Same reason a study with positive outcomes about coffee/alcohol/gay parenthood/gender reassignment/<insert issue> are not criticized as much as a study on the same topic that had negative outcomes. We want certain things to be true so we (consciously or not) avoid criticizing studies bolstering what we want to be true and harshly criticize studies we want to be false.
I like to think science always prevails in the end (like with tobacco), but it can take half a century or more to converge on the truth.
If you have a friend group of 10 people, 4 of which regularly work out. You will probably notice that those 4 friends have less body fat and are more toned than the other 6. At that point, if a study came out saying that working out had no impact on body physique, you'd reflexively question the results.
That might sound ridiculous, but lots of people here grew up playing "violent" video games through the 90s-00s, and had large friend groups who did the same. And it's pretty likely that, for most of us, none of our friends ended up with violent or aggressive tendencies.
Anecdotes are not scientifically rigorous, but they aren't completely useless either. If violent video games caused measurable increases in aggressive behavior, people who were around a large cohort of people playing these games would notice this fact in action. Just like they'd notice that friends who eat a lot of cake tend to be larger than the one who don't.
For example, I have a group of 10 friends. All 10 of them (including myself) got covid, and we all agree it is no worse than the flu. I mean, yeah, we couldn't smell or taste for a few days, but we all recovered within a week. Therefore... I should reflexively question covid studies saying how dangerous it is because in my own experience it's not even worth making a fuss over?
Maybe to some degree, but the fallacy I committed by relying on my anecdote to guide my intuition is that me and all my friends are young, fit, healthy people. My group of friends didn't include the elderly or immunocompromised or morbidly obese, etc.
In fact, I would be surprised for there to be zero correlation (even assuming there is no causation), as it is a reasonable assumption that naturally violent people are more likely to play violent video games.
If the effect was even 0.01 with growth by 10000% we would have noticed.
(I'm not trying to say that violent video games cause real life violence, but the numbers you describe don't offer any type of compelling evidence without other data being considered as well. )
With 2.4 billion gamers we should have seen increase by 2.4 million violent crimes per year in last few decades.
It's very unlikely that data hides such an increase, especially given the fact that in different countries game adoption and crime follows slightly different curves so it should be possible to separate changes caused by other factors.
If there's any link it must be negligible for the data to fit.
We have roughly 380 violent crimes per 100k people each year in the US. Just to keep it simple, let's assume they are committed by unique people. Half of adults play video games and about half of those play violent video games. (Very rough numbers but the right ballpark.) So in 100k people, you have 25,000 who play violent games of some sort. Of those violent video games, if only a certain type can create violence, you may be looking at only 10,000 people or fewer (per 100k people) who are playing the games that could cause violence. It also seems likely that the ability to cause violence would be tied to genetic and environmental issues in the person playing the video games. On top of that, for the violence to manifest itself, the person would need to find themselves in a circumstance where it could manifest. (Being bullied at school, etc.)
It seems very likely that by the time everything that might have an impact on violence is considered, you might be only dealing with 1,000 people out of every 100k who would be in the at risk group. If the effect for the at risk group is very high, say 1 out of 1,000, you are talking about one more violent crime per 100,000 people.
It would seem that an increase like this could easily be hidden due to other programs to reduce crime like cleaning up lead pollution, or better training teachers to to identify at risk students.
(And please understand, I'm not saying that there is a link. Just pointing out how it would be likely to show up if there was.)
The outrage was mostly about children and permanent damage to their brains caused by games. Almost all children play games, and certainly more than half of all games (weighted by popularity) are violent.
> very high, say 1 out of 1,000
That seems the opposite of high. High would be 1 in 2 or 1 in 5.
If the effect of everyone playing video games is 1 additional crime per 100 000 people I don't see the problem TBH.
> That seems the opposite of high. High would be 1 in 2 or 1 in 5.
I guess I'm thinking of how we'd view a side effect in medicine. If 1 out of 1,000 people who had the problem the medicine was supposed to cure were likely to die or cause a death when taking the medicine, it would seem like a high number of deaths. You'll routinely see side effects of things that happened 1 in 50,000 cases being listed as possible side effects of medicine.
> If the effect of everyone playing video games is 1 additional crime per 100 000 people I don't see the problem
Whether this matters probably depends on what violent thing they do. If it is an additional Columbine type event for every 100k people, that would be much less acceptable than one additional instance of verbal abuse by someone in a disagreement at a bar.
This would be like saying "this drug might kill 1 out of 1000 people who also have this rare gene which only 1% of population has".
Have shootings not gone up? Has no one noticed it.
It’s counter intuitive to think that games that simulate practicing shooting people would have zero influence on people this inclined.
I tend to agree and I can confirm with anecdotal evidence from all around real life. Take traffic for example where road rage is always directed at other people no matter how small their trespass, while far more damaging incidents where no other person was involved are met with some swear words (getting 2 flat tires at once, seeing a tree fall on your car, etc.).
It's other people and their perceived trespasses that cause the buildup of frustration and violence.
Allowing things like "teabagging" without instant ban for the user, even building dedicated humiliating moves in a game, or emphasizing some animations like slow motion kill cams when a certain score style was achieved are the reason I have a hard time respecting the gaming industry or taking e-sports seriously (purely because of games' design decisions, not the player).
Comparing the tea-bagging that occurs in online Halo play with the rules in place in the NFL is silly. Better to compare online Halo or Call of Duty with beer league hockey.
Throughout my comment I made a few things explicitly clear. That I don't blame the gamers, rather the game devs for including the option and the leagues for choosing to play games that have this. And that many games are fine. You chose to ignore that when making your case.
To your point, plenty of games exicitly have such behavior built-in via fatalities, takedowns, executions, or some signature move and slow motion kill-cam to be shown to the victim usually, all with animations that go beyond "I defeated my enemy" into "I humiliated them". There's only one reason to include such mechanism in a game and that's that they want gamers to use them. A league promoting those games regardless of whether it punishes using that feature still endorses them in their entirety. Those are the ones I'm having issues with.
The gaming and e-sports industries don't do enough to call the offenders out on this behavior. At best they turn a blind eye while still playing and promoting such games. I'm sorry but this is like having Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein at your birthday party and thinking it's ok because they didn't harass anyone while you were in the room.
The fact that I still have to explain this already speaks volumes.
In my opinion there's several factor contributing to this differences in cultures:
1. starcraft match usually takes about 15 minutes. Dota game takes about 45 minutes.
2. you are expected to surrender in starcraft when you recognize it's over - playing to lose condition is disrepectful; you cannot surrender in dota in practice (abandoning the game is harshly penalized by the matchmaking system)
3. there's more than 10% chance you'll be stuck playing a lost game that you have no influence over for more than 30 minutes in dota. This never happens in starcraft - either you surrender or you think you can win.
4. the culture of starcraft is influenced mostly by Koreans. Showing off isn't considered cool. Fountain diving is common in dota.
I don't think it's multiplayer games that are inherently toxic. I think highly competitive team-based multiplayer games played with random people with no way to surrender are :) And even then I'm yet to see an example of dota player becoming violent because of the game. If any game can do this it has to be dota.
My first question is, which games, which mechanics, and which e-sports organizations are we talking about here? Because from my perspective, the biggest e-sports in the world are LoL, CS:GO, Dota 2, Starcraft, and maybe WoW. Not one of these has any purpose-built game disrupting humiliation mechanics like the ones we’ve talked about. And as far as I know, the organizations that run the largest tournaments for these games are often, even usually, not the same organizations that run tournaments for other games.
So you have trouble taking all of e-sports seriously because some org runs tournaments for some games that happen to include mechanics that encourage highly unsportsmanlike behavior. Do you have trouble taking all of wrestling seriously because showy costume wrestling exists? Riot games doesn’t get to tell indie Street Fighter tournaments to shut down because they’re making e-sports look bad, nor would that if they could, because people who actually care about e-sports don’t assign Street Fighter’s problems to LoL.
The “gaming and e-sports industry” doesn’t act as a unit any more than all of cable television does.
So, call out your offenders, if you feel they aren’t being called out. But first, ask yourself: did that game developer even intend to make a game whose primary purpose was being a sport? Or are the tournament organizers just trying to make it work as one, despite it having some features that have to be disallowed? And why is that a big deal?
Still, it is possible that games with such mechanics--or graphic violence generally--may amplify bad behavior elsewhere. My guess though is this can never be conclusively proven true or false as there are just so many confounding factors.
The former is probably obvious so here's some points for the latter:
Public debate centers around "assault weapons" high powered rifles and mass shootings.
- 2/3rds of gun deaths are suicides (usually with handguns)
- The vast majority of gun homicides are with handguns
- The broadest definition of "mass shooting" I could find was 4 or more victims (excluding the shooter). That puts mass shooting deaths on par with accidental gun deaths; about 1% of total gun deaths and single-digit percentage of gun homicides.
Now, I'm not saying ending mass shootings is a bad thing, but it's as if everyone worried about traffic fatalities in the US was informed by watching "The Fast and the Furious" and wanted to ban forced-induction sports cars and was super worried about deaths from underground road races.
It's also a reasonable assumption that people who naturally want to avoid actual violence play violent video games instead.
This paranoia against violent video games was obviously fake from the start, and such a typically American thing - in line with the American puritan view that blowing up people in films or broadcasting police car chases is a-OK but (female) nipples or saying "fuck" is a big NO NO.
- I'm not making the claim that video games lead to violence, I'm just saying that we should apply the same level of analysis to studies supporting views we already have that we do to supporting views we do not already have. If this study was well done, great! If it was poorly done, then it is appropriate to call it out. If the study truly wasn't able to find any correlation (positive, per my hypothesis, negative per yours), then either there really isn't any correlation (meaning all of the potential forces that would cause a correlation happen to be perfectly balanced (which would be surprising to me), or there is something wrong with the study.
- To be clear, I don't think there is a causal relationship between violent video games and violent behaviors.
- There are likely correlations between video-games and ADHD, as well as single-player video games (actually any solitary activity) and depression. There are links between both of those and violent behavior, particularly self-harm.
Not only. Eg in Germany there's long been an enormous stigma against violent video games. I haven't talked with German gamedevs for some years so maybe this loosened up since. But basically, if you worked in gamedev you preferred to tell your neighbours and acquaintances that you work "in IT". If they would find out you work on video games they'd pretty much fully cut you out of their lives.
(Note, to my anecdotal experience this is a purely German thing. I don't know other European countries where the same stigma exists)
- Anno Series (I just picked up Anno 1800 yesterday)
- Fugger / The Guild 1-3 / Patrician etc
- The Settlers / Die Siedler
- Games set in the Dark Eye (role playing framework similar to D&D but more popular in Germany) universe.
There's a lot of violence in society. There's even more violent media available. From news broadcasts to internet forum posts to books. Perhaps violent video games aren't particularly worse at that than all of the other media that portray violence? The news tends to have stories that are more gruesome than the things that happen in video games. The violence in video games is usually toned down or limited.
In a community like HN there's also kind of a "meta-anecdote" that emerges. If there was a link, you'd expect to see at least someone posting an ancedote about how their friend got into violent games and then became violent themselves; instead it's mainly the opposite.
I'm still not arguing this observation is scientifically rigorous in any way whatsoever, merely that multiple ancedotes can be more useful than a single one. There could be other reasons such as those that are violent or hang out with those that are don't post on HN - but that also hints there is something more to it then just or even the violent games themselves.
>multiple ancedotes can be more useful than a single one
Sure. But that meta-anecdote based narrative can be highly biased based on the community that forms it.
A forum with an large respresentation of hospital doctors and a forum with a large representation of convenience store owners are going to have completely different meta-anecdote based narratives on whether packing heat is good or bad.
People will trust their anecdotes because in general they are right to. They don't need a double blind study to figure out that placing their hand on a heated element is a bad idea.
The question is whether the Bayesian confidence an individual places on their anecdotal knowledge is appropriate or not. In this case, plenty of people have a ton of personal experience with the subject matter, a ton of friends and colleagues with experience, and little to no evidence to suggest the contra factual is true.
Does that mean they're certainly right? No. But it certainly lowers the bar to evaluating yet further evidence of the position already held; why waste the time? If a study was released that was solid evidence that games did cause a significant uptick in violence, then examination would be warranted.
I know a bunch of people are going to take a contrarian position, but we operate in the real world with the same time complexity restrictions as the machines we work on. You don't need a double blind study to determine how to position your head while tying your shoelaces in the morning.
Depends on why you need to trust something. If the failure state is multiple nukes going off, sure throw money and time at it until your systems are bullet proof. If you've purchased new shoes and need to design a study to figure out which foot you should start with when lacing up, maybe you're going too hard. What about something more chemical in nature; say you have a family recipe you and your family love. You might tinker around with it, but do you stop making it because you are upset by the intellectual sloth of not running double blind studies on Grandma's Famous Cumin Chili? No. Unless something slaps your Bayesian priors in the face, like a news report that says Chili recipes using Cumin might cause cancer.
Again, the idea is that we all come into this with Bayesian priors. You don't need (and will never get) 100% certainty to operate in the real world. I don't need to spend a few hours and $60 to go from 99.5% to 99.7% on this issue and I'm betting you don't either.
We will be, and largely are wrong about a ton of things. And in the majority of cases it doesn't matter one tiny bit. Like here. This is a study about a political flogging point that is 15 years past the point it conceivably could have been made into legislation. The study will be dated by the time there's a political push for the issue to be re-examined.
This is shoelace study v.2.0. We have more pertinent, more complicated and more impactful problems to study both on an institution and personal level, so why devote our limited mental processing time to this? Because you want to be "right"?
Have you ever read a recipe you've done before and thought to yourself "I really shouldn't make this, because I haven't presented this foo
Should you question them? Yes.
Should you let your own experience and that of a few people around you override what you see to be a rigorous statistical study because you questioned it and looked into it? No. If you look into it and have serious questions about the rigor of the study? Maybe. Is that the case in the Covid studies? Probably not.
Whether this is about Covid or anything else, the important thing is to be able to asses information as it comes in and reassess your position based on the data available to you. Anecdotal data is invaluable and used by everyone every day to make decisions prior to receiving good outside rigorous data, because for many things we don't have good outside rigorous data.
In the case your examples, we already know that the CFR is lower than 10%, so a sample of 10 definitely is nowhere near enough to tell us anything useful. Now if the CFR was 50% and you had 0/10, maybe it'd be worth looking into it.
I'm curious though, have any of your friends had longer term effects? longer term smell/taste loss, brain fog, heart issues, memory issues, breathing issues, etc? The early reports on long term impact are at ~10-20%, so you may have 1 or 2 in your sample, but again your sample is small enough that you very easily could've had 0 too. Again, it depends heavily on what you're trying to disprove and what the rate of it is.
If there was a causation then the reduction in violent crime could be muted by a small factor due to games, while the net decrease is (as before) caused by an even larger independent factor. In other words, the net decrease could have been larger without the presence of games.
What it does instead show is a maximum plausible effect size, and that it likely isn't worse than the activities which it is replacing.
I think that rather than asking ourselves "does this have a negative impact?" we should ask "what can I do that has a positive impact?".
Personally, I would never work on a game with significant violence. From my point of view, there are so many other things a human being can contribute towards the well-being and progress of humanity, and I would not feel happy with myself if I limited my contribution and my creativity to making another shooter.
The published studies (two so far) support their effectiveness. It's not easy to get the word out though without the funds for a publicist, advertising, etc.
That's part of the point of this essay that was on HN last year: "Fortnite and the Good Life," which seems relevant here.
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-convivial-soc...
they are just games and most (non crazy) people understand that
like hansel and gretel when they push the witch in the oven - its fiction and not intended to be a guide to life
Alcohol is real.
Games are not.
You might read the actual tale of Little Red Riding Hood. It is very much meant as a guide for young girls in what to expect and watch out for in life.
In some situations being able to keep a cool head in a crisis or in an area where something like this might occur could actually prove to be a benefit, as you are less likely to enter a panicked state (such as working in an environment where you may witness excessive amounts of blood/gore, eg paramedic)
I think that the vast majority of people (teenagers included) are more robust than we give them credit for, and can distinguish fantasy from reality.
And yet gamers remain relatively docile on the whole. And while they may get heated their debates about PlayStation vs XBox are about as likely to result in fatalities as the programming community's vim vs emacs or tabs vs spaces debates.
I can think of 2 incidents in the gaming community off the top of my head which led to fatalities. The SWATing of Andrew Finch, and the Jacksonville Landing shooting (that was an NFL game convention though, so it's debatable whether the game was violent). I certainly haven't heard anything like that about text editors or coding styles, but then maybe the number of gamers is higher than the number of programmers.
That said, at the end of the day, the life was lost not because gamers were being violent due to a violent video game. None of the gamers involved so much as ever saw one another. Instead, an entirely innocent third party individual got erroneously targeted by a known type of hoax and, upon moving his hands wrong, was shot by a law enforcement official.
This was intended to be a case of gamer-on-gamer harassment over something that likely was spurred on by events in a violent video game (which is woefully common, though rarely to this degree). But the only violent act committed was by a police officer. And that's an important distinction.
(I assume we can elide the Jacksonville event as that happened during a Madden tournament; unless we want to make the case that football is more like Grand Theft Auto than it is baseball...)
Otherwise, we have to wonder how much Doom was played by Jack the Ripper or Ian Brady.
There is evidence of gamers doxxing, and even worse, swatting.
Does that make those other things toxic? On a purely comparative level, gaming is probably less 'toxic' if you go just by the worst things done by its fans.
Going back to streamers and video games, Twitch has definitely had its share of toxicity:
https://gamecrate.com/how-twitch-now-holding-streamers-respo...
But any place with “votes” has such effects.
My rule for analyzing social science articles is pretty simple: If the study contradicts your intuition or understanding of human behavior, it is likely that it does not support the conclusion because of extensive methodological errors or statistical skullduggery.
If, on the other hand, the study confirms your intuition or understanding of human behavior, it is likely that it does not support the conclusion because of extensive methodological errors or statistical skullduggery.
When there is such heavily biased review of social science papers, it calls the legitimacy of all of them into question.
The simple fact is that I cannot ever think of any solid methodology to investigate a “link” between these two things and that the man who devises it would deliver a rather groundbreaking idea.
How would a study such as this even work?; it's all Quatsch.
> till proven otherwise
It's still bullshit even if proven otherwise. If I roll my magic dice and determine that it's going to rain tomorrow, and it ends up raining, this in no way validates my methodology.
So since we have learned that violent song lyrics does not cause anti-social behavior in teens, nor that of violent movies, it seems as a good default stance that neither does violent video games. I would also default the same stance to porn consumption, based on the same logic.
I would prefer if we got a final study that gave a definitive answer if consumption of fiction causes anti-social behavior. It seems to me that fiction is simply an medium for which people can safely explore cultural norms, but in terms of causing anti-social behavior we would need to look at social environment and biochemical triggers for social behavior.
It's very hard to argue video games and crime are linked when the curves are:
https://i.imgur.com/hSHDyoH.png
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Statistic/190000/191219-blank-355.pn...
Of course it's possible that the link is small and other factors overpower it. But it's unlikely, and given the everyday experience with people who play games and people who are violent - there's very little evidence of any link.
So indeed we fail to the confirmation bias. Or, said in other words: "ordinary claims require very little evidence".
The literature on pornography is more mixed and contentious, though. On violent video games and "gaming addiction", there seems to be less and less going for the hypothesis that they cause violence or aggression.
However, from what reading I've done, you will find that longitudinal results in porn and video games are dissonant with experimental results in lab settings. This suggests that while there are effects, they do not persist to the level thought. More complex models (such as the confluence model in porn effects research) which try and explain apparent hidden variables are also gaining steam. There are actually only four or five major contemporary figures in porn effects research; Wright and Tokunaga finding that porn has negative effects on everyone; Hald and Malamuth finding that the main or only worry only lies in those low in agreeableness and predisposed to aggressive behaviour.
To a bunch of gamers and porn-users (including myself in both of those categories), these things are either things we spend a lot of time doing (for a portion of HN, I suspect their entire leisure time is taken up by video games), or they are very personal and private. Nothing is more personal than what we get off to, so any analysis of porn tends to be taken as an assault on sexuality itself (though interestingly, much as with advertising or propaganda, the very same sexuality cultivated by porn consumption).
I've tried discussing the literature on video games, porn, violence, aggression, and morality before on both HN and Reddit, and the discussion is either ignored or shot down with downvotes because any discussion at all feels like a personal attack.
I'd recommend for anyone interested in the topic of video games and aggression or behaviour, and indeed the hot topic of "video game addiction" to check out the papers by CJ Ferguson, who has a positive view on video games. At the same time, check out the people he replies to and the people replying to him. It's ridiculous to draw any conclusion from a study that happens to reach the top of HN.
I think you're seeing an important difference between acceptance of a conclusion versus agreement with it. I doubt this study is changing anyone's minds.
Besides: claims of a link between violent video games and aggressive behavior was never backed by anything other than assumptive moral arguments, much less studies (or even coherent reasoning and valid logic).
Thise leaves bias from confirmation of existing beliefs along with more anecdotal evidence not directly connected to videogames, such as decreasing crime rates over the period of time that videogames have become more violent. However relying on that correlation alone is a post hoc ergo proper hoc fallacy.
In short, we simply don't know enough about the study to overcome comment with substance, at the same time that the study corresponds to conclusions based on similar research. I'm hesitant to declare "confirmation bias" though when it does ostensibly confirm other research, though it's not really a replication, so I'd withhold final judgement.
For one fun field, look at the level of criticism papers in parapsychology (the study of the paranormal) and compare it to if they get more criticism or not than the average paper in psychology. There is a particularly fun study (which I do not recall the name of) where two scientists teamed up, one who thought parapsychology was a true field and one who thought it was fake. They worked together on the same experiment and each produced results that agreed with them, but neither could find a flaw in the other's methodology or results (other than they disagree with their own results).
Design this game with negative stereotypes and see how many people suddenly flip on how they think about the influence of the in-game social and anti-social aspects.
"Mike Splechta of GameZone questioned the game's timing and how it could become the "next scapegoat" in a climate that already held video games responsible for school shootings and other violence."
Presently we are seeing significant alarm raised by media over the content, not bugs, within Cyberpunk 2077; accusations have been raised by major outlets that it includes bias in support of law enforcement, a transphobic setting, and bog standard sexism.
But despite its severe bugs and missing features, it's enjoyed three solid weeks as a top seller on Steam and easily made back its expenses through PC pre-orders. For all the flak it gets, the game has an enormous and happy fanbase.
What I see happening is a bifurcation in game players: those who reject the gamer label and reject moral terpitudes, and those who embrace the gamer label and tolerate or enjoy moral terpitude.
I expect that in ten years we'll see an industry with healthy diversity in players and content; divided into their separate groups and with stores that have adapted to cater to specific groups.
A hundred years ago there was the Bay and Sears, and now those have been superseded by a large variety of clothing vendors. I don't expect to buy a cardigan and leather bdsm mask in the same store, right?
Hacker News users aren't smartly, we just type good
I both do not know any violent criminals personally, and have witnessed a rather staggering amount of acceptance of violence in our culture.
I’m reminded here of when the director of communications at Lockheed Martin responded with the following when asked about a possible connection between Columbine and the manufacturing of Triton missiles just down the street (Lockheed being a major employer of many parents in the area):
“I guess I don't see that specific connection because the missiles that you're talking about were built and designed to defend us from somebody else who would be aggressors against us.”
We also accept violence in the criminal justice system even to stop non-violent crimes. We also support wars, see it’s approval rating of post 9-11. I’ve had many a person tell me the solution to some Perceived racial problem was to “wipe them out” and only one of them physically assaulted me.
So it seems to me that we are okay with violence but often do not like carrying it out ourselves in personal disputes. Yet this may only be detoured but the treat of violence being carried out on us if we were to. Unless of course we are in the military and have been told/trained to carry out violent activities with impunity. All in all I am not convinced we are a peaceful nonviolent civilization, quite the opposite. Nor am I convinced that seeing accepted violence everyday on your T.V. Screen, be it video game or otherwise, does not affect this pervasive psychological mindset, agin the opposite.
Reminds me of the Dungeons and Dragons moral panic of the 80's [0]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/us/when-dungeons-dragons-...
Video games do not make people violent - and based on my observation of at least several thousand peers - it actually has the opposite effect. The truth is video games are a healthy outlet, as well as self train an individual to deal with defeat over and over and over again.
I bet if you took groups of individuals whom played sports for X hours a week, and compared them to an equivalent number of individuals whom played video games for X hours a week, the sports group would have more violent tendencies. This isn't just hyperbola, after observing as many humans as we have in both these activities, it's practically self evident.
*hyperbole, though my autocorrect also tried to screw me.
I'm not sure about this comparison though, as there seems to be a connection between concussions and violent behavior. Comparing track members to video game players would be somewhat interesting.
When I was a kid in the 90s, Oprah claims that Dungeons and Dragons caused Satanic worship and Grand Theft Auto groomed children for larceny. That's where our culture is coming from.
Yet we get to the effect of ultraviolent gun-worship games, and the reaction is swift to absolve them of any role in our society.
Still smells like "the preciousssss" undercurrent on pot legalization. Which I'm in favor of only because of the failures of the drug war, especially in destabilizing Mexico and Central America into narco mafia states.
America has radicalized around guns and gun violence, to the point they are religions. Sure, go ahead and say there are no effects from violent gun games, then go talk to your kids about the school shooting drills. Sure we can argue that gun manufacturers and partisan wedge politics have elevated gun worship and not 25 years of shooter games.
I get there aren't smoking gun game studies. But we are way far from the days of cartoon Doom.
If you've played the Last of Us 1 or 2, you know what I'm talking about. If you saw it, it would affect you deeply. But actually doing those things hits so much harder. Is it possible that has a deeper effect on us compared to a movie? I don't know, but it's not a ridiculous proposition.
I think VR may be an interesting test case in the near future as it is immersive enough to potentially be more traumatic and more unsettling... but that still doesn’t mean playing GTA or Doom increases your odds of going on a shooting spree.
The fact that you can make potentially more impactful stories using more modern media seems neutral to me. But to be frank, you really desperately do not need modern technology and fancy graphics to make an incredibly emotional, impactful game. Just look at indie games like Undertale and Celeste.
And there have been many film-inspired murders. the mass shooting inspired by the Dark Night. John Hinckley’s assassination attempt on Reagan ( inspired by Taxi Driver ).
John Lennon’s murder was inspired by The Catcher in the Rye!
Here’s a link to some:
https://www.newsweek.com/nine-horrible-real-life-crimes-were...
And remember, not all such incidents are famous. So doubtless there are more.
There are sick people in the world who are indeed influenced by all sorts of media.
this was the key idea behind A Clockwork Orange.
Whether such media influences “healthy” people is another question.
People can be “inspired” by a film or a game to do something illegal, but it’s impossible for us to tell if they were simply likely to do it anyway, so individual cases don’t say very much.
Some of us may be driven to violence by video games. And maybe those people aren’t included in these studies.
This submission, on the other hand, is a link to some kind of gaming news website, which links to an abstract for an article in a Cyberpsychology (?) journal which costs $60 to access, and there is widespread and uncritical agreement with its supposed conclusion.