Cowboys and Indians? Green Army Men? Risk? Battleship?
Violence in games (any kind) is not new, though I will concede that video games makes it easier for young children to be exposed to graphic violence. However, there should be a sensible distinction between preventing impressionable minors from doing brain-splattering headshots in SOCOM and barring self-responsible adults who wish to do the same.
Football? Hockey? Rugby?
I guess I wasn’t clear enough with my not really being a psychopath. That argument isn’t one I think actually holds water, but some legislators do. Specifically, I was thinking of California state senator Leland Yee, who said something like that in a TV interview.
No reason these can’t both be true.
If “eventually” means 3 weeks tops, then yeah, sure eventually 
Based on my personal experience
has any single game been directly attributed to violent behavior or deaths because of what people see in the game? like howchildren mimick wrestling moves on tv or hang themselves after watching that saddam thing?
When my son was younger there was a big push about video violence. After my wife nagged me for a long time I reluctantly agreed to talk to him. Once I started he looked disgusted and said "dad they are just pixels on a TV screen. " I felt like an idiot.
Ok, I spoke with Mr. Olives… he has me utterly convinced that violence in media has at least some form of impact on violent behavior.
They have done longitudinal studies (meaning: the same group of subjects over decades of time) on young children and followed them into adulthood. They have found that naturally aggressive behavior in seven year olds is NOT a predictor for attraction to violent media, but there is a very clear correlation between seven year olds watching/playing violent media (and not showing aggressive behavior at that time) and later violent behavior in adulthood. This study was specifically targeted at challenging the hypothesis that violent people are just attracted to violent media, rather than violent media affecting violent behavior.
There have also been controlled laboratory experiments with college students in which violent media (I believe the movie was “The Godfather” vs. the control “Finding Nemo”) clearly caused more aggressive behavior in those who had just watched the violent film. Notice I said “aggressive,” not violent–the case was specifically about a patient’s willingness to cause a faceless “other” discomfort based on their perceptions of unfair treatment – the students were seated in a char with headphones and directed to play a computer game with another, unseen person (the “unseen” person was actually automated, but the subject thought it was a real person.) The unseen person had the power to blast an uncomfortably loud noise into the subject’s earphones, and vice-versa. The studies have discovered a consistent pattern in which subjects who have just watched a violent movie are MUCH more likely to blast the noise back at full blast if they believe the unseen person is cheating than those who watched the nonviolent movie.
The crux seems to be retaliatory violence. Subjects are not likely to respond with aggressive behavior UNLESS they perceive they are being treated unfairly or that someone has done something wrong to them. When they perceive an injustice, their aggressive response can be completely disproportionate to the act.
Another interesting note Mr. Olives brought up is that there have been longitudinal studies on the treatment of movie violence in the media. What they found was that in the 70s, there was very little scientific evidence that violent media contributes to violent behavior, but news centers consistently reported on the dangers of media violence. Currently, there is a vast wealth of scientific evidence that violent media contributes to violent behavior, however, the media predominantly publishes only the evidence AGAINST the notion that violent media contributes to violent behavior. There is almost an inverse relationship between the amount of evidence gathered and the amount it has been reported.
Another key finding is that for violence in video games, there are two crucial components. The first is how much the player identifies with the character who is doing the aggression, the second is how much they feel the game reflects reality. Using this theory, 1st person shooters would be more likely to contribute to violent behavior than games such as Final Fantasy. They are currently in the middle of studies specifically aimed at isolating these two major factors.
Also, according to Mr. Olives, the idea that violent media is “cathartic” and prevents otherwise frustrated people from committing violent acts is “completely unfounded bullshit.” Rather, there is apparently a wealth of evidence offering the reverse – simulated violence, venting or other aggressive behaviors raises heart rate and blood pressure and makes aggressive behavior much more likely.
From his perspective, the vocal minority of scientists who believe that media does not contribute to violent behavior are being paid by the video games and television/movie companies that want people to continue to buy their product. This would explain why the news media remains silent on the matter as well.
Generally speaking, then, the following are things that we have some degree of scientific evidence for:
sigh
Now for citing. A lot of the studies I have mentioned above are under the direction of Dr. Brad Bushman at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research – my husband’s boss. These studies have not yet been published. However, I will cheerfully direct you to Brad Bushman’s web page through the university:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bbushman/
From what I can tell there is a lot of information here on violence in the media, including links to various interviews and studies he has done.
On the issue of “catharsis” being complete bullshit:
Quoted from the New York Times article here
I give you the link to about 15 separate studies on violent media/aggressive behavior here.
I easily found many more cases linking violent media to aggressive behavior that were done by people I don’t actually know. It really seems to be a case of people believing in what’s most convenient for them, rather than looking at the hard science.
I’m sure that that is all true. But the issue is that to some extent human growth depends on learning such traits as “You dun me wrong Billy. Now you get the thwap.” Children grow some amount of their strength through the characters and stories they experience. So the problem becomes, where is the limit?
Entrepreneurship, individualism, the willingness to quit a job when your boss is an evil manipulative a-hole, etc. come from one-upmanship and retributioness. So at the same time as it may be creating more crime, violent games could potentially be creating people who are going to be more critical of the world and willing to change it.
I hope you’re right.
More of just throwing it out there to be debated. But I do think that it is a viable hypothesis.
Well, I find the relatively violent “fantasy”/RPG-style video games I play to be quite empowering on an emotional level, and though I become viscerally connected to the idea of slaughtering things with a giant sword, I’m not actually slaughtering people or doing it in a context that seems at all realistic. I typically find 1st person shooters to be pretty disturbing since they are based on theoretical situations–I’m especially repulsed by war simulators. I am uncomfortable with graphic violence in any context, especially violence that includes overt, prolonged suffering.
There is something interesting about my generation (I’m 23) with regards to violence… we have heaped so much “ironic commentary” on the issue of media violence that it has become a form of comedy. The following are things I have laughed uproariously about in the past few years:
You get the idea. Does this make me a violent sociopath? No… most people from my generation would find these scenes equally entertaining. As a matter of fact, most people my age have a much higher threshold of violence tolerance than I do. Violence has gone beyond its original connotation of suffering and has become in many ways a parody of itself. “It’s irony” is a popular defense of why violence is funny nowadays.
The most popular example I can think of is “Itchy and Scratchy” from the Simpsons–clearly intended as an ironic jab at heinously violent cartoons from the past that are treated as completely inoffensive. But at what point does the irony lose its point? When I was younger I couldn’t even stay in the same room with an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon because I found them so disturbing. Now I just watch them in uncomfortable silence, but I’ve seen enough that it doesn’t bother me as much anymore (notice how I became DESENSITIZED.) But my peers seem to think that Itchy and Scratchy is hilarious, because “it’s irony.” But I feel that anything other than uncomfortable silence/revulsion in the face of those cartoons is completely missing the point. By parodying violence, Itchy and Scratchy succeeded in making folks even more desensitized than they already were.
I really can’t control what I find funny because so many factors have gone into developing my sense of humor it would be impossible to find a direct cause. I’m not trying to make people feel guilty for finding this funny.
But I AM wondering about the implications of this in the long-term. I’m wondering about what it means to have a society of adults who think a cartoon cat getting disemboweled is funny. I find it hard to believe that being repeatedly exposed to violent images in the media is going to have no impact on the way we treat others in society. And, as I have noted before… the evidence seems to support this perspective.
I have a problem with videogames being bundled with other media.
I have no doubt that watching the evening news turns kids into the kind of people that appear on the evening news. Stylized non-realistic violence on a videogame is a different ball of wax.
Take “Shadow of the Colossus”, where you kill gigantic monsters at sword point (the most beautiful game I have played, ever). How does that violence translate into the real world? The game is paced, inspiring, emotional. Now look at the evening news. A full hour of the lowest humanity has to offer with no uplifting counterweight. There is no doubt in my mind of what I will choose to expose my children to as they grow up.
Well you said that you were uncomfortable with certain things. Anyone is uncomfortable with various levels of content. But the question isn’t with what we are comfortable with, just with what effects we can prove.
Your husband has done research to determine causality between violence in media and violence in real life, but still that’s only one side of the issue. I could just as easily point to the crime rate climbing as police stopped being able to “interview” suspects in closed rooms without cameras. Yet I doubt that preventing crime is such a high concern to you that you would want us to return to the old ways.
If there is no good side to the issue, then to be certain, it’s just a matter of formalising a set of rules for where things should be limitted at. But until the good side has been researched, there’s still plenty of room to debate.
Personally, I would suspect that realism is less an issue than teaching poor behaviors. I would be less worried about a dad taking his kid out to fight in a war against an invading country, than I would be about some other dad teaching his child that women are there to be raped, or black people to be killed.
Certainly, which behavior should be enforced is a tricky issue. But I think that if anything, reality is about the only safeguard you have against poor ideologies being passed down. Certainly China hates the Internet for that very reason.
So while violence in media may cause violence, I would just be worried that there aren’t greater worries by trying to restrict it.
what is the connection to the video game? i’ll wager the results be unchanged were you to place them in separate booths with nothing but the loud noise button.
i also have a problem with videogames being bundled with other media.