I think those violent video games are a great way to relieve stress.
Better to be shooting up or stabbing up characters in a video game than being a big ball of angry stress, cranky and sullen and nasty in real life.
I figure it’s a way to let it out in a safe arena where no real people are getting hurt.
I think you’re absolutely right. Everyone has a tendency for aggression- a vestigial primal instinct from the good ol’ days when we could climb trees, throw feces, etc. Its how well we are able to cover it up with the influences of society that matters. As some previous posters have stated, after playing GTA3 or VC, one can get the urge to steal cars, run over pedestrians, etc. But its only fleeting. Isn’t it better to have already done it in a game then have such an urge building within you?
Violent video games are an excellent method to destress and anyone who doesn’t realize the distinction between the often ridiculous absurdity of video games and reality has serious problems to begin with. Most popular games do not place the individual in a real-life situation or anything close. Pressing R on your keyboard isn’t the same as reloading your rifle. And most people can’t take an assault of bullets while only losing a few health points.
Games can also act as a moral base. Most games have the player as a good guy who fights the evils of aliens, mutants, evil corporations, etc. I don’t know of any games that are outright “evil” although some games do have a “killing for the sake of killing” philosophy.
GTA 3 and VC are two popular games like that since you’re playing a criminal without restriction. But again, killing senselessly isn’t the point of the game. The cops and eventually the military will come after you if you keep it up. Plus its not all that realistic. I mean come on, who are the developers trying to fool. I can’t fit an arsenal of weapons in my track suit.
I’m quite sure it’s that way. Otherwise, I’d want to see how they explain why violence existed before or why people playing those games and are not violent. In my opinion, that’s what they are required to do now at all.
To my eyes, people need to have a certain affinity to violence to be influenced by videogames, high enough that they are violent anyway. There many people, especially children and youths, playing those games, but only a handful of all of them gets violent.
People have gone violent at any time, but statistics suggests that the availability of weapons is the most important factor, right after the existence of people who are that nuts to use them - at least over here I can count all the cases on one hand, commited by kids feeling deserted and betrayed by the world (and, as far as I know, it’s similar in the cases you have). The more you restrict weapons, the less cases you have (although you cannot reduce it to zero).
On the stats Dissonance was so nice to give, I think it could also be explained by the growing effectivity of the army’s education methods.
All in all, I think videogames may be considered a catalysator whose power remains to be determined but seem to be dependant on the affinity to violence of the individual.
Me, for example, doesn’t like those games. And I don’t use violence.
Still, I see certain web sites having the effect of wanting to hit something :eek: (I don’t). And they are text. Therefore, if we take on video games, we shouldn’t forget to burn all the books 
. (Would be OK if we would leave it to the pages’ book 
)
Not really. What would be required is not to prove that violence didn’t exist before the advent of violent video games, but that violence has increased since then. Of course, even then there is still the problem of proving causation with the rise in violent video games and other entertainment media. Grossman does provide data of the rise in societal violence in western societies from 1977-1993.
That was actually what Grossman described the cause as being – providing desensitization by means of more realistic and violent training in order to overcome the inherent human resistance to actually killing a fellow human being. For a long time it was assumed that simply delivering a soldier to the battlefield and having them faced with a kill or be killed situation would be enough to cause soldiers to fight to kill. Studying the results proved that it was actually not what happened, and that soldiers would turn not to the fight or flight model but to the fight, posture, submit, or flight model. Far more times than not, they would choose to posture (by firing not at the enemy but simply to fire) or submit (by not firing at all) instead of fighting to kill or fleeing. While again I think Grossman’s conclusions in relating them to violence in the media and video games is a bit overblown, I’d still highly recommend giving him a read even if you disagree with his conclusions.
In any event, welcome to the SDMB, Eindal.