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Games Cause Violence... AGAIN!
odstparker
Member Posts: 466 Arc User
Here we go again. We who play video games for some (or most) of our lives are once again being blamed for things like murder, shootings, abuse, and other such things. Some may think that sounds a bit over dramatic, but that's the basics of it. They say it makes us more "aggressive" and prone to random acts of violence while unknowingly emulating things from the video games that we know and love.
I, for one, hate this topic, and I want to get the opinion of my fellow Trekkers and STO players to see how like minded people (or those who are not) responded to this. Below is my personal opinion on this whole campaign of "research" and "studies".
I play Halo. I have no desire to go into space and slaughter aliens, nor do I have the desire to run over my comrades in arms in a 2 ton death machine.
I play Mass effect. I feel no need to recruit a squad of badasses to fight a galactic war against giant machine squids.
I play Assassin's Creed. I have never stabbed anyone in the neck, back, chest, or other body parts with a knife or other type of blade from a hay bale, lamp post, or rooftop, and I never will.
I played Mortal Kombat. I have never felt the urge to rip anyone's head and spine from his body, tear anyone's skin off of their bones, or otherwise slice and dice anyone.
I played Call of Duty. While I plan to join the military, I will never call for helicopter support based on the fact that I shot seven people to death, nor will I repeatedly crouch on their dead bodies.
There are so many others that I could include, but they all lead to the simple conclusion that is this... I play video games. I'm not any more aggressive, violent, or likely to perform random acts of murder than most idiots at my high school who are getting into much worse things (alcohol, smoking, other drugs, sex, etc.). I understand that when I play a video game, I am simply escaping my life for a few hours to have what I consider to be very good fun with my friends and family.
Maybe, just maybe, we should look to the person, who may not have been taught the same values that most well-adjusted people have, instead of blaming things like video games and guns for all the world's problems. Why don't we get some responsibility for something, instead of casting blame onto everything else to make ourselves feel better.
I, for one, hate this topic, and I want to get the opinion of my fellow Trekkers and STO players to see how like minded people (or those who are not) responded to this. Below is my personal opinion on this whole campaign of "research" and "studies".
I play Halo. I have no desire to go into space and slaughter aliens, nor do I have the desire to run over my comrades in arms in a 2 ton death machine.
I play Mass effect. I feel no need to recruit a squad of badasses to fight a galactic war against giant machine squids.
I play Assassin's Creed. I have never stabbed anyone in the neck, back, chest, or other body parts with a knife or other type of blade from a hay bale, lamp post, or rooftop, and I never will.
I played Mortal Kombat. I have never felt the urge to rip anyone's head and spine from his body, tear anyone's skin off of their bones, or otherwise slice and dice anyone.
I played Call of Duty. While I plan to join the military, I will never call for helicopter support based on the fact that I shot seven people to death, nor will I repeatedly crouch on their dead bodies.
There are so many others that I could include, but they all lead to the simple conclusion that is this... I play video games. I'm not any more aggressive, violent, or likely to perform random acts of murder than most idiots at my high school who are getting into much worse things (alcohol, smoking, other drugs, sex, etc.). I understand that when I play a video game, I am simply escaping my life for a few hours to have what I consider to be very good fun with my friends and family.
Maybe, just maybe, we should look to the person, who may not have been taught the same values that most well-adjusted people have, instead of blaming things like video games and guns for all the world's problems. Why don't we get some responsibility for something, instead of casting blame onto everything else to make ourselves feel better.
Post edited by odstparker#7820 on
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I was watching "Through the Wormhole" on science channel and one scientists study of the brain showed that people who exhibit criminal behavior have a certain defect in their brain that was seen through a MRI. Let's hope someone doesn't say it got there because he played video games.
...Oh, baby, you know, I've really got to leave you / Oh, I can hear it callin 'me / I said don't you hear it callin' me the way it used to do?...
- Anne Bredon
To expand the list above:
I've played GTA III, Vice City, San Andreas, and IV, several times each. I have yet to find any desire to drive insanely, steal, rob, commit multiple homicides, fire explosives at police officers, or hire, rob, and kill a prostitute.
I've played Star Trek: Shattered Mirror on the PS2. I have never actually piloted a starship through an alternate universe, fighting off the twisted mirror images of my friends.
I've played Fable and Fable II; I am not under the impression that I'm secretly the prophesied one who will save the world from the forces of evil.
I've played Rock Band 1-3, as well as Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock; I do not suffer from the delusion that I can actually play a guitar. (Heck, the only reason I played GH:WoR was because until it came out as DLC for RB3, it was the only way I could play Rush's classic 2112. I still have no idea how Alex Lifeson did that guitar solo at the end of "The Priests of Syrinx".)
Playing the various Mario Brothers games has never caused me to want to run through a sewer while eating mushrooms and jumping on turtles. Minecraft has aroused in me no desire to grab a pickaxe and dig under my house, looking for coal and iron. Even playing Champions Online hasn't convinced me to put on a spandex outfit and run about defeating criminal plots.
Basically, all such studies I've seen suffer from the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. They played video games, they later committed criminal acts - video games must be the cause! Similarly, they probably drank water and breathed air at some point before becoming criminals, therefore water and air make people criminals, yes?
That settles it.
We must ban air and water! My studies show that without air and water, the criminals within humanity will die off. It's a brilliant plan!
Harden up Princess
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Didn't you know? It was those infamous miniature wargames, Chess and Checkers, desensitizing children to violence.
It likes to point the finger at somebody, Yet ironically the news is strangely contributory to the desensitisation of violence in the general public, It also creates a sort of mental conditioning where people begin to believe the world around them is more violent and dangerous than it really is, Largely because they see a lot of news coverage of violent crimes
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_world_syndrome) they called it mean world syndrome
Basically the media likes to scare you, And wants you to believe the world is a nasty place, It also has to deal with the direct competition to its existance , Gaming, Interactive mediaums are generally more engaging than passive TV mediums, And you tend to be drawn to them over the later
What better way is there to discredit video games and create the sense of fear than to make people believe that video games are causing harm to children ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh2sWSVRrmo)
Ironically its this irrational Fear that causes paranoia and damages our basic trust in communities
In the words of Dr. Mark Warr, "What makes fear of crime so important as a social problem is its consequences for our society. When people take precautions based on fear that restrict their life and their children?s lives, we restrict our freedom and we do so unnecessarily. Fear also undermines the civility and trust in our communities that make civic life possible, and that?s a terrible consequence for a democratic society.?
It's not even a good example of the fallacy. If you look at violent criminals in general, and especially rampage killers, they play video games less than you'd expect than you'd expect of society on average. Out of the last ten high profile ramage killers, only one played violent games extensively before his crime (another couple were former gamers who quit a year or more before their crime). These were all males, mostly white, in the industry's goldmine demographics - if you grabbed ten random guys like this off the street and only one of them had an Xbox at home you'd be pretty sure five others were lying.
Of course, the one thing they do have in common? Brains like a bag of cats. Most of them had diagnosed mental problems and most of the rest had suspected problems that were never seen by a psychiatrist. Some became uncooperative with treatment or stopped taking their meds, some were untreated or stopped responding to medications, and a couple got screwed by insurance.
That almost never gets discussed, of course, and whenever it does the media and every politician on either side of the debate have the attention spans of first graders on espresso anyway and it takes about half an hour for the entire debate to get so far off track they might as well not have tried.
The chain of conversation that started with the naval yard shooting and ended with Congress debating the right of blind people to own guns took less than a day, and was so elegant in its insanity that I'm still not sure it wasn't just an elaborate piece of performance art coordinated by Sacha Baron Cohen.
If that is the case then the Holocaust started because Hitler lost a game of checkers to a Jew. Even without videogames, mass crimes and genocides can still occur. It all depends on the physiological condition of the person and perhaps how they were raised.
Its complete, balls, yes it can be adictive, and that addiction could lead to violence, but beyond that its rubbish, a huge number of things can be adictive and can have the exact same effects.
The people who find that video games cause violence? Tend to be linked in some way with the fundamentalist groups that hate video games, D&D, and other fun things.
In my personal case, video games have reduced violence. I have tempered my urge to find **** Cheney and Kim Jong-un and kill them horribly by playing hundreds of elite Borg STFs and shooting Thot Trel and Hakeev. Essentially, I avoid acting on my hatred of real-life monsters in stupid ways by shooting imaginary monsters and bad guys.
Plus, it's really fun to kill Thot Trel; he fondly reminds me of all the best D&D villains I've ever DMed with his hammy lines and arrogant superiority. Shooting him and his goons to save the Deferi brings back fond memories of throwing the Fire King into his own volcano and electrocuting Fzoul Chembryl as he ranted about my character's inevitable demise, and teleporting the dragonlord Despayr into space.
And, of course, that time when I polymorphed Evil Overlord Doomsday's Evil Lair of Evil into positrons.
I always was a bit a of a rules lawyer, LOL.
What these morons seem to leave out is that these individuals usually already have some form of mental instability to begin with.
I play war games, both FPS and strategy, with some dogfighting as well. I do not have the temptations to shoot people, send men into battle, or bomb German factories. And I'm slightly mental. Only slightly, though.
Trials of Blood and Fire
Moving On Parts 1-3 - Part 4
In Cold Blood
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
I don't suppose this helps the debate any, but it made me laugh.
(I think the "debate" can be summed up as "lazy thinkers want to find scapegoats for perceived problems" - which is why I put the word "debate" in inverted commas: you can't actually argue with these people.)
And the games didn't make him violent ... at all ... nor did they make me violent ... just really really tired if it was past midnight and the game hadn't ended yet. One time I tiredly conceded a computer wargame (Guad for the Apple IIGS) that was taking several hours to play and found out afterward I was actually winning. He was really good at "poker face".
I do confess, though, that my interest in first-person shooters has dwindled considerably since I first played "Wolfenstein 3-D". They just doesn't do much for me anymore, outside of "Star Trek Online" ground missions.
but despite the media hype and studys from paid off professional morons, im a pacifist! I hurt no one and never plan to! I even own a gun, to mess with politically correct minded people who say gun owners are all psychos. Given my past gaming entertainment habits and the"aaah run away he owns a gun!" crowd, people begin to malfunction and shut down when I tell em I love people and cant bring myself to hurt anyone. ...I entertain children most often at hospitals with my tails of James T Cat.
Yes I make fun of Political Correctness because its fun and easy, I never said I wasn't a smart***, I just said Im a pacifist! :P
wow, that means pacman could have been influenced by the 60's :O
Catstar, you're even more awesome than I thought you were.
Trials of Blood and Fire
Moving On Parts 1-3 - Part 4
In Cold Blood
Well now you mention it...
But Video games would never influence me... No, apologize me, I have to leave, go to town and ask kid around for some emendations.
At least there they do not turn into dump present box and just du the running game.
Btw, if again :roll eyes: the police (whats is their issue with that?) annoys me during that I'll just climb a Skycraper and jump down into some bale of hay, (I don't see why this should be unhealthy....)
If you hate it that much why do you bring it up? I mean not that I liked that idiotic topic...
Well as someone who had joined the Military (well trained by doom, obviously) I can tell you: Video games and handling any kind of weapons in real life have nothing in common but the way it might look.
end of the day there is no hard proof its games at all, its the person much like booze if they hide there violent behaviour booze just unleases there true self, the people who go around killing, beating people up are usually just violent anyway. i knew at a young age games are just that games and not real.
Games aren't real? All this time, my life's been a lie...
/sarcasm
Seriously, I think we're all in agreement that this is a stupid topic with little credible scientific evidence to back it up.
Trials of Blood and Fire
Moving On Parts 1-3 - Part 4
In Cold Blood
In a nutshell, yes.
I'm going to go back to some plot bunnies that are kicking around my head now.
Some people have "disfunctions" - let's calle it that - that are stimulated by some games which in turn may cause those people to act on their impulses. Still, this is not a "game" problem as they can get those inputs from a very wide range of things. Books, movies, news, internet forum, etc, and even from themselves (their own mind). So, the game may be a tool or a catalyst, but that is a long way from being the actual game to cause violent behaviour.
What I do believe is that some games, if played by children may eventually cause a "numbness to violence" and an habituation that - again, evetually - may allow for violent behaviours. And once again this is not exactly the game's fault, because firstly adults shouldn't let childdren play those games, and secondly, adults need to educate their children in ways that make them know fully well what is reality and what is not.
Hell i am doing it as a work in school.
It is intresting sins dreamhack. one of the biggest gaming things in sweden have arond 40 000 visitors yearly play these "violent" video games and as their spoekman said. It is a very calm event.
I read up on it. video games makes us violent in what way?
Excuse me I play these games and I am calm. I write books, play games and what else? I listen to the "violent" heavy metal. I am still the calmest in my class despite my destructive hobbies.
Nope. games are the scrapegoat now. Nothing else
So please all you who blame games. Move along. Nothing to see here. These are not the games you looking for.
I did say that wrong, didn't I? I hate that this topic even exists in the first place, so I'm trying to spread it around and bring it into a better light.
And of course I have no delusions that what I've done in Call of Duty or Battlefield will effect my future military career, if I pursue it, in any way whatsoever. That's the point I'm trying to make.