“Gamification” is really hot right now, but it’s largely well-marketed bullshit.
Yes, games can teach you things. But the lessons learned are often only tangentially related to the on-screen actions you’re pretending to perform. (Something that a gamification guru would be loathe to admit.)
“… violent games might help make them a better violent child.” How? By teaching them to mash buttons when they’re angry?
Reports that I have read indicate that children can be desensitized to violence immediately after playing, but I haven’t seen any evidence at all that video games cause violent behavior. If anything they offer a good way to release aggression.
Back in high school I have this memory of watching 20/20 or something, and they were talking about some shootout that had happened. A police officer was shot (she lived) while chasing an armed suspect through an industrial park. The reporter had brought her back to the scene and she was describing what had happened. The suspect had run behind a shipping container and she had followed him.
This made me cringe, because I was playing a lot of Doom at the time. Blindly following someone around a corner was a surefire way to get killed. In the game, you had two options – turn the corner guns blazing, or stop at the corner and peek around it to make sure the other guy wasn’t sitting there waiting for you.
Sure enough, the suspect was sitting there waiting for her, and she took a bullet. Doom, it would seem, had made me better at foot chases with armed bandits.
On a less personal level, flight sims make people better pilots and racing sims are ubiquitous for racing teams. If someone who wants to be a better racecar driver is wise to seek out a racing game, then why wouldn’t someone who wanted to be a better killer go seek out a killing simulator?
It’s a good, old-fashioned moral panic. The best things to make a moral panic out of are things that you, personally, have no desire to participate in. Sometimes, moral panics even come up about activities that no or very few people participate in- the panic about Satanic ritual abuse in the 80’s or the medieval blood libels would be an example of this.
But would the causality work the other way? If someone who had no particular desire to be a killer were to use a killing simulator, would that make that person want to be a killer?
No, not at all. I think that’s been studied extensively and the answer is pretty conclusive. That was, of course, what all the panic in the 90s was about. Normal kids getting turned into sociopaths.
The more nuanced question is, if someone already IS a sociopath, and they learn how to be a better monster through some kind of a video game (assuming that’s possible), what responsibility does the video game industry have for that?
For what it’s worth, I think war games are pretty far off the mark when it comes to training sociopaths. I don’t think this is an important problem, and solving it may be as simple as saying, “Hey guys, let’s not make any columbine simulators, OK?” But I think it’s more honest than saying that video games couldn’t possibly have an affect on someone’s violent behavior.
Because the most a shooting game can teach you is tactical awareness about moving through a space. It doesn’t teach the you how to aim a gun, or how to squeeze the a trigger, or how to handle the stress of being in physical danger, or how to overcome the aversion most people have toward hurting another person. So, yeah, if you’re really intent on going out and getting in a gunfight, then there’s certainly some minor training value in practicing ahead of time with a first-person shooter. But you’d be better off going to a gun range, or playing laser tag, or taking a martial arts class. If we’re going to start banning every activity that might give a potential killer a slight edge, the list is going to be very long indeed.
A first-person shooter is a “killing simulator” about as much as a game of football is an “assault simulator”.
Ha, that reminds me of a time I was playing Grand Theft Auto III. I’d developed this habit of taking a shortcut to the mission giver Asuka by driving at max speed off an elevated road, crashing into her parking lot, and crawling out of the car before it exploded. At one point after doing so I recall actually thinking “You know, this game does not teach good driving habits.”
Ha.
On the other hand many people might be horrified to learn what my daughter’s favourite games are: GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption. (She is three years old, and calls them “the driving game” and “cowboy,” respectively.)
I think she likes them because they are enormously liberating, presenting wide open spaces to explore and allowing her to “do” things she is too little to do in the real world, such as climbing, driving, riding, swimming, etc.
They aren’t violent games when she plays. She carefully avoids pedestrians in GTA, and only discharged a weapon once in RDR, accidentally shooting her horse in the butt.
She stops at red lights. 
And Pole Position isn’t a “driving simulator,” but 20 years later the genre eventually evolved into GT5 and iRacing.
I agree with you about first person shooters – they’re not very good killing simulators, and I don’t know that they’ll ever become them. Certainly someone could make one if they really wanted to – think Columbine, the Video Game, with realistic student panic AI and an AR-15 retrofitted to be a controller.
I’m also not advocating banning anything. All I came into this thread to do was post a link and to report on an attitude that I found refreshingly honest. Violent video games have been unfairly pilloried, but that doesn’t mean ALL the criticism is invalid.
“Gamification” isn’t (just) learning things from games, its the integration of games into every aspect of our lives. You won’t just be brushing your teeth, you will be gaining crestpoints every time you brush your teeth, and if you brush every day this week you get bonus crestpoints, which you can use to get discounts on crest. For a very good (and hilarious) talk about it, check out this one by Jesse Schell.
Adding achievements to normal activities doesn’t automatically turn them into games. Every example of gamification I’ve heard of consists of bolting some superficial feature of games (usually achievements) onto a mundane task without changing the nature of the task in any meaningful way. The whole movement boils down to “If you do this boring thing I’ll give you a gold star!”
It isn’t even a new technique. Back in the 1970’s my mom got Green Stamps every time she went to the grocery store. When she saved a whole book they could be exchanged for prizes. Woo … gamification! :rolleyes:
Gamification will run its course, like all management fads. A bunch of consultants will make a bunch of money over the short run, but gradually cynicism will set in as “players” realize that gamified tasks aren’t any more fun or interesting than ungamified ones.
What gamification is really selling is the fantasy that there’s a quick, cheap way to make your employees and customers happy without actually, you know, improving working conditions or making a better product … .
That’s why designer and game theorist Ian Bogost refers to gamification as “Exploitationware”.
That spike is nothing compared to the number of new farmers we’re seeing these days.
The Skinner box phenomenon has probably been around since the dawn of time. People do something for rewards. They’re pretty easy to condition into repeating behaviours even with a low chance of reward if the cost of the behaviour is not particularly high and the cost can be gradually ramped up. It was seen with gambling and drug use before computer games.
Drug use before computer games? Doesn’t that mess up your reaction time?
Video games are pretty cinematic now, and of course some games exist with content probably not appropriate for children, just as with films.
I think some parents are not aware of this and buy whatever game they think Timmy wants. Though age ratings are there, many parents disregard them in a way that they would not do for an R rated video.
But, could games make an adult more violent, or more likely to engage in violent acts?
I would say potentially, yes, for an adult predisposed to such things, but it’s not so much about whether a game contains violence or not. It’s more about whether the game tries to make a case that doing X is appropriate specifically in the real world.
I think in rare cases, they can be the final straw that causes a would-be mass killer to carry out his mass killing.
The only case I can think about right now is the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, he spoke about how much he loved “Dragon Age”, and a fantasist could easily see paralels with his plot.
[ul]
[li]Islam-analogue (The Chantry) who likes lobotomising (Tranquiling) those that it sees as a threat.[/li][li]Secret orders opposed to ‘evil’ (the Grey Wardens)[/li][li]A character and Breivik-lookerlike called Anders who believes terrorism is the best way to justice and freedom and ends up blowing up a state-sponsored mosque-analogue.[/li][/ul]
You laugh but look at the number of farmers in China versus the US. It must be working! Thanks for the tip, Randall!
I think we have to be careful with the word “cause” there. If I’m rude to some guy who unbeknownst to me, is a bit of a nutter, and he then goes out on a rampage, did I cause it?
That’s come from his “manifesto” which is 1,500 pages long and makes just a couple of references to video games.
It’s not so much that they “train” kids to be violent. What they really do in the long run is de-sensitize kids to violence. They teach kids that violence is the first (or only) resort instead of the last.
When I buy a lotto ticket from a vending machine I always choose Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A.
Hasn’t worked yet, though. :mad: