Call of Duty, GTA V do not make youth more violent Millions of people are currently preparing to settle down and play the latest versions of Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. But when it's game over, will they then put down the controller, pick up a weapon and go cause some mischief? Absolutely not, if you believe the findings of a new report exploring the relationship …
Yeah pretty sure they mixed the titles up there have sent an email to their corrections address.
Pretty unsurprising study though, makes sense if people have a harmless outlet then for the majority that can only be a good thing.
Probably still a tiny minority that could be tipped the other way though.
As for 'unsurprising study' --- the decline in youth violence seems to be mostly down to falling environmental lead levels (basically since 'unleaded fuel' became obligatory), as it seems exposure in your infancy just screws your neural nets and primes your for unrestrained behaviour later.
The peak and fall of youth violence (globally, wherever crime statistics are available) lags a decade a half after the peak and fall of environmental lead levels. (The causal link evidence is not much stronger than that, but it's everywhere precisely repeated, pretty much independent of economy, climate and society.)
So it seems to me that the violence of videogames causes either some more, a little less, or the same amount of violence --- but is a far weaker trend than the global violence trend. However, you can study separate individuals as you know those who play or not, since when, and you can make them switch habits (for pay, for a while); in the 'lead' situation, all are in the same cohort and there's no control group. [Yeah, some far-off tribe without petrol perhaps --- but they also have a completely different society so no use for comparison.]
What i found interesting was the actual scaremongering reports making gamers more violent.
My theory is that people looked at the report and felt subconsciously that they could blame video game for there violent out bursts.
But then i am not a physiologist in fact the only degree i have is in beeralogolgy.
It's the "my client is a victim, not a perpetrator" defense. When defense attorneys have nothing else, they'll try to diminish the guilt by blaming someone or something else -- jazz, comic books, computer games... -- and what they choose to blame depends on what is currently fashionable.
A bunch of scaremongering reports about games in media will therefore make more attorneys more likely to try to shift blame to computer games (rather than, say, rap music or hollywood movies).
@Vociferous
Not just that but it's also an attempt to present an easier target in place of whatever you are trying to deflect attention from.
As many people (including yourself) have noted, this keeps happening - they just update the scapegoat from time to time as people grow up. You have people blaming 'rock and roll' and then the people listening to rock and roll grow up and are the ones looking for something to blame. So, they blame heavy metal - that's clearly the problem. The people who grew up with heavy metal (not necessarily listening to it, but in that era) in turn become the ones looking for a scapegoat and bam! - there are computer games.
Computer games are slightly different due to their interactivity but there is still no evidence that they are responsible for violence. Thankfully, people who grew up with 'violent' video games are now in their 30s and 40s and so video games are less useful as a scapegoat.
I wonder what my generation will blame when we get into our 50s and 60s . . .
I'll be a bit off the wall..... I spent time in a totally violent place, Vietnam with the Marines. So why aren't I violent? If we take the violence breeds violence argument to it's logical conclusion, I and a couple of million others should be serial killers in civilian life.
Hundreds of studies have failed to reach any conclusion on fictional vs real violence. That it's hard to find any correlation shows that if any correlation exists, it's extremely weak. The only reason people keep searching for any link is because "common sense" suggests that fictional violence gives rise to real violence, contradicting evidence be damned.
Hypothetically: even though the correlation is demonstrably weak in a population sense; for a small subset of somehow suceptible individuals, it could be strong. And with the strength of the "suceptible" correlation being drowned out by the noise and other confounding factors (eg lead, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread) in the dominant non-suceptible population. Whether or not this might be true I do not know, but it's not implausible.
> given how complex this area is and how hard to isolate
Easy ... in the last 20 years violence in society has been steadily dropping. In the last 20 years there has been a huge explosion in computer games; If video games make people violent then we would be seeing more violent crime not less
Then prepare for me to ignore it. The point of Academic papers is that the author has done all the leg work and research to answer a question. The title is supposed to tell us, in as few words as possible, what they discovered. The same goes for news reports and any other form of reporting. If I wanted to read a lot of words before coming to the point of the piece, I'd pick up a novel.
To me the question mark is a big red flag saying that the following piece is nothing but click-bait (along with such words/phrases as '... might surprise you..' and '..you must read this before...'. Incidentally Buzzfeed, upworthy and their ilk are blocked on my firewall...
Game: "Congratulations on reaching the Nazi fortress! To defeat Hitler and his SS henchmen, please purchase the "Assault on the Fuhrerbunker" DLC for the low price of $29.99 by entering your credit card data in the space provided."
Me: Urge to kill....growing....growing!!....GROWING!!!!!!
..not because of the content but because of the CHEATING BASTARD COMPUTER. I swore i would never smash an xbox 360 pad into the ground, but after playing through COD4, on Veteran, i did.
The game was rock hard on that difficulty setting BUT i completed it without any violence to the Gamepad. Then came 'Mile High Club' the bonus level, which on Veteran you had to complete in under a minute.....that's when i had the problem. You see when you shoot the enemy sprites IN THE HEAD on all the other levels and difficulty settings, they drop down dead! But not on this pigging level they don't. Oh no, you shoot them in the HEAD on this level and on Veteran and you will find that they don't DIE but lay on the floor emptying a DESERT EAGLE into you whilst holding the gun 'Gangster style'.
After 78 failed attempts to get past the final baddies, so that i could make my way up the stairs of the aeroplane, i once again noticed i was getting shot to pieces but for the life of me i couldn't figure out who was doing it as i had just massacred all of the baddies and was in fine fettle. Then i panned down and low and behold there,on the floor, was one of the baddies introducing me to the contents of his gun. My BLOOD PRESSURE at this point was through the roof, but armed with this Knowledge i felt that i should have 'One More Go'. So off i went blasting my way through the baddies, on my 79th go waiting for this prick to pop his little digital head up. When he appeared, BANG, BANG, BANG with the shotgun i went and down he went lifeless on the floor of the cabin, only to come back to life and kill me once again! That's when i lost it, and BANG, BANG, BANG, went the Gamepad on the floor.....one of the vibration motors exited the pad, such was the violence of the impacts, that it bounced off the floor and cracked the Fishtank (no fish harmed, by the way).
So what did i learn from this experience?...NOTHING! The following day i tried again to finish the level, and fucked up my spare pad whilst hissing. I've never been VIOLENT because of the CONTENT of a video game, but i do get FRUSTRATED from time to time and this frustration isn't because i'm crap at video games but because ot the CHEATING BASTARD COMPUTER.
Not that I play many games these days, but years ago, I found there was something rather therapeutic when real life got me wound up, by taking out my aggression on a bunch of polygons on a computer screen.
I think Rise of the Triad was the one of choice at the time, either that Quake II or Doom II.
Someone left to allow that frustration to remain bottled up? That's when they get violent.
I've been playing computer games on an off for the better part of 25 years and so far I've managed to resist the urge to murder anyone! Shocked? So am I.
I could believe that for a very very small percentage of the population video games could precipitate violent behaviour but they are people that are not well balanced already and it could equally be films / books / conversation that triggered the behaviour.
For the vast majority of adults though it's down right crazy to suggest that we are so easily manipulated.
Will people become violet from observing violence real or viritual?
No, not necessarily. However observing it makes you used to observe it. Where goes your threshold for when violence is to much violence. How much do you tolerate to observe? Where is your threshold for acting when you observe a wrong doing? Or when did you start to accept it as a natural part of life?
If you think it's part of life in this world that people get mugged, murdered, wars. And it's just things that we need to learn to deal with. Haven't something gone lost from you then?
You are definitely not free from being affected in one way or the other. TV commercials would not exists if what we view didn't affect us.
So the fact that gamers don't kill other people on the street, just because they did it in a game for entertainment. Doesn't change the fact that violence as entertainment is far from upbuilding, or healthy entertainment.
I play games too, I do play Halo 1, but I have opted out from CoD and similar as I find them glorifying violence way too much, i'm not ready to allow them to bring myself to lower the standards than I'm withholding.
Anyone that says your are not affected from movies or games simply lies to them self a lot. Just think about when you were a small kid, and you for the first time saw something that was giving you the first adrenaline rush. From that point you (including me) have lowered your standards for what is acceptable to you.
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