Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality • Hacker News Board

Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality

#41

Post by gpcz » Wed, May 13, 2015, 11:57 PM UTC

byerley wrote: post #29

When are we going to accept the scientific evidence that video games (and movies before them (and books before them)) don't fundamentally change a person's philosophy? Books in particular are really good at helping you explore ideas and challenge your preconceived notions, but the subconscious effect is akin to hypnosis, completely incapable of making you do or believe something that you ordinarily wouldn't have. Con…

Can you provide some links to the scientific papers asserting that media doesn't fundamentally change people's philosophies?

Also, if media can't change people's philosophies, what does according to science?

Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality

#42

Post by vacri » Wed, May 13, 2015, 11:59 PM UTC

evo_9 wrote: post #14

I was really hoping Dark Souls was one of his examples. The game incorporates its own take on death/mortality in a way that no other game touches upon. It's also brutally hard and death is actually expected part of the experience; often you can't get past an area without dying first and in a few sequence, you have to die to advance the story.

In Dark Souls, you are dead. Undead. That's the story. When your character is defeated, your essence goes back to the checkpoint because of a magic doodad (that no-one remembers (or manually uses the item, for that matter)).

While in terms of playing a video game that's all nonsense - you have a character, it runs around doing things until it 'dies', so we talk of being defeated as "I died" - in Dark Souls you don't "die", and that's a fundamental part of the story. It's why you are where you are, why the things you fight are where they are. Why some things you fight disappear in a puff of magic smoke, and other things leave corpses. You can temporarily 'become human' in Dark Souls, but that's really just an improved link to the human essence - you don't actually 'return to life'. It really is a beautifully subtle and complex game with it's underlying backstory.

Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality

#43

Post by orthecreedence » Thu, May 14, 2015, 12:08 AM UTC

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #38

astine wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say we are hypersensitized to death, yet also think it's not a big deal. The GP didn't say that we think death is no big deal, he said that we are attempting to convince ourselves that it is no big deal. We are trying to solve the problem of death, yet in doing so we are disconnected to it. You have the causality backwards. In addition, I'm skeptical of your implication that the rate of emotional sensitivity to d…

My first statement was admittedly ambiguous: I meant that the GP implies that the figurative "we" think it's not a big deal from his position, not that the GP themselves think that. We are disconnected from death, and in doing so we are trying to solve its disputed problem? Doesn't seem to be the case, as human desire for immortality is quite ancient, precisely because of how visible death was. As for the last statem…

> they all desensitize us .. to death, or a certain view of it

This could probably have been written better. I was saying that we are desensitized to the idea of death but not to death itself. The two are logically relatable but not the same.

Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality

#44

Post by egypturnash » Thu, May 14, 2015, 1:00 AM UTC

manachar wrote: post #34

> Video Games have gradually turned death, the most (only?) influential and thought-provoking aspect of human existence, into a nearly-unexamined cliché. Death? That thing that happens to everybody and everything (except for that one weird jellyfish). That thing that's is random (oh look, a brick just fell off the truck in front on me and it went through a car window immediately snuffing out the passenger's life), ca…

If the "thousands of copies raining down into a hellscape" bit is in a level, then this TAS suggests that it does keep track, as I don't see that happening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JHPrmQS29k

If it's in one of the cutscenes I have no idea, as those always get skipped in a TAS.

Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality

#45

Post by byerley » Fri, May 15, 2015, 12:16 AM UTC

gpcz wrote: post #41

byerley wrote: post #29

When are we going to accept the scientific evidence that video games (and movies before them (and books before them)) don't fundamentally change a person's philosophy? Books in particular are really good at helping you explore ideas and challenge your preconceived notions, but the subconscious effect is akin to hypnosis, completely incapable of making you do or believe something that you ordinarily wouldn't have. Con…

Can you provide some links to the scientific papers asserting that media doesn't fundamentally change people's philosophies? Also, if media can't change people's philosophies, what does according to science?

The consistent trend going all the way back to the Payne Fund Studies is that someone somewhere thinks they can show some alarmist correlation between media and behavior.

However, the trend always disappears once you've accounted for shoddy research and disregarded short-term effects (i.e. hormone responses). I could cherry-pick you some recent results; the most popular lately seem to be video games and violence or video games and sexism. It wouldn't be very convincing since you can ostensibly find a variety of papers that say exactly the opposite. I urge you to browse through the google scholar results and draw your own conclusions.

Please do note: I'm arguing a subtle distinction here between subconscious subversion and conscious consideration. After seeing a horrifying documentary about war, I might consciously change my philosophy on death because the source is reliable and the information is believable/consistent. However, seeing silly deaths in a video game can't influence me in the opposite way because the source is dismissible and the conclusion is fantastical.

So, to answer your second question in an unsatisfying way: I think it's clear that people change their own philosophies.