Violent Games 'Almost' As Dangerous as Smoking 545
Via Voodoo Extreme, a Reuters report on some very 'interesting' research into violent games. A study out of the University of Michigan has apparently found that 'exposure to violent electronic media' is almost as dangerous to our society as smoking. "'The research clearly shows that exposure to virtual violence increases the risk that both children and adults will behave aggressively,' said Huesmann, adding it could have a particularly detrimental effect on the well-being of youngsters. Although not every child exposed to violence in the media will become aggressive, he said it does not diminish the need for greater control on the part of parents and society of what children are exposed to in films, video games and television programs."
Worth noting... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, I have to agree. (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm sure that he's probably poisoning all those little children.
Re:Get thee away from me (Score:1, Insightful)
parents yes, society no (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF does society have to do with this? if you dont want your kid watching scooby-doo because you think shaggys a bad role model, thats your idiotic problem. Please dont foist it on the rest of society, we have bigger fish to fry.
So tired of people trying to legislate good parenting.
My take (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, quite simply, absent and detached parents.
The "study" is silly. (Score:5, Insightful)
So what they're saying... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because wow, I'd have quit playing video games long ago if I knew that they had a 1 in 2 chance of killing me [wrongdiagnosis.com].
I suppose the other (albeit less likely) possibility is that this respectable and unbiased researcher may have accidentally used hyperbole in an accidental attempt to drum up fear in support of his findings... And in all fairness, he technically says that smoking is a "slightly larger" danger, so maybe violent media only turns 45% of its viewers into murderers.
Doomed! (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, wait... So only the crazy people will become crazy.
That explains many things (Score:1, Insightful)
The >.5 million in Darfur
The >.5 million in Rwanda
1 million Armenians under the Turks
Oh wait, they didn't have video games...
Re:My take (Score:2, Insightful)
Then we turn around and say, hey..that's bad!
While we are at it... (Score:4, Insightful)
G.I. Joe
Army Men
Toy Guns
Sports (Football, Hockey, etc..)
and the list goes on...
Why not (Score:5, Insightful)
However, it seems pretty clear to me that it must in some form. Play throughout the animal kingdom is basically simulation training. We play to unintentionally practice skills. Video games that involve explicit simulation of violence must be exercising something related to violent behavior. I'm not saying a video game "causes" a kid to do something violent or that parenting and personality don't interact, but it seems inconceivable to me that it has no effect.
Re:While we are at it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh wait. [americasarmy.com] That violence is ok.
Re:Get thee away from me (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets see, violent crime in the UK is pretty steady at 650-900 homicides a year [crimestatistics.org.uk] for a country of 55 million. The recent trend has been sharply down despite 52 homicide victims of 7/7. Of those the vast majority are domestics, killing sprees are pretty much a once a decade affair.
I don't think that you could honestly attribute more than 50 or so homicides a year to the effects of computer games in the UK if you took the most liberal interpretation imaginable.
Smoking causes about 110,000 deaths a year according to the leading anti-smoking campaign [oldash.org.uk].
Allowing for the fact that ASH might well overstate the case somewhat the fact is that we don't have a single UK case where computer games are confirmed as a major factor. So I would be pretty confident in stating that smoking is at least a thousand times more dangerous than video games and the evidence points to the difference being more like a hundred thousand.
So let us imagine what the difference between the UK and the US could be. Oh yes the fact that you let every loony and criminal arm themselves to the teeth with cheap firearms. The fact that this is not even mentioned as a possibly significant issue in the article kinda shows that the entire study is worthless. Or is the idea here that controlling fictional materials in which guns play a role is somehow more politically practical than controlling actual guns?
You can tell that its a fit up job in the first sentence "After reviewing more than 50 years of research on the impact of violence in the media,". In other words this is not an objective study, its a fishing expedition through existing research. Lets take a look at his bibliography [umich.edu]. Does not exactly look like the guy is a disinterested party here.
Sure lets talk about controlling violent video games, right after the US adopts the UK gun control laws.
Re:What has America come to? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My take (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That explains many things (Score:5, Insightful)
The >.5 million in Darfur
The >.5 million in Rwanda
1 million Armenians under the Turks
Oh wait, they didn't have video games...
What the fuck does that have to do with anything? Most of the victims of those genocides weren't helped by front and side airbags, either.
Re:Doomed! (Score:2, Insightful)
I did have an annoying suspicion as to the possibility of monsters under my bead until I was in 1st grade, though. I did not believe it to be true. But, still, something in the back of my mind kept nagging me about it. The only fictional charactors I believed in at the time where the ones that other people I knew personally, almost always adults, told me where real. (Think Santa Clause, etc...)
Re:Get thee away from me (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Get thee away from me (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Get thee away from me (Score:2, Insightful)
So what you're saying is armed thugs take what you've rightfully earned, and give it to someone else for purposes you probably don't agree with, and that violence keeps people doing what they are told, even when it may not be to their benefit.
In addition, violence and the threat of violence is one way to avoid tragedy-of-the-commons scenarios. Finally, violence and the threat of violence can deter future violence from occurring.
No. Threat of getting caught can be a deterrent. What good is threat of violence if there is no real threat? Being put in jail is not violent, so its not violence deterring anyone.
Its not that I disagree that sometimes violence is called for (the Revolutionary War, for example), just don't agree with your examples.
Re:parents yes, society no (Score:1, Insightful)
I agree with that. I think good parenting has gotten hard to find these days. I blame this on the way our society now functions. The women needed in the workplace along with the men due to more expenses to pay forces parents to rely on babysitters and daycare more often. So that makes it more difficult for parents to monitor all the things their kids see.
Also, if kids are playing violent video games and watching TV shows with some violence and the parents educated their kids on what is right and what is wrong there usually wont be a issue. I hate the fact that irresponsible parents try to get everyone else to change their behaviour so their kids be affected. Nobody can give kids a slap or tell some other parents kid not to do something.
Where were these stupid anti-gamers when this was released? http://youtube.com/watch?v=JaUjSBm_HiA [youtube.com]
Re:Get thee away from me (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Get thee away from me (Score:3, Insightful)
If we were basing our judgments based upon actual harm done, we would be trying very hard to get alcohol off the market and make distributors pay huge fines. Even if we ignore the much larger toll on the people drinking excessively, the harm done to other people by alcohol still beats tobacoo in terms of societal damage.
So in those kinds of terms, why not just blame tv and video games for the trouble. It sure as hell couldn't be the things that kids aren't doing when they are sitting in front of the tv. I mean it would be insanity to suggest that the lack of exercise or proper social interaction are the real culprit.
Re:Get thee away from me (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's how we should raise kids. If I ever have a son, I don't want him to be a bunny rabbit. Children should know the value of being gentle and sweet, but must be strong as well. Today's world is every bit as dangerous and violent as the ancient one, and it is rather sad that only the military are given "survival skills". And yes course they don't get these things from video games - video games pale in comparison.
As for pr0n, it is much less threatening to society then chaotic sexual relationships yet it's objectification of women is far more of a psychological impact than any game. Kids raised in a "healthy way" will not have a whole lot of time for either video games or pr0n, but games come out being more... tasteful as a form of entertainment
Re:Get thee away from me (Score:5, Insightful)
Natural is a word with no well-defined meaning, it's a completely relative term. If you try to define it as anything that is done naturally by creatures then that includes every act ever performed, as humans are creatures too, and trying to define them out of the picture means it's no longer that which is done in nature, but that which is done in nature by creatures other than humans. Well you know what? School's unnatural then, name one animal that sends it's young off to another parent to learn math? Math's unnatural too, and so is Physics and, well, just about everything else. No matter how you define natural you'll end up either stating that most of human behavior is unnatural, or it's all natural (if you try to say 'done by a significant number' then you have to define significant, and you'll end up either defining perfectly normal behavior as unnatural or all behavior as natural).
Violence is just as natural as Sex. There, I said it, bring on the hating. Plenty of predators kill other creatures, even if they have no intention to eat the carcass. There's little difference between that and human violence, or at least human violence isn't anymore unnatural than that.
Re:Get thee away from me (Score:5, Insightful)
I and millions of other people are able to clearly draw the line. There are some people who aren't very good at that, however, and when they are exposed to a violent message, regardless of the medium, they become more aggressive and violent themselves. You could suggest that none of this should be allowed because some people won't be able to handle it, but I don't think that's the right way to go. Everyone is responsible for their own actions and if some person feels that such material affects you in a negative manner, then perhaps that person shouldn't consume that content.
Regardless of what you believe, humans are a violent animal and it's a big part of our history. I don't think that ignoring the problem is somehow going to solve it. If you think that any of the recent video games, movies, books, etc. are overly violent, just look at some of the ancient methods of torture on Wikipedia or other web sites. They tend to make anything you see in Manhunt or Hostel seem fairly tame by comparison. The big difference is that the movies and games are just imagination whereas these methods of torture were actually used.
Re:Get thee away from me (Score:2, Insightful)
Predators prey upon other creatures for food. I'm not saying that it's impossible for a lion to kill a smaller creature just for the hell of it (or to hone their abilities further), but I feel that the comparison you're drawing doesn't fit. Never in the history of the world have we observed lions massacring lions by the millions or lions snapping one day and taking out 30 other lions before taking their own life. It simply doesn't happen. When lions (and other creatures) fight each other, it's to prove which one is stronger. The difference is akin to the UFC vs say, a school shooting. Both are violent, but there is a *very* important difference: in the UFC, both parties agree to fight under certain rules to prove who is the stronger fighter. After the fight is over, both sides reflect on how it went, think about what they could improve and train harder for next time. Thus UFC, like animals fighting their own species to prove dominance, breeds strength. The school shooting, on the other hand, is an insane, parasitic destruction of life. The school shooting only serves to temporarily gratify the emotions of the shooter. At the end of the day, a bunch of people are dead, cut down like lambs to the slaughter. There are no heroes and the community is weakened by the events.
The bottom line is, sex is much, much more natural/healthy than the kinds of violence depicted in a lot of video games. For the life of me I can't understand why everyone thinks that, at some point, you may have to pump some one full of lead with a machine gun but sex is this terrible, unspeakable evil. I mean, the reason we're sitting here right now posting on Slashdot is because at some point in the past, our parents had sex and viola, out we came. *cringes* How many of our parents have ever killed someone? There's a very important distinction between violence in the sense of rough housing and wrestling and violence in the sense of total war and massacre.
Prey an unarmed population ? (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact is, as it was already discussed in Slashdot , some type of weapon LOWER the barrier to usage. For the same reason police are more readily using a taser than a baton, joe-anybody in a situation where rage/violence escalate will have a lower barrier to violence using a firearm than say, a knive or a blunt object. Any discussion ignoring that fact is doomed to be propaganda. Allowing the population at large to get firearms, don't mean that people will be able to defend themselves better, it means that John & Jane Doe which would normally not have committed a crime because knifing would have been too much for their stomach, would readily take the firearm and fire a bullet from a safe distance.
Try to take this a little bit serious (Score:4, Insightful)
This research is not saying that this or that individual will necessarily be more violent after having played a video game; but it says that there is a measurable effect on average. The article doesn't detail what research method was used, but it could be something like comparing a group of people, who play violent games with a group who don't. And of course, one might question whether the interpretation of the results is correct; but jeering stupidly is not the way, I think.
I think the reasoning behind is quite sensible: You can train your responses to situations in a simulator - this is used in many places, not least the military. So in a violent game you learn to respond with violence to certain situations; also, when you do something often enough, it becomes routine, and you feel less emotional impact from what you do. Wouldn't it be reasonable to suspect that playing violent video games might harden people against the consequences of violences to others? To most this will not be an issue, but there is a frighteningly large proportion of the normal population whose grasp on reality is not very strong - they are not very far away from a mild form of actual psychosis, one might say, and those people will be less able to distinguish between what happens in a game and what happens in reality. I don't know actual numbers, but there are more than most think. On that backkground, isn't it reasonable to research the subject of violence in the media question whether we, as a society, would not be better off there was less of it?
Re:Get thee away from me (Score:3, Insightful)
Thing is that the harm done to society by alcohol prohibition was considerably worst than than caused by alcohol itself. Indeed there dosn't appear to be any recreational drug where prohibition actually results in less harm to society. Most drugs, especially when subject to regulation and quality control, are nowhere near as dangerous as well armed gangsters running a black market.
Re:Get thee away from me (Score:3, Insightful)