea of a violent, culturally worthless piece of schlock entertainment that appeals to prurient interests, but because we already have games like that called GTA that are more well designed and crafted and actually have a sense of humor about them that is a notch or two above the gutter level of sophistication that Saints Row only ever hopes to aspire to. I openly criticize Volition not for making a violent, culturally worthless piece of entertainment, but for making a shitty violent, culturally worthless piece of entertainment. If I wanted to make a slightly well crafted GTA-alike that completely missed the point of GTA I'd have held onto Saints Row instead of selling it off when I did.

To address the larger issue: Saints Row does not affect me or anyone around me in any real way. At least not until some kid who spent way too much time playing Saints Row and decided that being a thug gangsta street mofo was some hot shit idea and tried to play the part by shooting up his classmates, of which one of my potential children could very well be a part. Even then though, I would still have to question whether the real link was between the game or the environment the kid was raised in that led to his behavior. I think assuming it was the game, even for the sake of this discussion, is quite a bit facetious because time and again we keep seeing that a person's environment and upbringing play a larger role in who they become as an adult and an individual than what sort of entertainment they partook of once when they were young, and too keep following that thread even for the sake of discussion is to ignore the greater issue. That being that parents should man the fuck up and raise their kids to not be antisocial psychopaths. If you're asking me if the state should be allowed to intervene if the parents aren't up to the task then I'm going to be skeptical and say "maybe not" because then it becomes a bit of a civil rights slippery slope and I'll always err on the side of less government involvement in a persons private affairs being better than more.
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Mr. Mechanical

[TOLLMASTER]

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

I'm quite interested to know if there have been any tests on how board games affect the minds in similiar ways that video games do in "violent adolescents".

Also, does anyone know what the game those kids are playing in the photo in the article linked at the start of the thread? Those plastic rifles look badass.
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[Cycle]

[klikbeep]

[chompers po pable]

[Mr. Mechanical]

[Dracko]

[dhex]

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

[klikbeep]

[chompers po pable]

klikbeep, i meant that to take a stance on the study results you proposed, there'd have to be more concrete evidence. and i don't think that evidence could ever be provided.

[klikbeep]

[Dracko]

[dhex]

[Redeye]

What an entertaining thread.

If there was real data linking violent video games to violent behavior, how would I react?

I would accept the data as long as it wasn't cargo cult science.

I would want to know if situational variables were factored. Why do some people act out and others don't? Is there a literal mindedness at work, and where is it at work? In the minds of the game player, the scientific observer, the political interprter? All?

There is a political angle to the science. Many on the "left" believe in a pseudoscientific form of behavioral psychology/sociology.
Has anyone read "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" by B.F. Skinner?

Children traditionally play games that imitate adult behaviors.
They play "house", "cops and robbers", "dope dealer", "fort", "smear the queer", etc.
Presumably this helps socialize them to perform their adult roles.

So what gets internalised by playing violent video games?
Hardly an irrelevant question.

I would prefer to try to make people smarter, equip them with hardcore logic skills, etc.
Then let them wallow in any information they please.

It appears that policies of information control- which is what this is really all about, assume stupidity, gullibility, and knee-jerk imitation on the part of the subjects.

I have mixed thoughts and feelings about this.
I am insulted by the presumption that I require herding, yet I understand that governing requires pragmatic generalization.


In the case of video game violence, I accept that sitting alone in a room playing games is sort of like self-imposing a diluted "Skinner-Box". ( A similar device was used for reprogramming in "A Clockwork Orange".) I remember reading somewhere that the internet, or VR could be "like freebasing television". Super fun! But mushy brains might not mix with it very well.
The exposure is mediated by one's own ability to reason, to parse and analyze and ruminate.

We have to look at all inputs, the context of the inputs, and also the variable ways the information is processed in between input and output. It would be intellectual laziness to just draw a big circle around a bunch of factors then declare "causal relationship".

Sick of typing, you people continue.
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I felt sheer anarchic joy when I ran over my first pedestrian.

[Mr. Mechanical]