Don’t worry, this is not going to be another of those “video games are not a problem because: Japan” postings; there are plenty of those.
Have you noticed how US lawmaker’s response to ${just about anything} reveals how profoundly ignorant they are about ${just about anything}? This is perplexing, because they have people who presumably research ${just about anything} and write speeches that make the lawmakers sound less than completely ignorant. I’m convinced that the system has broken down and the research/think/speech-write process has collapsed down to power-hungry nihilists who make whatever mouth-noises they deem necessary to make the questions go away.
The first computer game I played was Space War on a DEC PDP-1 in 1978. It was a violent game with “sole survivor” gameplay
Ignorant mouth-noises about computer gaming periodically come from all political quarters, which I attribute to two things:
- There is no NRA equivalent for gaming
- Gaming is an undefended target, which makes it ideal for politicians, who are at their finest when delivering unopposed beatings
If you’d like to learn about the history of politicians demonizing gaming, I recommend David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague [wc] which recounts the moral panic over comic books in the 1950s. All you need to do is read that book and mentally substitute “computer games” for “comic books” and suddenly everything will become clear. Let me note that the government even found a genuine comic book-hating academic, sort of a Jordan Peterson-like character who was willing to make up whatever pseudoscience was necessary to substitute for actual science in the government’s argument. I.e.: it was a typical American social sciences experiment.
Fast forward a few decades and now there are social sciences experiments trying to determine if playing video games makes you more violent. I do not propose to review those here, but instead let me draw a few lines in the sand: if you’re thinking of commenting about such-and-such experiment, please make sure first that the theoretical mechanism by which the experiment functions does not contain priming theories. Unfortunately for the social sciences, priming theories appear to be bunk; the studies on which they are based have not been successfully replicated (i.e.: the original studies were a wad of methodological errors or outright fabrication of data) or have demonstrated a minimal effect. In other words, social sciences studies that attempt to measure things about computer gaming have mostly demonstrated that you can pay college undergrads to play computer games. That’s something I had already worked out by the time I was in high school.
The premise is that violent games get the gamer excited, get their adrenaline pumping, and make them more likely to respond in the context they have just been training. That’s why, when you play Fallout New Vegas you are more likely to break the front of a candy machine in with a crowbar (and shoot anyone who complains) than you are to feed a couple of quarters into it. Right? You’ve been “primed” to respond in a certain way and it very slightly nudges you to be more likely to respond the same way in other circumstances. What games were the school shooters playing before they went on a rampage? Have you noticed that, while certain political assholes consulted their soulless advisors and were told “blame gaming” nobody asked “hey what games was the school shooter into and how much time did they spend playing it?” Well, since pretty much everyone plays games of some sort or another, it’s pretty easy to blame the games without actually knowing anything. The problem with that is, you ought to know something about the person’s gaming diet before you blame mass murder on it.
What if the shooter was a Candy Crush enthusiast? Or a Tetris obssessive?
See the problem? If we start getting into the games in detail then we need a more complex ontology of gaming. Is Tetris a game that encourages (formerly: “primes”) our love of organization, or our fear of disorder? Is a person who plays Tetris more likely to re-arrange their end mill collection, or to shoot up a bar? What about Candy Crush? I know it sounds like I’m being silly here (I am, slightly) but there’s a critical point to make here: games are all different, because that’s why we play them. If all organizing/categorizing games were the same, and encouraged our organizing/categorizing behaviors, then we’d only play Tetris and there would be no need for anyone to write endless knockoffs. There would be a set of categories of games and we’d all be expected to know that people who play Call of Duty are all violent-minded hyper-aggressive authoritarian wanna-bes who have fallen for the government’s secret plan to normalize walking around in Syria blowing the residents to pieces.
Oh, oops, did I cut a little close to reality there? The politicians who are saying “games made these shooters lose control” (well, that and homosexuality and drugs) are choosing to deliberately ignore the fact that the more violent games (Call of Duty will serve as a stand-in) look like ads for the military. Would you jackasses in Washington make up your minds? Do you want biddable cannon fodder for your imperial ambitions, or would you like a nice peaceful civil society?
By now I expect I’ve made my point: you can’t just point at “gaming” and say “there’s your problem, nyuk nyuk!” because America’s problem is that it is the worlds’ most militarized society that has ever existed. We make Imperial Rome look like a bunch of hippies in comparison! The Romans never held the loaded cannon of nuclear death to everyone in the world’s head at the same time – though, to be fair, Sulla probably would have done that if he could have.
I am tempted to briefly re-activate my twitter account so I can blast a few comments to the effect of: “Let’s restrict video games AND military advertisements that glorify violence.” It sure would be fun to push for some legislation requiring the military to represent military service more accurately and appropriately. I can see the ad in my mind already; it’s based on my service at Ft Dix, NJ, in the summer of 1983. Picture a young soldier he looks optimistic yet serious and world-weary because he knows he carries a huge responsibility. His uniform is broken in and he’s lugging a great big M-60 machine gun on a shoulder strap. As the morning sun halos the fog coming up in the pine barrens, it paints the soldier’s face in profile with the lighting of a renaissance master. Muted light glints off the oiled metal of the M-60. The soldier is … picking up cigarette butts thrown on the ground by other soldiers. He knows he’s going to do a lot of useless pushups if the NCOs see a cigarette butt on the ground and he wishes that all the smokers in the platoon would be forced to swallow the damn things. He’s ready. He’s a warrior. He’s serving. He is a still pool of contempt. He’s an army of one and he knows it.
Now, let’s take an excursion into linguistic nihilism, because I think this affords us a great case study for doing so. Were we in a discussion with one of these political jackasses, we would torture them by endlessly parsing and sub-parsing their definition of “video games” You may wish to review [stderr] first before we start the vivisection.
We begin our enquiry by asking innocently “what do you mean by ‘video games’?”
Our target might respond by saying something like: “I am referring to violent games with violent imagery like Call of Violent Duty XXVI” but if they don’t they are doomed because we quagmire them with:
“Are you aware that the computer gaming world is massively complex and diverse? It includes some games that are full of violent imagery like Call Of Carnage but such games are a minority, less than 10% of the overall market. In fact the most popular games right now are games like Farmville, Words With Friends, Candy Crush, and The Sims.”
Now, our interlocutor ought to be able to see what’s coming next. It’s a demand for data: “You sound very confident that video games are the problem. Can you explain how playing The Sims encourages mass murder?” [other than starving your sims to death in the basement, I mean] you can be conciliatory and lay a trap for them by saying, “sure, there are plenty of games that glorify violence, like Cthulhu Eats Congress and the Punchable Mitch McConnell app, but do you have any evidence that the shooters were playing those games before they started their attacks?”
The attack is launched simultaneously against the claim to knowledge regarding gaming, and the claim to knowledge regarding a specific person’s gaming appetite. Since their entire point hinges on knowing what a “violent game” is, and that it affected the shooter, they’re in trouble if they can’t land a solid definition of the kind of game they are talking about. So: don’t let them. If you’re mean you can pepper your questioning with asides like, “for someone who’s saying that gaming causes violence, you seem to be remarkably ignorant about gaming.”
As always, “going meta-” is the best offense. You can go straight for the jugular with a razor-sharp argument like: “I don’t think you know very much about gaming, actually. Maybe you should convince me otherwise by offering an ontology of types of games and how and why which are more associated with violence and which encourage candy crushing.”
If they say anything about social science experiments, hammer them with the replication crisis and the problem with priming theory, and suggest their education is out of date.
I’ve been in exchanges online about gaming many times, and have generally been amazed at how people promote very naive stereotypes about games and gamers. For example, did you know that 30% of games are purchased by parents for their kids (looking at the low end of the age group) and that some families (about 20%!) game together. [Let’s not talk about my friend R. D.’s family that play Call of Duty as a squad and use practical military tactics. They do quite well and R. always enjoys mentioning that the top-cover sniper is a 12 year-old girl] The most interesting fact you can bring in to destroy someone’s knowledge of “what a game is” is that the vast majority of gaming now takes place on smart phones during commute-time.
Just keep digging into your opponent’s definition of “gaming” and they will probably retreat behind a smoke-screen of terms like “hard core gaming” or “first person shooters” [innocently ask if Fruit Ninja is a first person shooter or not] or what is “hard core gaming” [stderr]
They will find it impossible, we claim, to define “gaming” in a way that allows them to claim toxic violent games without also owning Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja. It’s actually impossible to find another game that’s quite like Call Of Duty except for all of the fucking Call of Duty games.
Pepper them with a few statistics like that 59% of gamers are certain they will vote in the next presidential election and your work should be done.
PS – They are “FLAT PANEL GAMES” – nobody uses a CRT anymore, you jackasses. Do you call them “FAX games”? No!
The ESA’s fact-sheet about gaming/gamers is ripe and delicious: [esa] Basically, it’s the “how to win any argument about gaming” guide.
I have to say, I have once or twice found myself playing certain games a lot, then inadvertently interpreting the world around me in terms of the game when I then go outside. On the way to the shops after a long session of The Sims 2 I found myself idly redesigning all the buildings around me to be more aesthetically pleasing. Move that window a few units to the left, make the top floor symmetrical, add a picket fence, that sort of thing.
On the way to the train one morning after a few nights of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, I found myself noting that certain backstreets and alleys would be good places to ambush unsuspecting mortals and drink their blood. This would perhaps be considered a less socially acceptable activity than redesigning people’s houses without their say so.
So I am willing to entertain the notion that games can cause a certain psychological response. But reading books, eating food and thinking about horrible people in the media do that too. I’ll get back to you if I ever get arrested for attempted ambush haemophagy or late-night unsolicited renovations to other people’s property.
I have a family member who loves playing games where she has to arrange five identically colored spheres in a single line. Nonetheless, her home is a mess. Apparently, tidying one’s home is not as fun as playing a game.
Since we are being silly here, I can propose another social sciences experiment: do Pokemon players engage in poaching and frequent dog/chicken fighting rings?
cartomancer @#1
I have never played that game, but I pay attention to buildings around me and I think about how I’d like to change them simply because I have read some books on the history of architecture.
My uninformed opinion is that video games (and 8chan, and, and, and) are not causal, but rather seeds around which, occasionally, a supersaturated solution of crazy/bad happens to crystallize. Without the seed, maybe it would have crystallized around something else, maybe not. But, what the hell do I know?
If I read you rightly, you’re presenting the idea of leading people into a quagmire of infinitely refined definitions as a rhetorical device, not as a logically sound argument?
But anyways, it is generally always worth saying that just because categories are grey and fuzzy around the edges doesn’t mean that the categories don’t exist. When I say “violent video games that lead to mall shootings” you can fuss around and talk about Super Mario all you like, but you and I know that in broad strokes there is a salient category, a category with fuzzy boundaries, that is what we’re talking about. Pretending that the category’s fuzzy edges somehow make the category not exist is disingenuous, although it can be rhetorically potent.
The category probably doesn’t cause mall shootings in any meaningful sense, but it does exist.
Andrew Molitor @#3
A category of “violent video games that lead to mall shootings” probably does not exist. If you imagine that such games do exist, well, good luck proving that.
A category of “games that offer players the option to kill non-player characters or other players” might be possible to pinpoint, but still, the boundaries are fuzzy. Again, you cannot prove that playing such games alters a gamer’s behavior in the real world. When people simply assume that games might make players more violent also in real life, that’s just prejudice against video games. For example, will you also assume that going to a theater and watching a Shakespeare’s play makes the spectators more violent? I shall remind you that said plays feature numerous protagonists who are murderers. How is watching a Shakespeare’s play any different than playing a video game if both feature murders?
I think it might be more interesting to talk about themes and messages in violent games than whether games can be categorized as “violent” and “non-violent.”
For instance, Wolfenstein is an immensely popular video game series about shooting literal Nazis. Is a Nazi sympathizer with thoughts of bringing their guns to a crowded public space likely to be influenced by a game about shooting Nazis?
Or in the vein of military shooters, there once was a game called Spec Ops: The Line. It masqueraded as a typical military dick-swinging pro-America interventionist game, and opens with you on a squad assigned to fight “terrorists” in Dubai after a catastrophic sand storm. Then a few hours in, the game pulls a wonderful bait-and-switch, and it shows you that every single thing you do is making the situation worse. It has more in common with Full Metal Jacket or Apocalypse Now than it does Black Hawk Down or Saving Private Ryan. The game even prods you in its later stages with messages in loading screens like, “You are still a good person.”
Obviously it ought to belong to a whole different category from Call of Duty. Would a mall shooter play it? I dunno. But if a pro-‘Merica gun fanatic played it and thought about the themes and ideas, it could change them.
On the other hand, there are games out there that literally simulate school shootings, or have you shoot unarmed gay people, or other such fucked up things. I don’t think these games should be banned, but that’s not the only conversation we can have. These games shouldn’t have a platform on which to sell or advertise them. They’re not going to convince an average person to go re-enact the game in a public place, but someone who’s already stewing on the idea of mass murder might end up stewing even deeper.
My point is that the conversation can become much deeper, more interesting, and more educational than the pointless slinging of rhetoric that we see more commonly, and I think that conversation is likely to be more productive with people on all sides of the issue.
Also, the video game industry does have an “NRA.” It’s the ESA and it’s just as terrible. However, they’re spending more of their time defending selling gambling games to children and gambling addicts than worrying about violent content in video games. Also, they like supporting tax incentives for the wealthiest video game publishers.
In the past, they established the ESRB to get regulators off their backs on the violence question, and for the most part it worked. Now they’re trying to co-opt the same system to address the gambling and shopping addiction problem (the ESRB can apply a warning for “in-app purchases”), but crafty video game publishers are now implementing their “in-app purchases” after games have already been released and reviewed, so they get around that rating anyway.
I’m pretty sure there’s some useful middle ground in between “there is a direct casual link between these specific cultural products and these specific instances of violence” and “this class of cultural products has absolutely no influence on the ideas and attitudes of people who consume them”.
A lot of the discourse around the impact of various cultural depictions of violence seems to edge pretty close to arguments about how you can’t prove the precise aetiology of a specific cancer… Maybe not, but if you work with PCBs, live next to a superfund site, and smoke 40 a day, there’s gonna be some elevated risk there.
Andreas, I don’t mean any of those categories. I thought I was being pretty explicit, I don’t mean any precisely definable category.
What I mean is that what some politico goes on about “violent video games!” you and I both know pretty much what he’s talking about. There may in fact be exactly zero extant games that precisely fit the definition, and in fact the definition is itself blurry. But for any given game you could probably assign a degree to which it fits. Maybe Halo is 80% and Super Mario Cart II is 15% and Candy Crush Saga is 3%.
Whatever. It doesn’t matter. The point is that just because something is fuzzy doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. The politician does in fact mean something, and in fact we all know what the politician means. Pretending that there is no meaning, or no shared meaning, is disingenuous.
When I say something like “Big dogs scare me!” I am being imprecise in many ways. You can say “well what’s a BIG dog, anyways? Do you mean dogs over 60 pounds? Or do you mean pit bulls? Or what?” and the reality is that the definition of “big dog” here is fluid and situational. We could spend all day arguing, but your point would probably be that pit bulls are super maligned and I am an asshole because I don’t love them, and the whole exercise would be disingenuous. My statement was in fact meaningful, despite the fact that nailing down the exact details is impossible.
Language is imprecise, but somehow we manage to communicate with it anyways, of we choose to do so.
(full disclose, I like dogs just fine, the only dogs that scare me are the outright vicious and the ones that communicate poorly, and I own a pit bull mix who I adore)
invivoMark says
“[The ESA is] spending more of their time defending selling gambling games to children and gambling addicts than worrying about violent content in video games.”
[CITATION NEEDED]
Loot boxes are about as much “gambling” as buying a pack of, say, Pokemon cards.
@WMDKitty 9:
You’re right. Buying a pack of cards in a trading card game is gambling. You’re exchanging money for the chance to get something valuable.
I’m not saying that gambling should be illegal, but it’s regulated for a reason. Gambling addiction is real, and we should not allow companies to prey upon people with addictions.
Fortunately, it’s fairly easy for parents to control their children’s spending on a card game, since one generally goes to a physical store to buy cards, and parents usually don’t hand their children their credit cards. But when all transactions are made electronically, often entirely through the app itself without having to enter credit card information, it can be surprisingly easy for children to spend their parents’ money.
There are multiple stories of children spending hundreds if not thousands of their parents’ money on loot boxes and other in-game purchases. Sometimes it is even without realizing it – in one case, a child didn’t think the money was real; in another, it was a young adult with mental disabilities that prevented him from understanding what he was doing. Here are some of those stories:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48908766
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48925623
And it’s not just that gambling is possible in these games. It’s that they’re designed with predatory marketing and monetization in mind. They’re designed to be social games, where you can show off your loot box prizes, or where rare items offer gameplay advantages in multiplayer. They’re designed to hook players early, then become “grindy” so that players want a shortcut to the prizes they want. They often refuse to let you simply buy whatever loot box prize you want, because the publisher wants you spending money on the gambling. At least if you’re playing a card game like Magic or Pokemon, you can just buy the deck you want.
As this scientific study shows, loot boxes are designed to prey on people with gambling addictions: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0213194
Is that enough citations for you?
WMDKitty@#9:
Loot boxes are about as much “gambling” as buying a pack of, say, Pokemon cards.
Reveal did a terrifying expose into online gambling addiction and how facebook and facebook gaming companies tapped into people’s tendency to fall into risk/reward cycles:
https://www.revealnews.org/episodes/harpooned-by-facebook/
When I listened to it I kept thinking “what is WRONG with these people?” except that they’re just vulnerable to a few basic attention hacks and what amounts to pavlovian training. There are some horror stories from extreme cases like one woman who spent all of her retirement money on a facebook game. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Part of the problem is that facebook and the game companies that have loot boxes make it very very easy to just click and get more. So, uncontrolled kids can use their parents’ credit cards and back up the truck on loot boxes – then when the parents try to get the transaction erased, well, good luck with that.
99% Invisible did a good podcast episode about how online games have been optimized to grab attention:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-78-no-armed-bandit/
As InvivoMark says@#10: these things are optimized to appeal to people with gambling compulsions. The current state of the art is to use Facebook data to predict which customers are most likely to fall into a compulsion feedback loop, and help get them there, by offering them VIP access and other enticements. It’s capitalism on parade!
invivoMark@#10
From the article you linked:
A careless parent fails to pay attention to their child and commits two dumb mistakes at once, and therefore entire genres of video games ought to be banned? Seriously? Maybe instead of complaining the parent should have used a unique pin and paid attention to his e-mails?
If you dislike some game, don’t play it and don’t buy it for your kids. The fact that you dislike something doesn’t give you a right to campaign for said thing to be banned. Why is it so hard for all the people who dislike some video game to just not play said game and shut up?
On top of that, I seriously don’t get all those clueless parents who give their children free access to a bank account and afterwards whine about the financial problems they have gotten themselves into. My own android phone is not in any way connected to my bank account. I never buy anything with my phone. And I’m an adult. If somebody really wants to give their children access to a bank account (I think they shouldn’t), there exist tools for limiting how it can be used. That’s what passwords and parental controls are for.
It is not uncommon for societies to elect to regulate things that have the property that “committing two dumb mistakes at once,” say, causes the user harm. The regulations of this sort are certainly a bit random and occasionally capricious, but it certainly is neither weird nor rare to propose some sort of regulation.
Dunc@#7:
I’m pretty sure there’s some useful middle ground in between “there is a direct casual link between these specific cultural products and these specific instances of violence” and “this class of cultural products has absolutely no influence on the ideas and attitudes of people who consume them”.
I agree. It’s a great big nasty stew, though, and I don’t think there’s one chunk we can point to as responsible. We also are far too eager to let some good suspects walk without examination (e.g.: gung ho military advertising)
Next up: are US soldiers that commit war crimes “mass shooters”? What about Ssg Bob Bales? Was My Lai a mass shooting or was it a war crime and what’s the difference? Was the shootings at Charlie Hebdo in Paris a war crime or a mass shooting?
What I’m getting at is that governments have done a great deal to insulate themselves from the rather fucking obvious relationship between militarism, military indoctrination, political indoctrination and mass shooting. When I was in basic (1983) they tried to make us sing “kill a commie for your mommy” and I got a lot of extra pushups for asking “which commie? and what did they do?” Former friends of mine who were in Iraq told me that (because it was hot and boring) playing Call of Duty was a team activity a lot of the troops spent collective weeks playing. Can we say there’s a relationship between playing Call of Duty and picking up your M4 rifle, getting in your uparmored hummvee, and going out and shooting someone? There might be. Treating military thugs as nationalistic heroes might just help encourage chairborne rangers to grab a gun and start a crusade, etc.
If I were to try to build an ontology of games I’d break them up into problem solving / you find problems and problem solving / problems find you then there would be finer subdivisions from there. I believe that playing a quest-based game (let’s say World of Warcraft) encourages a completely different problem-solving approach from a head-to-head first person shooter. They also stress profoundly different capabilities – let’s say WoW is more strategic than CoD (not that WoW is a strategy game, but in one game you’re optimizing for taking the player’s executive functions out of the loop in favor of map-knowledge and in the other you’re optimizing the executive functions for map use [I am trying to describe the cognitive difference between running a dungeon instance and a boss-fight versus a 6-vs-6 shootout]. The point is that playing PUBG is a very different experience than playing CoD even though they are both “first person shooters” – would that experience translate into real world behaviors?
I’m a big fan of cooperative strategy games and I think that WoW and Portal 2 are among the best I have ever played. I have played more WoW than I want to think about and I do not think that my cooperative behaviors in WoW have mapped into my real life very much. I think I like WoW exactly because it provides a narrow surface for human interaction that is tightly controlled by the player – it’s what I wish real life was more like, not the other way around.
Andrew Molitor@#13:
It is not uncommon for societies to elect to regulate things that have the property that “committing two dumb mistakes at once,” say, causes the user harm
That’s definitely right. I believe, in general that there could be highly beneficial complex rules that amount to, “three-fingered Ronnie the woodworker, you are not permitted to buy a metal lathe. In fact, you are not permitted to buy a motorcycle with an engine larger than 120cc” Because society has determined that you are either unusually accident-prone or you’re dangerous with machinery. Three-fingered Ronnie might not be a great guy to give a submachine-gun to, even if it was only to repair the damn thing.
Andreas Avester@#12:
A careless parent fails to pay attention to their child and commits two dumb mistakes at once, and therefore entire genres of video games ought to be banned? Seriously?
There are multiple failure modes going on here, which need to be unpacked.
– The parents have indicated that they are probably unwise to have a credit card, since they were so unwise that they effectively extended infinite credit to their kid
– The kid has indicated that they are not a very good credit risk
– The gaming company deliberately softened the safety mechanisms one might expect to find in something that does financial transactions
To translate that into an example I am familiar with: some parents should not be allowed to buy their kids a lathe, because they don’t think enough to see if the kid can use it without killing themself and – further more – some lathe manufacturers that want to sell lathes with the safety controls removed ought to be held liable for the damage that may result. And everyone knows that Junior is the kind of person who will put his tongue on the lathe chuck if you tell him not to. In other words: none of these people should have credit cards, lathes, or kids in the first place.
Dunc @#7
I am comfortable saying that “popular culture, including video games, books, movies, music, advertisements, etc., contributes to people developing various attitudes about life, and often said attitudes end up being harmful for people who have adopted them and the society they live in.”
I was careful with my word choice here. I said “popular culture” rather than “only video games”; I also said “contributes” rather than “causes.”
Firstly, I have a problem with the video game bashing crowd. In itself, the medium isn’t any better or worse than movies or books or whatever have you. Let’s imagine some game developers created a game where you as the protagonist go around date raping women. Your victims are portrayed as shallow, bitchy, disgusting creatures who deserved it. Alternatively, a writer could write a novel where the protagonist is doing all the exact same things. Both could be potentially harmful, and the medium itself (game versus a novel) wouldn’t be the problem, the content would be the problem.
Moreover, I would be comfortable saying that such a game or novel could potentially contribute to the player developing misogynistic attitudes. I wouldn’t be comfortable claiming that such a game or novel is going to increase the amount of date rapes. When fiction features actions that are illegal, majority of readers or players don’t even think about trying to do the same thing in real life. And those few who do must have had pre-existing mental problems to begin with. If an average normal person watches “Game of Thrones” or plays some video game about combat, they won’t go out and kill somebody the next day just because they saw a fictional murder on the screen.
I’m cautious with proclaiming any causal link between getting exposed to any fictional violence per se and becoming more violent in real life. Simply playing a strategy game where you have to defeat the opposing army shouldn’t lead to an idea that murder is a good thing. Then again, I can imagine some very specific scenarios where fictional violence could contribute to developing negative attitude towards some groups of people. Let’s imagine a fictional game where the protagonist must catch illegal immigrants who are wandering around their town committing crimes. The game makes it clear that said immigrants are brown people from some specific country and the game also portrays said people as evil. Such a game might potentially contribute to xenophobic attitudes. But at this point I shall remind that watching Fox News also contributes to developing xenophobic attitudes. That alone shouldn’t be sufficient to cause a normal and mentally healthy person to become a murderer.
Andreas Avester@#12:
Just a thought experiment
A careless parent fails to pay attention to their child and commits two dumb mistakes at once, and therefore entire genres of video games ought to be banned? Seriously?
A careless parent fails to pay attention to their child and the child commits 22 murders with the father’s AR-15 rifle, therefore entire genres of rifles ought to be banned?
The problem is that we have a cause/effect situation where there are multiple causes that depend on eachother. Human reasoning is optimized to try to pick out one cause from that web of causes and effects (Aristotle’s proximal cause) whereas a causal nihilist would step back, raise their hands, and say “I have no idea!” Aristotle’s framing was that the causes are “sufficient”, i.e.: the effect cannot happen without those causes – but it falls down from there. Let’s say you have:
– gun
– inattentive parent
– kid
A specific mass shooting requires all three of those causes; we can remove any one of them and nothing happens. Humans then rummage around in their brains and say variously “get rid of the gun”! or “the kid is crazy!” or whatever – when causal webs get more and more complicated eventually everything is part cause of everything that happens and we wind up with a great big argument about what caused anything to happen and what should be done.
So we have:
– easily manipulated kid
– game designed to manipulate money out of kid
– parents that extended the kid unlimited credit
I can look at those causes and see a recipe for disaster, which could be averted in this case by addressing any one of those.
I’ll note that (I strongly suspect) the credit card company’s terms and services probably say something like “this is your credit card, not your kids’ though you are liable if you are such a fool that you give your credit card to a 14 year old so they can gamble online through facebook.” That’s why nobody is pointing at the credit card companies so much, though since the credit cards are part of the causal web in the situation one can say with some truth: “if the credit card companies required better authentication so kids couldn’t use their parents cards, none of this would happen.” Or even “smart parents set up a paypal account for their kids’ allowance and let the kids learn how money works.”
Marcus, @ #14: Exactly. The reason I said “cultural products” rather than “games” is that I think it’s absurd to try and claim that there’s something specific about games that makes then significantly different from the rest of the culture. “Violent video games” are just one subset of “violent entertainment”, which is just one expression of a widespread cultural fetishization of violence. It’s everywhere.
Andreas Avester@#17:
Firstly, I have a problem with the video game bashing crowd. In itself, the medium isn’t any better or worse than movies or books or whatever have you.
– Ray Wylie Hubbard
Andreas Avester @12:
First of all, I never called for “entire genres of video games [to be] banned.” Pay attention to what I say because if you are going to keep putting words in my mouth then this conversation is NOT going to be productive, and I’m just going to walk away thinking a whole lot less of you.
Second, think about the games involved. FIFA has been a staple of video games since the ’90s. People who grew up playing FIFA are now raising children of their own, and they never had gambling in them until recently. Do you think it should be common sense to worry about your child cleaning out your bank account playing FIFA??? Do you think every parent should just KNOW that FIFA has loot boxes that their child might end up buying repeatedly???
And think about HOW children are getting access to their parents’ money. In one case, the child watched their parent enter their credit card to buy the game, and later copied what their parent did. In other cases, the game simply remembers financial information and a kid can simply buy things with the press of a button. In at least one case, the parent was IN THE SAME ROOM as the child when the purchases were made – they were being a responsible parent and watching the child, not noticing their money was being spent, not realizing they had to be hyper-vigilant about it!
These aren’t games that are obvious about their predatory nature – they’re educational games, they’re games marketed for children, and their interfaces are designed to make it as easy as possible to siphon money from your bank account to their coffers. Like Google Play, the default is usually to simply memorize every credit card number and expiration date so you can spend spend spend and never give it a second thought.
Oh, but it’s all the stupid parents’ fault, right? Fuck them for not being ultra-vigilant around GAMES FOR CHILDREN, right?
Gambling is regulated. Loot boxes and predatory marketing should be regulated. Not banned, but regulated: transparency in marketing, interfaces that aren’t deceptive, clear warning labels, confirming payment information each time, and keeping all these mechanics out of games meant for children.
EA is wealthy enough, it doesn’t need people like you defending their business practices.
Dunc@#19:
“Violent video games” are just one subset of “violent entertainment”, which is just one expression of a widespread cultural fetishization of violence. It’s everywhere.
Yup. That’s why I wanted to point out that the US is a hyper militarized culture that has been on a constant war-footing since the civil war. It’s useful to have a population that you can spin up into lethal violence at the drop of a bloody shirt, but the downside is that they’re unstable and they just want to fucking kill someone, anyone, and you’ve got to stay clear of the end of the barrel.
My reply @ #19 is equally relevant to Andreas @ #17. The only thing I’d add is that we have to be aware that there is always some fraction of the population who are not “normal and mentally healthy”.
Excuse me while I ramble on a bit.
Mass shootings (civilian) are extremely rare events. School shootings interest me, as a former attendee-of-schools. I am pretty confident that you’d be hard pressed to find a high school student who has NOT ever thought “God damn it, I wish someone would just shoot all those fucking guys” where “fucking guys” means whoever is tormenting you at the moment. It certainly occurred to me.
What is rare is to follow through, and when it does the wheels have fallen so far off that the shooter doesn’t even manage to find the shitheads who beat him up every day for 7 years, but instead manages to shoot some randos he barely knew before he blows his own brains out. By the time you’ve driven the Honda to school with all those guns, I assume you’re pretty agitated and not thinking very clearly. Honestly, I’d be surprised if these guys can *see*, it’s pretty much just blood pounding in the ears and adrenaline.
My base assumption is that, while there are very few mass shootings, there are a LOT of people who occasionally think thoughts that have that shape. In between, there is a kind of path from the vague occasional “FUCK those guys, BANG!” thought to actually going to the mall with 5000 rounds in your pants. I dunno, maybe 50% of the population occasionally has a moment of badthink, 20% has them pretty often, 10% buy a gun, 1% buy 10 or more guns, 0.1% draft a manifesto and a plan, and whatever miniscule percent it is actually suit up and get into the Honda.
The USA is not unique in that it has mass shootings, it is distinctive in that it has so many of them. This suggests to me that there is something in the American Psyche that leads people down the path that leads to a mass shooting substantially more easily. In Switzerland all the percentages are just a lot smaller, or maybe they shrink down faster? My theory is that we accidentally baked it into the founding myths of the nation, with a powerful and resonant message of individual liberty, of My Ability To Choose as, somehow, the defining characteristic of the nation.
However the intermediate numbers play out, the miniscule percentage that actually suit up and get into the Honda, here in the USA, is 10 or 100 times greater than it is in other countries.
The notion of Individual Liberty Over All leads neatly to things like Westerns (movies) which both feed ON this idea, and amplify/refine that same idea in a kind of feedback loop, and pretty soon we’ve got the idea that maybe the answer to our problems, whatever they might be, can be found in the barrel of a gun. The idea that I can successfully defend my home from a burglar with a pistol, or gun down the gang threatening all these innocent townspeople, goes hand in hand with the idea that the right way to deal with my sadness is to go to school and shoot that girl who loudly rejected me in the cafeteria, and 10 of her friends. In America more than other countries, the gun presents itself as a solution.
Do video games help to normalize that idea? Sure, to some degree. Probably pretty small. Do military ads? Yep, they sure do. As do our military adventures abroad. Our soldiers are indoctrinated with the idea that, somehow, going to foreign lands and shooting what seem to be random people is the solution to America’s problems. Why not to your own problems? While not everyone in the USA serves, a lot of people do. The ones that don’t get a lot of propaganda dressed up as “news.”
[“causal nihilist” = I am skeptical of our ability to assign cause/effect for anything more than the most trivial situations. The scientific method appears to be a way of trying to manipulate cause and effect into such narrow situations that we can actually argue with some confidence that “A causes B” and that’s why it’s the most valuable epistemological tool humans have ever invented. Because real life situations are not controlled science experiments we appear to experience them as a collection of causes that are related to a collection of effects; greater precision than that seems to be an illusion promoted by human brains’ ancient survival mechanisms.]
Notably, absent the underlying American Myth, it seems to me possible that things like violent video games and movies don’t get as much traction in redefining what is normal. In Latvia, perhaps, Westerns might be as widely, or more widely, watched than in the USA but end up having less of this specific form of cultural impact because (I speculate) Latvians don’t have the same kind of national myth for these genres to chew on and amplify.
Andrew Molitor@#24:
Our soldiers are indoctrinated with the idea that, somehow, going to foreign lands and shooting what seem to be random people is the solution to America’s problems.
WAT!? Next you’re going to tell me it’s not?
Well, given that I am sitting here eating cheerios directly out of the box, I have to say that whatever the hell our politicians are doing it’s working well for me!
Marcus @#15
Sure, I can see the benefits, but how does the society find the right balance between preventing self-harm and abusing individual people by stripping away their freedom and autonomy? The first example that comes to my mind is doctors trying to prevent me from harming myself by obtaining a hysterectomy: “Andreas has displayed a desire that might indicate a mental illness, thus a responsible surgeon should prevent Andreas from harming their own body and refuse to perform the surgery Andreas has requested.” Attempts to prevent self-harm have a tendency to turn into tyranny. After all, there do exist adults who have demonstrated that they can responsibly engage in potentially addictive behaviors like gambling or drug usage. Thus banning gambling and drug usage harms all the people who would benefit from being able to engage in said activities. Sure, I know that there exist mentally unstable people who shouldn’t go anywhere near a casino. But how can the society sort out who should or shouldn’t be prevented from doing whatever they want to do?
Marcus @#18
I’m cynical and by default I expect the worst. Some companies selling entertainment are predatory. They want to abuse and manipulate their customer. Thus they create shitty games with in-game purchases. All the regulatory agencies are subject to lobbying efforts, so I might as well consider those useless. All kids are easily manipulated.
Thus the only remaining solution how to avert a disaster is for parents to not give their kids unlimited credit. Being careful and paying close attention to your bank account is the only way how an adult can prevent a financial disaster. The world sucks. Everybody is out there to get your money. Thus the best solution is for some person to accept the reality, stop whining, and take reasonable precautions to prevent a financial disaster.
By the way, I see a difference between:
A careless parent fails to pay attention to their child and the child commits 22 murders with the father’s AR-15 rifle, therefore entire genres of rifles ought to be banned.
and
A careless parent fails to pay attention to their child and the child spends $ 1000 on in-game purchases, therefore entire genres of games ought to be banned.
Firstly, in #1 victims are innocent bystanders; in #2 victims are the parents themselves. Secondly, in #1 there is immense harm that cannot be fixed; in #2 harm is smaller and the parents will recover from the financial loss after their next paycheck.
I support a ban on civilian ownership of guns, but I’m much less willing to ban all games with in-game purchases. By the way, personally I consider such games bad and manipulative, and I wouldn’t play them. But I don’t think that I have a right to ban something just because of a personal distaste for said thing.
invivoMark@#21
Yes. Predatory games exist, so it should be common sense to worry about letting your child play one of them.
Yes, a responsible parent should first examine the game they let their child play.
Back when I was a child, my mother never let me watch over her shoulder how she did various digital financial transactions.
It’s possible to prevent a device from remembering your financial credentials.
I’m not proposing that parents should be paranoid or “ultra-vigilant.” Allowing your child free access to your bank account is careless and stupid. People should take at least some very basic steps to prevent themselves from losing money. For example, here are some things I do to mitigate potential risks:
* I don’t even have a credit card.
* All my online purchases are made with a debit card that has less than $300 on it at all times. If I need to make a larger purchase, I specially transfer money to said card.
* My mobile phone is in no way connected to my bank account. It would be impossible for me to buy anything from my phone.
* I always uncheck every box that offers my computer or some service to automatically remember data for financial transactions. Even if I have shopped in some place before, every time I have to type my card data or PayPal credentials again and again.
* I’m not married and I don’t have children, but if I had a family, I would never give any family member access to my bank account. My family members would have to explicitly ask me for money every single time they wanted something.
* My bank offers a service where they send me a text message every time money leaves my bank account.
* I’m not an avid gamer, I only play video games very rarely. Yet even I know that games with in-game purchases exist. A parent who lets their kids play video games should know such a basic fact about them. Personally, I never play these kinds of games, because I prefer to skip the disappointment of not being able to obtain something in a game.
Are we sure that these video games aren’t literally ads for the military? Not that I know anything about this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the military partially funded some games, kinda like they do with movies.
I’m sensing an immense amount of privilege from you, Andreas.
As if thousands of dollars is a loss that any family can just recover from at the end of the month.
As if every adult is savvy about how electronic transactions work and how companies take advantage of people through them.
As if every adult understands modern video games enough to immediately tell if a game marketed for children might have gambling mechanics in it.
As if you could reasonably expect that no child could ever find out their parents’ credit card information.
Yeah, it’s possible, but some companies actively try to hide that button and it is easy to miss it if you are not savvy.
I’m sure you’re smart and educated, and your family was wealthy enough not to worry about losing a couple grand here and there, but do you think that applies to every family in the world? Do you think it’s reasonable to expect every parent in the world to be as financially cautious as you are?
The degree of victim-blaming here is astonishing.
@Siggy 31:
Yes, to at least some degree, they do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemia_Interactive
invivoMark @#32
You don’t know a shit about my family. Fun fact—by the time I was 10 years old (that was in 2002), my entire family was surviving on less than $200 per month. My mother made sure I didn’t know where she keept her money, because she couldn’t afford to loose a single dollar of it. People who struggle to survive have a tendency to pay close attention to what happens with their bank account.
The degree to which you excuse carelessness is astonishing.
Andreas @34
Okay great, then you know what the problem is with your previous statement: “… and the parents will recover from the financial loss after their next paycheck.”
Of course, the question remains, why did you write that previous statement? You know it isn’t always true. Given that you don’t seem to care about any form of consumer protection, and that you seem to want to dismiss every event as the fault of the stupidity of the parents, maybe you want to portray gambling in games marketed to children as a non-issue. But if you have to lie in order to support that portrayal, maybe you ought to reconsider your position.
Given that you claim to come from a poor family, it seems that you should support consumer protection.
@invivoMark:
I used to know a motorcyclist who was not wearing a helmet and took a nasty wipeout. Aside from a cleanly broken leg he was fine and healed up as though nothing happened. That convinced him he was some kind of expert on motorcycle safety and told people stuff like how the more open field of view with no helmet was actually safer.
My friend Fred M took him aside and told him he was going to get someone killed and handed him his Arai Superlight that had been stuck under the frame of a car and maintained its shape long enough to save Fred’s head. Fortunately, the lesson took.
Sometimes people survive something and jump to the conclusion that they were smarter or better and the people who don’t survive were just lazy and stupid and deserve no sympathy.
Giving your child an electronic device with a direct access to your bank account is reckless. Even if games with in-game purchases didn’t exist, the child could still purchase dozens of normal games and apps thus spending hundreds of dollars.
Failing to regularly pay attention to what happens with your bank account is reckless. There are multiple schemes how a complete stranger can steal your credit card data. All the banks I know offer notification systems that automatically inform you each time a purchase is made from your bank account. Just use them. It’s not that hard.
Having a credit card with a large credit limit is reckless. You can accidentally spend more than you can afford. A thief can get your credentials. You don’t even need to be a parent for this to go wrong.
Not paying attention to what games your child plays and not using parental controls is reckless. If a parent doesn’t pay attention, how can they know whether the child sticks to age-appropriate entertainment? If a parent gives their child some toy, they have a responsibility to learn how said toy operates and what the potential risks are.
The only way how a parent can have their finances permanently devastated by in-game purchases is by doing numerous reckless actions simultaneously. When some person is that reckless, something bad is bound to happen with their finances, one way or another. If you want to live in a world where each person is free to be reckless with their finances and have a guarantee that nothing will ever go wrong, well, that’s not going to happen.
As long as the parent takes at least some reasonable precautions, their finances won’t be permanently devastated and they will recover from the loss. For example, if you enable notifications for payments, you will spot the problem very quickly after the first few payments are made. Accumulating hundreds of dollars worth of debt takes weeks of neglect. If somebody is that reckless, then they are bound to experience some form of monetary loss sooner or later anyway; one way or another, but it will happen.
Any form? Where did I say that? And where did I say that I don’t care about consumer protection as such?
Where did I say “every event”?
The links you provided described mostly events where the parent had done multiple immensely reckless actions simultaneously. The idea that a parent should be free to give their child access to a bank account and be guaranteed that nothing will ever go wrong is stupid. Welcome to the real world—reckless actions can have negative consequences. Sure, I feel sorry about people who have experienced misfortune, but that doesn’t give them a right to blame others for their own stupidity.
In order for people to live in a free world, they must also be willing to take at least basic safety precautions. If you want to enjoy the comfort of using online banking, you should pay attention to what you do with your bank account. If you want to enjoy the comfort of driving a car, you should drive carefully in order to minimize the risk of accidents. If you want to give your child some potentially dangerous consumer products like electronic devices, you should first learn how they work. The moment you shift the responsibility about your wellbeing to others, you basically give up your freedom. The only way how to ensure that nobody ever gets hurt in a casino would be to ban casinos. The only way how to ensure that nobody ever gets hurt by a video game would be to ban all video games. Without such a ban, some people will get addicted. Some will spend more money than they can afford. Some will spend too much time on these forms of entertainment, thus hurting other aspects of their lives. That’s how freedom works—individual people have to take responsibility about their own actions.
Since you mentioned consumer protection as such, it’s reasonable to demand that various good must be correctly labelled and safe under typical usage conditions. But demanding that everything must be absolutely foolproof so that no reckless idiot can possibly harm themselves is silly.
look up America’s army. i have no idea if it’s still around, it’s not the sort of game i care about.
i think we’ve established that the parents are not responsible. are you willing to damn the kids because of the sins of their parents?
i think we have some duty of care to those around us, and that includes making sure kids don’t suffer when their parents are useless fucks (the actual details of how to do this are incredibly complex. if you want me to write child protection policy and procedure again you have to pay me. a lot)
@Andreas Avester, as someone who used to do formal debates and study them, you should know better than to repeatedly engage in using several logical fallacies.
Firstly you were arguing against a strawman by pretending – even after being made explicitly aware of it – that your opponent argues for baning in-game purchases or games containing them. They never were, they made it clear fromt he star that they argue for establishing codified set of rules/regulations for how such business should be conducted to minimize harm.
Secondly you are arguing as if only perfect solutions to any given problem were worth pursuit and as if your opponent wanted such absolutely perfect solutions. That is nonsense. The fact that there always will be people capable to fuck themselves over despite regulations is not an argument against having any regulations at all.
Thirdly you are arguing as if only the parents were the victims of this, and commpletely ignore the harm to the children. If parents get into financial problems, it is their children who suffer too. Children who cannot know be
Fourthly you are arguing as if it were possible for people to be completely rational agents who are always 100% informed in advance about possible negative consequences of their actions. That is just not possible and everybody will fuck up sometime somewhere. The purpose of regulations is to reduce the probability and scope of the negative consequences of such fuckups in order to allow the people to learn from their mistakes. Despite your denying this, you are engaging in victim blaming. A victim of their own ignorance is still a victim.
All in all, you are arguing like a libertarian, conflating personal freedom with absence of regulations. World is more complicated than that.
Charly @#39
Citation needed. Where did I say that I’m against establishing a codified set of rules/regulations for how such business should be conducted to minimize harm?
What I’m arguing against is the overall attitude that people are entitled to 100% idiot proof technology and the assumption that people should be free to engage in extremely reckless behavior and have a guarantee that there will be absolutely zero negative consequences.
Citation needed. Where did I say that only perfect solutions to problems are worth pursuing?
Citation needed. Where did I say that I’m against any regulations at all?
The fact that there always will be people capable to fuck themselves over despite regulations is an argument for why it will never be possible to design 100% idiot proof technology. This means that people will always be forced to use technology in a responsible manner. They will be forced to learn how some technology works, they will be forced to actually enable existing parental control mechanisms. Google can design two-step authentication software for gmail logins. It’s still up to each user to actually enable it. Banks can design systems that notify their users about payments made from their account. It’s still up to each user to enable said notifications. Tech companies can design game consoles with parental control software. It’s still up to each parent to enable said tools.
All the cars are sold with locks. They are equipped with seatbelts. Now imagine a person who absolutely refuses to lock their car’s doors or use a seatbelt out of sheer laziness or carelessness or stupidity. On top of that, they even refuse to learn how to properly drive a car. When the inevitable happens and the car is stolen or crashed, the owner gets angry and starts complaining about the fact that they were sold an unsafe car, which wasn’t 100% idiot proof. The fact that the user refused to use existing safety mechanisms gets dismissed. It’s the car manufacturer’s fault that something went wrong. This is how your position sounds to me. Giving your child an electronic device that has a direct, unlimited, unsupervised access to the parent’s bank account is about as stupid as refusing to lock your car’s doors. Modern electronic devices and banks already offer numerous safety mechanisms to prevent kids from doing what they shouldn’t do. It’s parents’ responsibility to actually enable and use those tools. It is inherently impossible for some business to design an electronic device that is 100% idiot proof. Just like a car manufacturer cannot force a driver use a seatbelt or lock their car’s doors, so a company that sells smartphones or game consoles cannot force parents to use parental control tools against their will.
Instead of acting like idiots and afterwards blaming others for things going wrong, people should use at least some of the numerous already existing tools that are intended to ensure their safety.
Citation needed. Where did I say that a child’s wellbeing cannot be harmed by their parent’s idiocy? Sure, it can happen. But the only way how to reliably prevent 100% of all the cases where parents’ poor decisions harm a child is by putting all the kids in orphanages.
Citation needed. Where did I say that humans are “completely rational agents” or “always 100% informed in advance about possible negative consequences of their actions”? People routinely get themselves killed due to irrational decisions or not being informed about the dangers. If the state allows people to climb mountains, some inexperienced climbers will hurt themselves. If the state allows people to drive cars, some reckless person will fall asleep at the wheel. If the state allows people to exchange goods and services, some careless people will make bad impulse purchases. If people are allowed to do {any action}, some inexperienced individuals will always fuck themselves. Nonetheless, most of the time various actions are allowed, because a significant portion of the population still benefits from being able to freely do some action.
Citation needed. Where did I say that I oppose all the regulations?
I only think it’s unreasonable for a parent to want to give their child unlimited, unrestricted, and unsupervised access to the parent’s bank account and expect regulators to ensure that there can be no negative consequences whatsoever.
Citation needed. Where did I deny that “the purpose of regulations is to reduce the probability and scope of the negative consequences of such fuckups in order to allow the people to learn from their mistakes”? I’m perfectly fine with accepting this as the purpose of regulations.
Citation needed. Where did I say that a parent who unknowingly has their bank account emptied cannot be called a victim? I’m perfectly fine with the statement that “a victim of their own ignorance is still a victim.” I’m only arguing that people would benefit from taking at least some basic precautions to avoid accidentally becoming victims.
Citation needed. Where did I indicate that I’m a libertarian? And where did I indicate that I cannot tell the difference between personal freedom and absence of all regulations? I strongly recommend you to stop telling other people what they think.
Overall, I don’t particularly mind regulations about what can be inside games marketed towards children. After all, in general, children and parents do benefit from such regulations. What bothers me is how the current absence of one specific regulation is blamed as the sole reason why some parents suffered a misfortune. Parents are trying to brush off as insignificant the fact that they did something immensely reckless and failed to use at least some of all the countless already existing tools that are designed to prevent such financial disasters from taking place. “I did something reckless and suffered as a result, but it’s not my fault, because the state should have protected me from my own stupidity” is a problematic attitude. I do think that the state should try to protect people from making at least the worst possible mistakes. That could prevent some disasters and thus people would benefit as a result of said regulations. Nonetheless “the society would benefit from regulations that protect consumers” in no way proves that “therefore no reckless individual can be held responsible for their misfortune” or “people shouldn’t try to take at least some basic precautions to protect themselves” or “it’s okay for people to act recklessly.” Me agreeing that consumer protection is beneficial in no way requires also lifting all the responsibility from reckless individuals who hurt themselves. Not wanting to engage in victim blaming doesn’t mean that one has to excuse stupidity.
You should know better than to reinterpret other people’s words by ascribing to them ideas they have never articulated. You should also know better than to ascribe to other people logical fallacies that you yourself have imagined. It’s pretty annoying to have another person ascribe to me some odd things that I have never said or thought. In general, trying to tell other people what they said is a bad idea.
Citation needed.
Please stop now.
[Edit: I need to do an Argument Clinic posting about this, but the short form is that when someone starts demanding citations, or evidence, the discussion has veered into “dictionary skepticism” – a lazy form of pyrhhonism that depends on exhausting the opponents’ resources. It’s a scorched earth tactic that says nothing to me but “I want to win this argument and will never stop shoveling this trench until my opponent taps out.” It’s arguing in what the existentialists would call “bad faith.”
I am certainly guilty of this, myself, but I am trying to do better.]
@Marcus Ranum 36:
I would call that part of the Just World Hypothesis. “Something bad didn’t happen to me, so if it happens to someone else, they must have done something wrong to deserve it.”
It reminds me of an argument I once observed where someone argued that we didn’t need vaccines, because they personally haven’t gotten sick in years, and they had a list of precautions they took to avoid getting sick (they claimed they washed their hands immediately after touching anything that someone else has touched). As someone who has spent years studying infectious diseases, it made me cringe.
Andreas Avester @whatever,
Look. If the hill you want to die on is defending the predatory marketing and business strategies of a multi-billion-dollar corporation, then go ahead. It looks like there’s nothing I can do to stop you, and this conversation isn’t going anywhere. I have found your arguments entirely unconvincing, and you haven’t tempered my sympathy for the victims of major video game publishers, including anyone with gambling or shopping addictions who are being exploited for profit.
I had hoped I could convince you to share some of that sympathy, and it’s unfortunate that it appears I could not.
Some observations:
People (like me) who grew up playing video games are old enough now to be buying them for their GRANDchildren. The change, and the pace of change, has been staggering. I grew up playing Pacman. I was taught to play Fortnite by children. I once had to change the settings on my XBox because my girlfriend’s son had spent £2.50 of my money on a hat that didn’t exist – my first and only encounter with that sort of thing. I don’t buy “loot crates”… but I do play games that have them.
If you claim video games can’t/don’t make people more violent, you EITHER haven’t been playing the right games OR are an arsehole making a pedantic point who likely knows full well that they can. I have a love/hate relationship with the Call of Duty franchise, because although victory in online team deathmatch or objective multiplayers games is extremely satisfying, even *winning* induces an endocrine response I can feel. I get noticeably more irritable when I’ve been playing, to the point that I skipped a couple of generations of the game altogether because I didn’t like the person I became when I’d been playing. I’m back on it now, with the habit under control. I also never acted on any changes in my mood because (a) I’m not an arsehole and (b) I live in a civilised country where access to assault weapons is limited to people who might in the course of their work be required to assault something, i.e. soldiers.
But speaking of soldiers – even those guys don’t like killing people. I read somewhere about the army realising that EVEN WHEN THEY WERE BEING SHOT AT, most soldiers (conscripted ones at least) tended to point the rifle vaguely in the direction of the enemy to satisfy their leaders, and fire to deliberately miss. They put this fact down to the training – in training, the men had been using “bullseye” targets, to measure their proficiency. Faced with a live, human shaped target in the field, their natural tendency was in the main NOT to kill.
The solution? Targets that look like people. The logic was, inure the troops to shooting at human-shaped targets, and when the time comes, they’ll follow the training and aim to hit. And indeed it appears this worked, at least a bit.
I was trained to fire an L85A1 at mainly human-shaped cardboard targets, apart from when they let us loose on the virtual training ground, a thing that amounted to a REALLY realistic version of “Time Crisis” using real rifles modded to fire lasers at a video screen. NOTHING in my training approached the realism of running round a Call of Duty multiplayer arena, pointing and shooting at moving, running, realistic 3D targets that shout and dodge and shoot back and which I know “are” actual other humans. You cannot in good conscience pretend that playing that game is not actively inuring at least some of the players to accept a level of violence they’d otherwise reject.
Obviously, your mileage may vary. Not every likes CoD. And other ostensibly similar games (e.g. Fortnite) simply don’t engender the same noticeable endocrine response (at least not in me). So pretending all video games, or even all shooting games, or even all first-person team deathmatch games, are equal just shows ignorance. But quibbling about whether video games influence violence is disingenuous if not also ignorant.
And saying video games are just another aspect of popular culture is also showing ignorance or disingenuousness. You might just as well say that a crude pencil picture of a lady with her boobs out and PornHub are entirely equivalent. A violent book requires one to imagine what is happening. A violent film removes the need for visual imagination, but is still a fundamentally passive experience. A violent video game puts you into the action as a participant. It can’t help but have a more direct effect on your mood and perceptions – if it’s done “right”. (Not all “violent video games” are the same – Hitman, for instance, while having as its protagonist a morally repellent character, requires the player to meticulously and patiently set up situations. It’s the very antithesis of the sort of run-and-gun game you KNOW these people are talking about when they rant about violent games.)
However, all of this is academic. The USA has a mass shooting problem. Even as a keen gamer, I’m prepared to admit that certain very specific video games may be a small contributory factor, along with other things like failing education, declining industry, the crisis of masculinity and the concept of manifest destiny.
But also, y’know – FUCKING GUNS. GUNS GUNS GUNS. FUCKING GUNS EVERYWHERE. It’s hilarious you’d even think about starting to talk to someone who, faced with the US’s mass shooting epidemic, has ANY space or time to talk about anything other than the fucking guns everywhere. Why would you even bother?
Apart from if you like talking about video games and enjoy baiting morons. As you were.