This is the first thing you should do: Read up on process addiction so you have the slightest clue as to what you are talking about. Second, know that it is NOT being dismissed. Third, consider this: An hypothetical mother has a process addiction to shopping (a relatively common one as these things go) and leaves a child in a hot car so she can go to a dress sale at the mall. The child dies of heat stroke in the car. Do you blame the store for the child’s death? If not, how can you reconcile blaming a video game for a child’s death?
That article. Lots of other articles at the time did, I just can’t find them now. And both dogs were killed.
You act like you think I’m lying. Why don’t you question everyone else in such detail?
You act like this thread is about pit bulls. Why don’t you take your hijack somewhere else?
thanks for the link. i think your hypothetical might work better if the child got lost in the store premises or something, to better align it? regardless, it seems to me the store’s influence should only apply during the mother’s presence in the store itself. any distraction done would be limited by how much money she have and the muscles on her legs.
of the other behaviors listed in your link: gambling is limited by how slow you can burn your money; food is limited by how much you can stomach; sex and pornography is limited by your refractory period; exercise is limited by your endurance; cutting by your pain threshold; work is similarly not limited as online gaming, but at least it pays. once a person had access to an online computer, the only limiting factor would be the ability to sit in one spot for long stretches of time. free gaming, a virtual social aspect, games designed to trigger your impulse control etc etc all work together to keep you glued to the monitor.
i think most people would agree that you can severely screw up a child if you introduce gambling, food, sex, pornography and cutting to him at an early age; but an ever growing number would not bat an eyelid at a child hooked on facebook games.
You don’t understand the core concept of process addiction, do you? It doesn’t matter what the compulsion is - eating, shopping, internet use, whatever. What matters is the person who suffers from the addiction has an overwhelming compulsion to perform that activity to the detriment of all else. Sure, someone may develop a behavioral addiction to video games, but the psychology behind that addiction is in no way different from any other behavioral addiction. It is not the activity that is causing the addiction - it is the illness. You can’t blame compulsive over eating on food. You can’t blame compulsive shopping on commerce. And you can’t blame compulsive game playing on the games themselves. You have to look at the psychology of the person - not the activity itself. In your zeal to blame video games for something, anything, you are reversing cause and effect. Please read a bit more about it.
And learn to use the shift key.
Also, did you just say that you can really screw up a child by introducing him to food at an early age?!!! Yep, you did.
that is exactly what the OP is about - doubt over assigning of blame totally on the person. if you replace a child’s daily menu with McDonald’s, do you blame the resultant fat kid with attendant host of problems on the child, or do we blame whoever enabled his diet?
Conjecture ahead:
10 to 1 he put the pillow on the baby in the first place to muffle its crying so his team-mates could hear what he was saying, or so that he could concentrate, during the raid. I mean how does a baby get a pillow on its face? I’m not saying he wanted to kill the kid, just that he’s a very stupid and selfish person.
Some people are scum.
The title of this thread should have been:
“Another Infant Death Linked to Parental Stupidity”
You’re trying to look at one example and generalizing it to be applicable to all gamers. The actions of this one person, acting on his own, is not evidence about gamers as a group.
You haven’t proved how it’s different. You and kanicbird just insist that it must be, because gaming is so involved.
A) Unless you can demonstrate that there is a statistically significant number of children dying because their parents are online (and you can’t) - your argument that gaming is more deadly than tvs or cellphones is hopeless.
B) It sounds like you’re trying to make an argument along the lines that people who spend all day on the computer are less caring now than in the past because they’re online and not in person. In other words, it sounds like you’re conflating “screen time” with “gaming”. They’re different activities with different probably outcomes.
And again, you need to demonstrate that the children of computer users die of neglect as a result of their parents’ computer use in greater numbers than children die of neglect while their parents cook/clean/read/nap/watch tv/etc. You’re not going to be able to do that.
Barring actual evidence, talk about an “epidemic” is silly regardless of how metaphorical you want to make it.
Or maybe he would be so caught up talking to his friend on the phone that he’d lose track of time and not notice that his kid had gone silent. Maybe he wouldn’t have heard the kid over the sound of the laundry machine where he was doing the ironing. Maybe the doorbell would ring and he’d be distracted by arguing with some Witnesses. Maybe the hot teenagers next door would be sunbathing topless.
My arguments are no less likely than yours.
Conjecture on your part. Even if games are a problem for this one person - it doesn’t mean that games in general are dangerous, that games in general are more involving for everybody who plays them than different activities are for other people, or that children of gamers are in bigger danger than, say, children of marathon runners who are working out everyday.
Dude, I’ve done that. Well, not a tank. But the point is, nobody I play with has any trouble going afk for bio breaks, beverages, family demands or pet problems.
But the question I have for you shijinn, is: if you were the main tank for a 40 man raid and in the final battle of a 4 hour fight - would you be so caught up that you’d let your baby suffocate?
I don’t believe you would - because the problem is not the game. The problem started with the individual. There is no evidence for generalizing beyond that.
Honestly, I would guess that individuals with personality problems could be just as likely to become addicted to Bejewelled or Solitaire as an MMORPG. Even the massive single player games like Oblivion or Fallout might click for an obsessive individual. Farmville got a lot of press lately for addictiveness. Or hell, Pokemon. That’s my personal crack pipe. That’s the only game I ever walked away from because I was starting to obsess about it.
In so far as some people become obsessed with games, there’s no rational reason why certain games trigger that for each individual. The games themselves don’t cause problems in people who don’t have problems to begin with. Some people are drawn to this or that game, not because the game is insidious, but because it happens to scratch that individual’s psychic itch.
Two-thirds of all households in America include gamers. There’ve been what - a handful? not quite a dozen, even? - kids who’ve died from neglect while their parents were playing online games. There just is no evidence that gaming is a problem for the general population, as opposed to being a problem for a few individuals.
[QUOTE=Merneith]
- Plenty of kids have died while their parents watch tv or talk on the phone or do housework or** nap**.
[/QUOTE]
(my bolding)
Y’all missed the worst part. Gaming engages a person more than SLEEPING? Come on.