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Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior

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Re: Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior

#471

Post by totony »

iso8859-1 wrote: post #397
vlunkr wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that in most games, the violence is not the goal, just the mechanics. You're either competing with other players, trying to fulfill a quest, surviving the zombie apocalypse, etc. Very few games are really "murder simulators" and when they do come along, even if they are meant to be satirical or something, they are usually controversial.

If the mechanics were sufficient, why are people not posting more pictures of airliners flying into buildings in Flight Simulator? It is a simulator, so it has the best mechanics. The violence is the only thing missing. Flight Simulator will just display a boring dialog saying "you crashed".

There's a middle ground where mechanics are fun but not too easy; flight simulator is just too hard to be that fun in my experience.

Re: Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior

#472

Post by ALittleLight »

afandian wrote: post #117

I'm one of those people who is entirely bemused by violent videogames and films (I'm sure there are plenty of people who would be bemused by my pastimes too). I'm not trying to argue to stop anyone doing it, but I would really like to understand it better. Many video games are essentially simulators of things that we're prevented from doing in reality, because of the laws of nature or society. Whether that's dropping…

I don't think it is the case that physical violence generally is okay in video games. For example, if you learned that someone played very realistic torture simulators you might feel uncomfortable about that, or about leaving your children with them.

I think the idea is that guns and bombs and such are cool, and probably lots of people have the impulse to just let loose some destructive volley, blow something up, shoot stuff, run people over, etc - and video games let them do that without consequence. If you saw someone playing GTA and they were running over drug dealers and having shoot outs with the police - that seems like a pretty wild and fun fantasy. Conversely, if they murdered an NPC, then found that NPC's grieving family members and kept dragging the murdered NPC's body in front of them to make them depressed - that would be more atypical.

In other words - if the fantasy you're indulging is being powerful (guns, bombs, using the car destructively) - then that's pretty normal. If the fantasy you're indulging is sadistic, that's pretty abnormal.

Re: Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior

#473

Post by sneak »

afandian wrote: post #117

I'm one of those people who is entirely bemused by violent videogames and films (I'm sure there are plenty of people who would be bemused by my pastimes too). I'm not trying to argue to stop anyone doing it, but I would really like to understand it better. Many video games are essentially simulators of things that we're prevented from doing in reality, because of the laws of nature or society. Whether that's dropping…

> But if that's the case, why is the realistic simulation of some societal taboos (e.g. physical violence to the point of murder) mainstream, but others (e.g. sexual violence in any of its forms) not?

I think "simulated" sexual violence (that is to say, real-but-consensual violence, as well as other forms of simulated coercion) is pretty close to just as mainstream, people just don't talk about it as much.

Rick is not a real casting agent, and there is no job.

Re: Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior

#474

Post by aidenn0 »

mulmen wrote: post #428
aidenn0 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually great evidence! Much better than "I and many of my friends who are currently successful played violent games and we are just fine." The latter is about as convincing as "My grandfather lived to be 90 and he smoked like a chimney."

Correlation does not imply causation.

A lack of correlation is pretty strong evidence for a lack of causation though. (My personal inability to find correlation is much weaker evidence, since who knows how many confounding variables there could be)

Re: Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior

#475

Post by golemiprague »

stakkur wrote: post #267

It's interesting that we find links between environment, habits, and behavior in every other facet of life , but--somehow, repeated simulations of visceral violence (violent video games) are an exception. This isn't a simple thing to measure. Players of violent video games have diverse environments, social supports, and other factors. These mitigate the effects of playing these kinds of games; in other words, while t…

If your claim is that it is not measurable, like many other social "science" fad research then you can't claim that it goes either way. But it is pretty clear that it is even better for people with background social issues, preventing them from getting out to the street and actually being involved in violence.

Re: Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior

#476

Post by nonbirithm »

dx87 wrote: post #139
afandian wrote: post #117

I'm one of those people who is entirely bemused by violent videogames and films (I'm sure there are plenty of people who would be bemused by my pastimes too). I'm not trying to argue to stop anyone doing it, but I would really like to understand it better. Many video games are essentially simulators of things that we're prevented from doing in reality, because of the laws of nature or society. Whether that's dropping…

I think the difference between acceptance of violent and sexual depictions in media is based on how likely it is to affect people's lives. Almost nobody has a natural tendency to act on violent thoughts, so playing a violent video game is unlikely to cause issues in real life. Most people will have sexual encounters at some point in their life though, so getting an unrealistic expectation of them can cause serious is…

I have heard that Japan is more tolerant of sexual depictions, while less tolerant of extreme violence (*guro"), and the United States is the opposite. A lot of overseas releases of anime/games are censored for mild nudity that passed Japan's rating association. And some popular districts advertise erotic games on massive billboards under large crowds of pedestrians. On the other hand, a mission in a Call of Duty title was changed in the Japanese release so that it immediately ends with an admonishment if you try to shoot civilians.

Re: Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior

#477

Post by aidenn0 »

Mary-Jane wrote: post #408
aidenn0 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually great evidence! Much better than "I and many of my friends who are currently successful played violent games and we are just fine." The latter is about as convincing as "My grandfather lived to be 90 and he smoked like a chimney."

Given the political bent of this forum, I'm curious how people would react to the fact that the same argument could be applied to the prevalence of guns in America, e.g. gun ownership has been steadily increasing since the 50's, but violent crime peaked in the 90's.

Public debate on gun policy in the US is amazingly bad. On one side all regulations and restrictions are bad, on the other side proposed regulations and restrictions are extremely poorly targeted.

The former is probably obvious so here's some points for the latter:

Public debate centers around "assault weapons" high powered rifles and mass shootings.

- 2/3rds of gun deaths are suicides (usually with handguns)

- The vast majority of gun homicides are with handguns

- The broadest definition of "mass shooting" I could find was 4 or more victims (excluding the shooter). That puts mass shooting deaths on par with accidental gun deaths; about 1% of total gun deaths and single-digit percentage of gun homicides.

Now, I'm not saying ending mass shootings is a bad thing, but it's as if everyone worried about traffic fatalities in the US was informed by watching "The Fast and the Furious" and wanted to ban forced-induction sports cars and was super worried about deaths from underground road races.

Re: Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior

#478

Post by aidenn0 »

Mary-Jane wrote: post #408
aidenn0 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually great evidence! Much better than "I and many of my friends who are currently successful played violent games and we are just fine." The latter is about as convincing as "My grandfather lived to be 90 and he smoked like a chimney."

Given the political bent of this forum, I'm curious how people would react to the fact that the same argument could be applied to the prevalence of guns in America, e.g. gun ownership has been steadily increasing since the 50's, but violent crime peaked in the 90's.

As another aside, California (with the harshest gun laws) is one of the only states to show declining gun deaths since 1981. I'd like to see the homicide and suicide numbers brought out separately, since (in most states) any decrease in homicides is completely shadowed by the huge increase in suicides. With coastal California having a much lower gun-ownership rate, I assume people committing suicide choose other means (nobody I know who killed themselves in California used a gun, while 2/3 of those I know who killed themselves in the midwest did, the third being a woman, who is much less statistically likely to choose a gun).

Re: Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior

#479

Post by Avamander »

samschooler wrote: post #83

I feel like this exemplifies the phenomena we see in the news today, and over the past few years has been increasing. Anyone can just say something on the news, and get a bunch of attention and credibility. But in order to disapprove it, we need a 10 year study, and multiple citations plus a large N value. Even then a lot of people won’t believe it nor will they take the science as a more credible source than the ori…

I think this isn't really a phenomena of we see in "news today", it's a really old problem but tech has made it much easier to have your voice heard. We have proverbial phrases about this, e.g. "One fool may ask more questions than ten wise men can answer." and all the different variations in other languages.

Re: Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior

#480

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

yazboo wrote: post #80

I have noticed that many social science articles posted on Hacker News bring out critical comments about study design, doubts about the strength of the study's conclusions, that kind of thing. This submission, on the other hand, is a link to some kind of gaming news website, which links to an abstract for an article in a Cyberpsychology (?) journal which costs $60 to access, and there is widespread and uncritical agr…

Relevant comparison: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25575971
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