Ten year study: No link between violent video games and aggressive behavior | Hacker News Reader

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

gamesage.net

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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 blocks into place, building a city, chasing and eating ghosts, flying a plane, performing magic spells, or engaging in physical violence.

And there's a never-ending push to make experiences more photorealistic, to make simulator even better. From that I can only conclude that people want to get as close to the experience of perfoming the prevented act as possible.

Chopping someone up is heavily frowned upon in real life, but perfectly acceptable to emulate in someone's living room. Somehow the simulation escapes the taboo. And that escape seems to be absolute: In the range of violent acts you could commit, from a gentle nudge to grisly murder, simulation of the most extreme extent is permitted.

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? They are both very serious offences, but somehow one gets a free pass to let anyone pretend to do it, but the other not.

Is it a reflection on the ultimate limits of those taboos in the society that produces most of these games? Or is my logic broken somewhere?

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.

I take it you've never removed the ladder from your Sims pool after they hop in for a quick swim?

To be fair, I was like 10 years old back then!

The millstone that hangs around most people's necks tends to be financial and professional. The sort of psychic violence that comes from having to work for decades and follow an ever-growing social contract is far more harmful to our physical and mental health than any game. In this sense, gaming addiction is more closely related to the absence of a worthwhile link between effort and reward in real life for the majority of people.

The game industry is growing faster every year because the demand for an escape from the dull grind is rising just as fast. The violence is just a peripheral aspect of it.

Another aspect is that it's easier to recognize violence as fictitious. When you are exposed to real-life violence, it feels completely different from anything you've ever experienced in media. There is simply no confusing the two. On the other hand, sexual content tends to be more directly related to the act itself or to complicated emotions around it, even if the material is recognized as fictitious. Sometimes the content IS the act, if we take into account that for a large number of individuals the main draw is the exposure itself.

Unlike with fictitious violence, the tastes of the player/watcher/consumer are in plain view, and we know that these tastes can then easily become behaviors. Much more is revealed than we would care to see. That is why is it considered much more abhorrent.

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.

I would also echo this as well. I play quite a few violent video games, but not all. I do not necessarily seek out a video game because it is violent, but there are mechanics that I enjoy more than others. I like shooter games (Halo, COD) more than I enjoy fighting games (Mortal Kombat, Soulcalibur). Does that indicate that I have a violent desire is to go out and shoot people? Absolutely not.

> Does that indicate that I have a violent desire is to go out and shoot people? Absolutely not.

Perhaps. But does it mean you're more tolerant of violence? And that others such as yourself eventually aggregate to have a collective impact on the broader culture? And what about 10 or 20 years from now, will your non-desire to shoot people still not exist?

Neuro-plasticity effectively dictatess we are what we consume, we are what we do. I'm not disputing your self-diagnosis. But there is science that does.

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".

Because flying into a building doesn't gain you any benefits in the game. It's not part of a goal, it has no purpose.

Since it's not part of the mechanics: as you point out, it's not (frequently) done. That seems to support the claim that it's not about seeking violence.

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.

I'm not necessarily suggesting that the participant in the simulation is trying to do nothing more than commit acts of violence. But if the goal is predicated on committing violence, and can't be achieved without it, then I don't think it's logical to dismiss the violent aspect.

To transpose the argument to reality, a serial killer may see the act of killing as a neutral act pursuant to a goal they consider important. There are plenty of serial killers with manifestos.

Whatever they are trying to achidve, they aren't welcome in society.

Would you make the same argument about a war film? Violence is a necessity there, but it doesn't mean people want to commit or see real violence, or be in a war.

Also, you could just as easily transpose it to something tame in reality. Kids like to put on capes and swing sticks around like swords, not because they want to kill stuff, but because it's fun to play pretend. Turns out grown ups like to do this too, we just call it cosplay and video games.

I think that games with optional violence are more contentious. If violence is the only way, you are putting yourself in soldier mindset pretty quicky. You kill to defend yourself or your objectives. And this makes everything ok because our culture sucks and if you have to kill because that's the rules, suddenly everything is ok and you are absolved.

Honestly I feel like the mainstream games industry is pretty chaste. A large part of the audience is younger, and it is their parents who are buying the games. You want something to be engaging, maybe even edgy, but not so edgy that mom and dad wouldn't want little johnny playing it.

Part of the equation is that combat is interesting to simulate. It has clear rules ( live or die ), a lot of different ways you can tweak the game design to differentiate ( swords vs guns vs spells vs karate ).

The most popular games are NOT that violent. They simulate combat, but the draw is the competition created by the simulation, not the blood and guts. I can't name a game where "chopping people up" is the primary goal. I'm sure it exists, but I would find it dishonesty to disparage an entire medium because of the work of some niche game developer.

I didn't grow up during a time when you could go out and wander the streets all day and your parents would be OK with that. You had to be home. Having friends over and competing over video games was a great way to pass the time. The game we played the most? Super Smash Bros. Rated E, 0 realistic simulations of violence, about as bad as any slapstick film.

GTA3, Vice, SA, 4, and 5 are chaste? Far Cry 3, 4, 5? Red Dead Redemption series? God Of War 1, 2, 3, Reboot? The Witcher series? Mass Effect series?

Are you sure we're talking about the same game industry?

Honestly, GTA has been mellowing out over the years. the antics of running around a strip club beheading prostitutes as might have happened in vice city are replaced with a focus with the main story which most of the time would not be out of place on primetime TV - is it still set in a dark crime world, yes. But they've moved on from the level of shock factor of earlier titles. There's maybe one sequence in the first 40-50% of GTA V I played that I can recall as being very shocking.

Yeah, they totally are. You aren't able to, in detail, say, operate on someone while they write in pain. Or, slowly cut up someone with a swored and watch their organs fall out as you laugh and kick salt in it. You can't try and force an abortion by kicking a pregnant NPC down the stairs over and over. These are just items off the top of my head.

I am not saying I WANT or would play said game, but that level does not exist in these games.

The closest examples of games where the main focus is violence for violence's sake are "Manhunt" and "Hatred". Both very controversial.

I'll add my observation that action movies and games try to evoke a particular feeling (that feeling that causes you to exclaim, "that's so cool!"), and that feeling isn't just from violence. For me, watching an awesome, well-choreographed dance routine evokes a very similar feeling. (And you could probably argue a good kung-fu fight scene is essentially a well-choreographed dance.) If you ever watch a James Bond movie, they're essentially packed with stuff intended to evoke this feeling of coolness, including, but not limited to violence. You'll see parkour, extreme skiing, sky-diving, etc.

I'll also note that most mainstream action movies and games tend to de-emphasize the goriness and injuries from violence (although gore-flicks also exist, especially in the horror genre). Compare a James Bond movie to a more realistic depiction like Saving Private Ryan. When James Bond shoots unnamed bad guys, they neatly fall over with minimal blood. When he blows people up, you don't usually see any blood or dismemberment. They just get thrown by the explosion and lie dead (but intact) on the ground.

My guess is they do this because the audience isn't watching for the injury aspect of violence, and gore can turn off some viewers. I think the violence in action movies (and games) is more about the protagonist winning. It's the competitive aspect we like. The power fantasy. The protagonist showing incredible skill.

As for graphical realism in games, I don't really know of any that specifically focused on making the killing more realistic (I'm sure some exist, I just don't know them). I've seen games advertise realistic lighting, shadows, reflection, environments, water, faces, gun models, etc. When they make everything more realistic, the violence may get more realistic along with it, but it doesn't seem to be the main focus.

I have tried to compare typical fight movies to ballet. Some family disagreed heavily, until I convinced them to sit closer at a production. The physicality of a ballet show is incredible.

It's not true that violent games are trying for realism with the violence. There are a couple of series that went down that path, such as Soldier of Fortune, but most of them don't feature anything beyond blood and "rag doll" physics.

The stories of most of these games are close to a hero fantasy. Having the people you shot scream in terrible agony as their organs fell out wouldn't exactly work with that theme.

The other replies barely hint at this, perhaps because you don't really notice something when it's so pervasive, but the answer is obviously American puritanism.

I wonder about this too. There seems to be some inconsistencies with how society thinks about violence vs sex. Rape and murder are two of the most serious crimes, and both are punished severely; with murder more severely in most cases. But when movies or games depicts extreme violence, including murder, it’s seems as fairly normal and accepted. But when rape for example is depicted, it causes a lot of controversy.

Ultimately games and moves are fantasies. But for some reason living out some fantasies that would be very wrong in real life is ok, but others it’s not. I hesitate to even get into the really taboo subjects like for example pedophilia.

I'd say a part is that the violence is turned toward competition, not emotion. Who's going to win the fight? The emotion part is toned down.

Rape on the other hand is mostly emotion.

Not to mention what competition is there to have over raping? Shooting games are purely competitive, a competitive raping game just sounds dumb.

I suspect such taboos are due more to emotionally-driven Puritanism than anything else. I agree that it’s interesting why we have such taboos in the first place.

The difference between the "kill" taboo and "rape" taboo is: We have a narrative where killing is justified–Good guys killing bad guys–but we do not have a narrative where rape is justified.

Remember the controversy around the game "Hatred", where you play some random angry "antagonist" who just wants to kill innocent people? When the "good guy" narrative breaks down this far, society would reject violent video games as well.

There are games that toe the "good guy" line, most notably Grand Theft Auto. But GTA also has some of the most tame looking violence. I cannot imagine a GTA with the "sadistic gaze" of Mortal Kombat's finishers being widely accepted.

This is especially more palatable if non-humans on receiving the violence. There is strong interest in killing aliens/monsters/demons/robots, but I think it's safe to say there is comparatively little interest in having sex with them. I say "comparatively little" and not "none", because Rule 34.

It is a bit strange. For example, if you're playing Dungeons and Dragons with a group of friends, the choice to murder a child is likely to be met by at worst some groans. Try to have your character rape an imaginary woman, however, and you're likely to not only be kicked out of the game but lose those people as friends as well. I know I wouldn't talk to that person again.

We have a double standard when it comes to imaginary evil that is simply violent and imaginary evil that is repugnant. Make a game about shooting a thousand people and it may win game of the year. Make a game about avoiding prosecution while abusing your virtual pet dog and you'll probably lose your job.

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 issues in the person's life. For example, women who think men should always cater to their demands because that's what's shown in movies, or men who think that women want to be treated the way they are in porn.

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.

If you think violent depictions in media won't make people more violent then how can you then think that sexual depictions make people more sexual or not? People don't have violent encounters in life (or any even that could escalate into violence)? Really?

Seems like you're making the OP's point, something is special about sex in your mind.

I think it's partially a function of how common and brutal is the deed. You can rip people into pieces in game for a family entertainment because it almost never happens anymore. Sexual violence still happens way too often so its nastiness is more real for people.

Also sex is generally taboo way more than just murder. Soldier killin people - good. Even innocent women if it's indirect enough like bombing. Soldier raping people? Oh, no, we can't have that!

Also not all murder is equally safe for entertainment. Chopping enemies on the battlefield - great. Stalking innocent people in the city to murder them... Way more on the edge of what's acceptable. Even gunning down civilians in the airport raised some eyebrows.

As I'm getting older I'm getting softer. Recently I was sad because I unintentionally squashed Jeff in Half-Life Alyx, blind mutant that was pretty much helpless if you were careful about the sounds you make. Game characters cheering totally didn't sit well with me.

I think in general a taboo is something the majority of people cannot see themselves doing. If our civilization evolved in a way where you were rewarded for having as many children possible with as many partners as possible perhaps sexual violence would be a feature of video games.

One way to look at it is violence in video games is a mechanism for “completing a mission” (neutralize those preventing it), financial ends, or survival (whether your pursuers have good reason or not). Those things are tangentially related to our day to day lives but the farthest end of what most people might consider themselves capable of doing in pursuit of extreme success or survival. Plus, death is a normal part of life, so is death by force. It’s normalized in modern life.

But in terms of sexual violence, there’s no real world corollary of survival or prosperity mapped to something so heinous. The real life perpetrator feels some twisted satisfaction over another person, but that’s it. It doesn’t preserve an individuals life or advance their station in life. So it’s not relatable to the majority of folks, even in the deep parts of their mind on what they’d be realistically capable of doing to just live or survive.

You explained very well a puzzle that has been in my mind for quite a while, too. Thank you for putting that into words!

I am amazed that there's so much hypocrisy around different categories of violence in fiction. It's even worse than other manifestations of hypocrisy, because this one seems completely invisible to people — I don't recall having seen this discussed anywhere until I read your comment today.

Case in point: when https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Serbian_Film came out, there was so much talk about it being immoral and/or illegal, and so many (eventually successful) calls to boycott, censor and ban. I have not watched the film, and I do not think I'll ever watch it, because judging by what I read about it, it seems utterly disgusting and horrifying. Disgusting to the level of scenes depicting the raping of a newborn, and the most imaginative mix of necrophilia, torture, rape, and gore. I think I could not stand it, and if I forced myself to watch it, I suspect I'd have nightmares (literally). So what follows is by no means a defence of this particular work, nor an endorsement of gloating over the most extreme and shocking forms of violence an artist/performer can conceive.

At the same time, there are so many depictions of violence in mainstream film, games, TV and literature. By far, most of that violence is done to male characters (and incidentally, also by male characters). That violence is usually not sexual in nature.

As Vladimir Nabokov put it, art has to be transgressive and shocking.

One more idea to consider: violence (as most things) comes in gradations. Murder > torture > punch > pinch. Rape > harassment. Actual violence > threat of violence. Violence to several people > violence to one. Sadistic violence > plain violence > violence as self-defence > physically restraining an aggressor. Violence committed taking advantage of physical superiority > violence among equals. Etc. There is no gradation, however, contingent on the sex of the victim nor on the sex of the perpetrator: violence towards men ≡ violence towards women.

Why then, it is so controversial to depict rape or sexual abuse, but so commonplace to rejoice in depictions of murder, torture and physical aggression?

but somehow one gets a free pass to let anyone pretend to do it, but the other not.

I think you're operating under the false assumption that simulating sexual violence is taboo. I'm not sure that's a given: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_fantasy

> And there's a never-ending push to make experiences more photorealistic, to make simulator even better. From that I can only conclude that people want to get as close to the experience of perfoming the prevented act as possible.

I don't think that's a natural conclusion. Video games are a form of entertainment (or art). They are pretty young. There's usually a period where an art form gets super into "realism" because it's still a challenge and a way to communicate "high production values".

Then pretty good realism becomes cheap and widely available - and the art form pivots to more expressive works that go beyond chasing "realism". So why are high budget games trying to get more photorealistic? Because it's currently an effective way to communicate "high quality work of entertainment, worth at least 60 bucks". It has little to do with the actual entertainment value.

I think it’s a reflection that we have not a general framework worked out. We also don’t seem to entirely want to know “the truth”.

For example the entertainment media on the one hand say that entertainment does not influence people via depictions of violence, etc., to emulate such things. On the other hand they say that how people are portrayed for positive role models “I could be that person” they are necessary and instrumental and thus the need for representing a cross section of the population. Yet on the other hand they would (with good reason) resist showing only positive plots (ala modified 1950s but contemporary).

I agree though. If sexual violence is a non starter then so should lethal violence be a non starter. Else there is a non sequitur in reason.

There's a great reason to discourage one and not the other: There are lots of people out there who have been victims of sexual violence, and these depictions would do emotional harm to them. On the other hand, there are exactly zero people out there who have been victims of lethal violence and might now be hurt if they play your game.

Violence as a part of combat, that is to say, in furtherance of a political objective, provided the violence is against combatants is mostly ok in video games.

Straight up torture - a person who is captive, has already surrendered, etc is not “fair game” in any sense of the word, not even by a stretch. They cannot shoot back, etc.

The same goes for sexual violence. If a character is raping another, the victim has to be incapacitated.

If we were a society of black widow spiders, then I’m sure sexual violence would be fair game because it would be very risky for the male.

you are taking playing for simulating, and that's not quite correct, as they are very distinctive. There's sim games of course, but they are games first and foremost, not sims. if you want to learn more about play, you should read one of the most interesting writings from 20th century: Homo Ludens, from Johan Huizinga. answering your question, when you ask why is something mainstream or not you should know it has to do with commerce. I should also add killing someone irl is nothing like killing someone at a videogame. It's all imagination play.

Evolutionary wise, games are a way for us to train things without actually doing the thing. This is very beneficial when the real thing is high risk.

Also on the evolutionary side, it was beneficial for us men to deal with violence and agression, to either defend our own stuff, or take that from others.

We're basically still training for when the day comes, we are able to survive. Good thing for most of us in the modern world, that day will never come. And so we can enjoy training in the risk free environment.

> 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.

I'll try to break this down one by one.

>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 blocks into place, building a city, chasing and eating ghosts, flying a plane, performing magic spells, or engaging in physical violence.

I've played a lot of ultra-violent games, puzzle games, adventure rpg games, competitive shooters and mobas and more.

I've become quite skilled in most of them (t500 in OW and GE in CS:GO, to compare to competitive skill levels). I really enjoy "mastering" these games. (for example finished Doom: Eternal on the hardest not allowed to die mode too). This is ultimately what it's about more than the killing of monsters/people. It's about trying to survive impossible odds by skill or competing with other people to be better and get better. Your mileage will vary as this isn't what other people want to get out of games. Some people enjoy managing a farm in games like Stardew Valley, building things in Minecraft, solving puzzles in Portal and enjoy the story and gameplay whilst doing so.

>And there's a never-ending push to make experiences more photorealistic, to make simulator even better. From that I can only conclude that people want to get as close to the experience of perfoming the prevented act as possible.

Making games look better goes hand-in-hand with making them look more 'photorealistic' or realistic in general. We're very much grounded in our own realities. So when you're going for a 3d experience that emulates real life events like wars. You will end up with something that looks more photorealistic. It doesn't however mean that the game feels real. Playing a game like insert recent AAA fps is a very different experience from watching the Christchurch shooting. The latter makes me sick to my stomach, the former doesn't at all. NPCs are ultimately just visual representations of people, the latter actual people.

>Chopping someone up is heavily frowned upon in real life, but perfectly acceptable to emulate in someone's living room. Somehow the simulation escapes the taboo. And that escape seems to be absolute: In the range of violent acts you could commit, from a gentle nudge to grisly murder, simulation of the most extreme extent is permitted.

It's a thought I think almost no one actually has when it comes to murdering people. Hell this might even have the same effect as pornography, namely a reduction in crimes related to it. (Porn availability on a societal level reduces the amount of sex crimes). So a potential murdering being able to 'chop "people" to bits in a simulation' might be a good thing. For me it has no effect, I've never had the thought of murdering people let alone how. At most I've had a "I hope you die" moment, and then regretting thinking that.

>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? They are both very serious offences, but somehow one gets a free pass to let anyone pretend to do it, but the other not.

Though certainly not mainstream, this might also have to do with general taboos on porn, this could become a thing in the future especially with VR. A lot of people have very taboo sexual fantasies the they enact with partners. We know that this is the case, but it rarely gets openly talked about due to the former taboo mentioned.

>Is it a reflection on the ultimate limits of those taboos in the society that produces most of these games? Or is my logic broken somewhere?

I think your logic is indeed a little broken, as different taboos are taboos for different reasons. Hopefully I made some sense.

I just want to add that the skills that make a good First Person Shooter player do not translate to real-world shooting skills AT ALL.

In a virtual world:

- The gun weights nothing so strength doesn't matter and gravity doesn't slow your aim

- The trigger is a mouse button and there is no right or wrong way to pull it, and it's incredibly easy and identical for all firearms

- The accuracy of the firearm is often perfect

- Holding the gun still is usually only a consideration when sniping and you can just hold down a button to achieve an impossible level of stillness

- When you reload a half-empty magazine the bullets from the discarded magazine usually stay in your overall supply somehow

- Posture is a non-issue

- Recoil never hurts

- You achieve a perfect sight/scope picture every time you shoulder the weapon or raise it up with no practice needed

Basically I am trying to point out that these games are really not simulations. The visuals are just window-dressing for the real game which is determined by the mode. Even the ubiquitous "team deathmatch" is essentially just a modified version of capture-the-flag without the flag where eliminations are not permanent and the game is instead ended by a timer or a score limit.

On an interesting note, I got the game Star Wars: Battlefront 2 recently and I noticed that the game says I "defeated" whoever I just shot which is in contrast with the visuals of the person getting shot and falling down. I see this as an attempt to make the game more friendly to kids by pulling back the curtain on what is really happening through language in order to keep kids from going around talking about how many dozen people they killed in the last game they played. I don't see anything wrong with this but think it should not be necessary for adults. Of course if your game is rated T (Teen) or E (Everyone) then this makes perfect sense.

Representations of things aren't things, realism can't be reduced to realism of perceived graphics. Sitting behind a computer, clicking a mouse and watching pixels is a fundamentally different experience to murdering someone.

It's more or less a western culture thing. The overvaluing and focus on sex of being something amazing or interesting.

EDIT: sorry, not western culture, American culture, particularly.

> The overvaluing and focus on sex of being something amazing or interesting.

Because there are severe consequences to it, pregnancies and STDs being just the start.

Yes, it is an amazing thing, and it is not overvalued at all. It's one of the strongest drives we have as humans, and it should be controlled, otherwise it will lead to chaos.

>Chopping someone up is heavily frowned upon in real life, but perfectly acceptable to emulate in someone's living room.

The same reason people have been reading horror novels for hundreds of years? A good book and an imagination is a lot more realistic than a computer game, IMO. The reason society gives it a pass is partly because they are entertaining and partly because they are considered free speech, the latter being a fundamental human right.

It is because you are actually mistaken. There are BDSM simulators online. I don’t want to create an account to see how exactly the game goes but you can if you like: NSFW and this link seems to hijack the back button https://www.kink.game

The parent comment mentioned sexual violence. Let's just be clear that BDSM is for consenting parties who are turned on by various experiences including pain. That's not what sexual violence / rape is. BDSM or a nod towards it features in many mainstream games. Then again Dishonored did feature a kink scene which turns into a violence/torture scene... it's just not overly sexual.

Because violence against men is acceptable, violence against women is a big no-no. Have you seen a movie where a woman is kicked in crotch? Countless movies teach us that men kicked in crotch are funny.

Compare reactions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QFvEzIzQwg

This reminds me of when I was at grad student in that area. It was really frustrating to read all of the studies from e.g. Anderson and Bushman asserting the links between violent media and aggression.

These publications were headline-grabbing, but some of the study design was laughable. The whole state of affairs led me to leave the discipline (which led me to a career as a software engineer). I'm glad that I did, because the reproducibility crisis hit hard within a few years of me deciding to do something else with my life.

Some of the studies that I read made me think that there was a link between frustration (caused by e.g. undesirable outcomes in videogames, or performance issues like high latency) and aggression, but of course the researchers assumed it was the violence.

PS: if you want a real treat, take a look at how some of these studies measure "aggression".

My favorite was where they used the volume of hot sauce poured into a cup as the measure of aggression.

Hopefully they've come up with some better ways of measuring it since then.

Anderson and Bushman never met something that didn't cause "aggression." And in the several studies coauthored by Anderson that I have read I have not seen a definition of what they mean by aggression. I remember one mentioning "raising your voice."

Then the news media just reads the abstract and says "a new study shows videogames make you violent!"

Oh yeah, the "Hot Sauce Paradigm" easily quantifiable, never backed up that it actually correlates to aggression in real life. From Adachi and Willoughby (2011):

"Lieberman et al. [1999] found that scores on [the hot sauce] paradigm were positively related to both trait and physical aggression scores on the Buss and Perry (1992) Aggression Questionnaire, supporting the convergent validity of the Hot Sauce Paradigm, although to date no study has measured its association with aggressive behavior outside the lab."

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2cab/940f9292928a48d57c3752...

I think psychologists frequently struggle to delineate cultural criticism and science: from its inception those two modes of thinking have been uncomfortably intertwined; no one reads Jung or Feud as a serious scientists anymore (and if you do you'll see it's mostly highly caveated platitudes about human nature based on anecdotal experiences). But there is value in connecting cultural trends to personal behavior, it's just not always scientific.

It's worse than I thought. They measure "aggressive behavior" based on a questionnaire.

They look for a correlation between the "class" of gamer; literally "people who play a lot at younger ages, drop, and then increase", "people who play a moderate amount at younger ages, drop and then slightly increase", and "people who play only a little bit at a young age but increase" and report no correlation between those classes and the aggression assessment based on the questionnaire.

I admire the fact that they didn't do more work to p-hack their way into a correlation; they went with one methodology and showed that it didn't produce a correlation, and reported that. But even though I agree with the article's conclusion, I don't think the data support it in any meaningful way.

I can't see the full text to evaluate the server, but if there is an established and proven diagnostic tool for measuring aggression and that's the tool they used, then the methodology may be sound.

Look in the comment thread to links to scihub.

Yes, they use an off-the-shelf diagnostic tool. No, that does not make the methodology sound. They use a word like "aggression" which has a qualitative meaning and attempt to assign a quantitative metric to it. To assign a meaning to it, I would have to go to other studies to find out how this links to my various qualitative notion of "aggressive": incidence of violent crime vs. cutting in line vs. correcting people's grammar.

You may say "this is impossible, the bar you are setting means that social science papers can't even use the word 'aggressive' to describe quantitative results". And yes, that's true, they can't. They can say things like "convicted of a violent crime" which we can at least agree means something objective that vaguely correlates to aggressiveness (although this has limits). The media can report this as "aggression" and that's fine too, so long as we know what is actually being measured.

Somewhat Tangential: Without any instruction my 2 and 4 year olds know how to turn things into weapons to beat each other with. Like puppies they seem to be testing limits to rough play.

What surprised me is what happened when I didn't intervene: a few times the older one completely dominated and got his way. But more often than not the older one displayed empathy and tried to apologize and give kisses and give the younger one additional toys.

Maybe this is an unoriginal idea but it bears repeating: I think kids have more ability to self regulate than we typically treat them as having.

> I think kids have more ability to self regulate than we typically treat them as having.

This "kids need adult supervision" is a relatively new thing, we used to be sent out to play as kids for HOURS (be home by dinner) and ran the woods and parks or played murderball (soccer with tackling) and other forms of roughhousing, all without serious mayhem. Parents would let us "work it out" if there was a fight.

I emphasize "work it out" so often with our kids.

Funny story. my 4yo was playing with the neighborkids around the same age. the neighbor girl came to me to tattle, saying they weren't sharing. I told her you need to work it out with them, use your words and manners. Clearly not the result she was looking for, she turned and yelled "He said you have to share!" I clarified with the other kids "that's not what I said! Work it out!"

'Parents would let us "work it out" if there was a fight.'

And now days the school calls the police for minor fights and kids end up with records that can drastically alter their lives in a negative way. I almost wonder if this zero tolerance mindset creates an all-or-nothing mentality in kids when they realize they aren't allowed to defend themselves. And if this mentality (equivocating criminal record and expulsion with the end of one's opportunities and life) leads to more extreme behavior - hey, if the cops are going to be called for punching my bully, why not take it further?

Having grown up in the manner you describe, and being a parent of several young kids - I do find the prospect of them having a similar childhood pretty terrifying.

I am forever thankful for a childhood like that - but letting my kids run amok in this day and age for hours brings me a lot of anxiety. It is an interesting paradox that makes me a bit sad.

edit: for the record, we have them in wrestling / jiu jitsu - so their plate is still full re: physical activity and social interaction.

I have seen "work it out" method with friends kids and it convinced me that I won't do it.

In one case, it ended up with older boy consistently bullying smaller sibling. By the time parents started to intervene, it was habit and it took months to be stopped. The younger kids still somewhat dislike brother, altrought he treats her much better now.

Other cases I have seen were roughly similar. Work it out may work out may not. But pretty often it amounts to enabling bullies - and even blaming the victim if the victim does not defend itself in perfect magical non noisy calculated way.

And yet a generation raised that way turned out to be absolutely paranoid about raising their own kids.

Yep I sniped a lot of people with my wooden gun when growing up playing military games in the woods. I've never so much as been in a fist fight and have talked others out of it on a few occasions (mostly in college). These video games cause violent people is the same sort of ludditery we saw when novels became popular, when comic books became popular, when rated R movies became a regular thing, and on down through the annals of history.

"Kids are harmed by daily emotional and physical abuse from other kids" is also a relatively new thing. The past was not a rosy place for everyone.

Throughout the 1800s there were tens of thousands of homeless kids just running around New York City making ends meet. The data is unreliable but it’s interesting to wonder how their lives turned out.

Kids did suffer injuries and deaths playing unsupervised before. Whether the risk is worth it or not is a fair question, but we can't just pretend there is no risk in letting your kids play without supervision.

This is the same argument that anti-vaccine people make... we survived as a species for thousands of years without vaccines, we don't need them now!

Yes, we survived as a species but a lot of individuals did not survive.

Every safety and health improvement we make can suffer the same argument (we survived for years with lead paint! Asbestos has been used in a ton of buildings and we are still here!)

Of course, not every safety improvement is worth it. Some risk is acceptable when the gains are high. I just think it is important to be realistic about the risks when we are talking about the benefits.

Some kids have the ability to self regulate more than others. Much of it is just based on their observations of the world and experience within.

The problems is that as parents we often just group all kids together in how we treat them. They think it's either one way or the other for all kids rather than treating them as individuals with different experiences and different minds.

The one thing I have seen to be true amongst all my peers children is that if you talk to them and treat them like adults, they are much more likely to act like adults at a younger age. That is to say, take into consideration their experience and feelings any time you want to intervene or have an interaction.

*not parenting advice, just imho. apply as you see fit.

I think people form stronger ethical boundaries when it is self-motivated - i.e. your 4 year old learns how to be sincerely empathetic because you allowed them to deal with the emotions from rough play, rather than forcing them to play nicely.

I used to teach kids for many years, and I noticed the "helicopter parents" tended to have more mischievous children, presumably because these kids rarely feel intrinsically motivated to do anything (it's always coming from the parents).

I agree. I think this can even be true of adults. Many times I see people make absolute or semi-extreme comments about a topic, but they've never been in the type of situation they are discussing. I think through mistakes as a child, we learn to question our emotional responses/impulses more.

There was a story recently about a real-life event that started out a lot like the scenario in Lord of the Flies, i. e. a group of children stranded on an island.

It turns out their society started looking after their weakest and made decisions based on consent.

Meanwhile, the book just confirms everyone's beliefs not only about children but mankind itself, namely of a Hobbesian/Darwinian/Randian rule-of-the-strongest being the natural state of affairs.

I think Hobbes and Darwin would both object to being grouped in with Rand. Hobbes would say the world is violent therefore we should take measures to protect ourselves (with a neutral external force or Leviathan). Darwin would say that ruthless competition has driven genetic change, but would never say that this ruthless competition was intrinsically good or should be encouraged. Rand, on the other hand, showed casual disregard for human suffering and would glorify in winner take all competition (even though that’s not how societies best organize themselves nor how evolution plays out in the real world where cooperation is usually a winning strategy)

I think it depends on the kid. You just have to rely on the parents judgement. When our oldest was 4 our twins were 1 and she was very abusive towards them. She was trying to make them hurt and upset.

At 5, now they mostly get along fine. Unless they get in her toys. Then it's bodyslam time.

Thank you for saying this, because I’m the parent of a toddler and an infant right now and I swear my only job is trying to keep the older one from hurting the younger one.

That's why it's so important to let them play. They end up figuring out a lot of important things by themselves that it would be almost impossible otherwise.

It's kind of like watching kids invent society. Really quite fascinating to watch.

When my son was around 4 I was playing GTA and was not playing it violently when I took a car from someone and they tried to pull me out he said "Hit him dad! Hit him!" but never in his life (he is 21 now) has he struck anyone. It was just a game to him.

A week ago I pulled out my warhammer miniatures and my 5 year old picked the leader and started shooting and stabbing people. Then she proudly stated that he was "collecting dead people".

I was quite surprised because her normal play involves taking care of her baby dolls.

My four year old watched me play a Dark Souls boss and just laughed and wanted to try (and get crushed).

Some kids, yes.

That your children do this I think speaks more to your aptitude as a parent and nurturer than human nature in general.

Yes! Risky play is an essential part of child development, it's how children learn to estimate and handle risk.

Reminded of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=206

and less so, more peterson spam, as it were.

https://youtu.be/txyGqaeAMbQ?t=27

Evolutionary psychology teaches us that mammals play to learn social skills, so you're right on with your assessments.

Its not unoriginal but it ignores the issue where the professionals and government officials want to interfere. They want you to believe you cannot handle the situation properly so that their existence can be maintained. Sadly there are enough abusive parents and such to keep them in existence to interfere with parents who are otherwise doing just fine

My mother specialized in early childhood learning and developmental psychology. She never once blinked when my brother and I played Doom or Wolfenstein, some of the most violent games of their times. We were allowed to play with toy guns and listen to whatever music we wanted including heavy metal (which my father despised.)

I asked her about this later in life and her answer was and she laughingly told me "I knew you two were well aware of the fact that it was a fantasy. I never saw it influence any unhealthy behaviour. Plus its a good aggression outlet for young boys."

I live in a Mexican city near to the border with the US, the violence got really bad 10 years ago (some cartels were fighting for the border, now it is a lot calmer). Anyways “Narco culture” has influenced a lot of people (mostly on poor neighborhoods) and therefore it has influenced kids, it’s really sad to see boys playing with guns pretending to be narcos. The government has tried to ban those kinds of toys, I don’t know, does that really help? I guess I don’t have a strong opinion since that doesn’t look like a solution, but in the other hand it’s sad to see those boys aspiring to be narcos.

I don't think it's any different from playing soldiers or cops and robbers. Little kids just aspire to what they see as local physical violent power. It's just fantasy of power when you have none because you are little kid.

I'm from Mexico too. Kids (males mostly) playing with toys guns or swords is normal.

Almost all games/sports are microcosms for wars, football, basketball, tag, hide n seek. Both kids and adults love these microcosms of war.

They don't pretend to be narcos because they like toy guns. They do it because they aspire to a quality of life they will never get via a normal working job.

> Plus its a good aggression outlet for young boys.

Post-freudian hydraulic metaphor of emotions. That one's about as outdated as psychological views get.

We have experimental data that punching things when you are mad doesn't make you less mad, to give the most straight forward example.

> Doom or Wolfenstein, some of the most violent games of their times

> Plus its a good aggression outlet for young boys.

This is one of the standing theories why the influx of those types of games in the 90s coincided so perfectly with a drop in crime. A closely related one is games in general, as "gives them something to do instead of go out and cause trouble".

http://i261.photobucket.com/albums/ii45/oversaturated/2r6ns4...

I love your mother opinion, what important is telling the difference between real life and not.

I remember the days when the Columbine school shooting was being blamed on video games (amongst other things like movies and goth culture) and as a result, all kinds of new fun censorship measures and laws were being talked about here in the US. FEPA[0] eventually being one of them (much later on). Luckily the censorship laws were struck down as unconstitutional[1]. Funny to have more evidence now that it was all misguided. Something I've always felt having been raised on violent video games myself and never feeling the urge to commit violent acts just because I played Counter-Strike or Unreal Tournament.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Entertainment_Protectio...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchan...

Can we do a study on a link between video games and ADHD or dopamine deficiency?

https://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/childhood-adhd/adhd-and-video...

This is something that I'm seeing a lot as elementary school teacher in Germany. Kids exposed to excessive video game - Normally, parents that work full-time and sit the kid in front of the video game/tablet/etc to be able to get things done, - got specially worse after the first lockdown - are being diagnosed with ADHD and are starting to get Ritalin.

My kids play video-game, I play video-game, and I have nothing against it. However an excessive exposition is a pattern that i can relate to ADHD.

This is entirely my own experience but the friends I had in high school/university always clocked in way more hours in WoW than I could doing repetitive tasks such as reputation grinding, crafting, dailies, raiding etc. I always wondered if it was something to do with ADHD or possibly the medications they took. The latter seems less likely as they played even more when they were off their meds.

I can tell you, as someone with quite severe ADHD, it affects gaming as well. What I mean is, I can focus just as little when I am playing games and just get distracted by my smartphone. It's been like this as a kid too, the game isn't really that enjoyable when you can't focus and pretty much miss the story.

Medication could have that effect but I experience quite the opposite. It almost makes me feel "bad" that I am playing a game and doing something more productive. That's generally how these meds work, they "stress" you into doing tour work, so you don't do it the day before you have to turn it in.

But I guess it's different for a professional gamer. It maybe doesn't feel unproductive when it's your main source of income.

Another thing is, the H in ADHD stands for hyperactivity. To play a game however, you have to sit still.

I do still play some games, but only those that are non competitive and casual. For example, I really like playing Stardew Valley, it's very calming and because it is open ended, there is no FOMO.

Funny. As someone who is borderline ADHD, I've always attributed my inability to play MMOs to the ADHD. I can be pretty focused for a few days, but over the long term I get bored and have to move on to something else. When I was younger I rarely even finished single player games before getting bored.

I took add meds in high school, they made me obsessed with yugioh. It was very strange, I didn't really like the game much when I wasn't on them, but as soon as I started back up I would spend all day theory crafting new decks

I'd love to see more specific studies around video game use. There's just so many variables to account for. How does duration, solo/team play, or player skill (win/loss rate) affect the findings?

In my experience, there's definitely negative and positive correlations to my mood, curiosity, patience, and productivity.

People with ADHD are very likely to find themselves abusing drugs, or videogames. Not even dopaminergic drugs are causing ADHD, so why would games? Or what do you want to study? Yes, people with ADHD are likely to abuse games, that's well established.

Why is the prevalence of kids addicted to video games on the rise?

People are too quick to say "causation/correlation" but often times there is overlap. One can encourage the other.

The WebMD link and, thus the commenters intent, was the ADHD leads to videogame addiction and NOT as you have presumed, video games lead to ADHD.

Doing a quick review of the literature I can find shows we don't have a completely clear picture yet. The link in young children is definitive and the link in adolescents is murky but it looks like one of many risk factors. I am inclined to entirely disregard the linked study as garbage since it gives a very definitive black-and-white answer that is in opposition to highly cited literature. I think the main reason it is at the top of HN is that we want this to be the simple black-and-white answer.

As someone who grew up with violent video games I think this issue is taken way too personally by most of us. The idea that video games will necessarily make you violent is absurd and not being proposed by anyone (that is mostly a straw man used to dismiss the idea). The question is whether violent video games can push some kids over the edge -- kids who are already predisposed to violence. Imagine an abused kid with no farther figure who would probably be a violent teen anyways. Will playing violent videogames numb him to the idea of killing, give him neural pathways that make the repetitive action more likely and start him with some bad ideas? Could it be the difference between him getting in some fist fights and indiscriminately murdering schoolchildren? The answer looks like "yes."

The case made in the book On Combat is very interesting. That book is considered one of the definitive secondary works on combat psychology and he spends significant time on this question. I strongly recommend the book.

A lot of the comments here are replacing "aggression" in the title with violence. Yeah, maybe people aren't more likely to be aggressive on an individual level from violent video games. A much better (but harder to answer question) is do violent video games cause society overall to be more violent?

Is someone who played COD more likely to support military action? Or vote for a violent politician? Or join the military? These all contribute to violence in the world as a whole.

Careful. Did they play CoD because they support military action or the other way around?

This is frustrating. Although I understand why this study is helpful, I believe it would have been much more helpful had we been asking a different question.

Violence, per se, is not as relevant as the context for that violence. The more revelatory question is not whether 'violent video games do lead to agression' but instead whether they could.

If, for example, the protagonist in a video game has an attitude or behavior that is treated as aspirational then it's more likely that players of that game (especially those with less life experience) will themselves ascribe to that attitude or behavior. And if that newfound attitude or behavior persists, then over time it is likely to lead to changes in action.

The study that would be more helpful is not the one that evaluates the impact of violent content due to its mere presence but rather evaluates the impact based on the context in which that violence is presented.

Going by your example, it would be less about games and more about every single form of Storytelling, including films, TV shows, books, anime, manga, etc...

Last time I play Assassin's Creed:Origin, I have to stop halfway because I'm tired of all those senseless killing. I feel bad and sad for those virtual Roman soldier I've killed, how can that even happened? (P.S. I'm not the only one)

I think part of it is because videogames graphics and animation these day is so realistic(and it will keep getting more real) All the blood and gore and violence and how you kill someone are realistically depicted. Or maybe its objective clashes with my identity and values(I'm not okay running around and killing people in real life, of course)

Note that I can "kill" hundreds of infantry in Dynasty Warrior game (which is much less realistic) and doesn't feel a single thing.

I believe that what you consume, whatever it is, effect you one way or another, despite "researcher" tell you otherwise.

It's conceivable that this study's results apply only to video games with sufficiently unrealistic depictions of violence. The newest Assassin's Creed depicts human violence more realistically than anything I've ever seen before. It's still not quite there, but once we get there, maybe the psychological effects will be different.

True. And we’re not even in the immersive ‘VR’ age of gaming.

When it come, I can see many people will face with depression because whatever they consume is too immersive.

Of course, but there's no reason to disparage those that aim to study these phenomena.

This study didn't conclude that the media you consume had no effect. It merely reported observed effects and concluded that playing a lot of violent video games as a child is a poor predictor of aggression later in life. That's it.

Well, that’s true. I think most of us realize that the scope of most research is super specific (with tightly control variables) and just can’t apply broadly.

Just don’t let the media see this, because that’s when it will blown out of proportion :P

I must admit, I don't understand the appeal of the most violent video games. I recently read "The Last of Us Part II" described as being "about [...] the awful things that humans can do to each other" [0].

Why would I want to spend my leisure time experiencing that? How is that entertaining?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/dec/23/the-15-best-vi...

>Why would I want to spend my leisure time experiencing that? How is that entertaining?

As another commenter above noted, it's a form of wish fulfillment and imaginary transgression, which is particularly appealing to teenage boys, since virtually all forms of actual aggression are off limits. Sports are the only arena where boys are allowed to be physically aggressive in real. Other than that, we have an entire group of young people who once would have been learning to hunt and kill and defend their clan but who now have to sit around and do very little besides read, write, and stare at computers. Arguably it's a positive thing to have less violence, but it leads many young men to wonder why the hell their bodies are strong and powerful. In video games, they at least get to pretend that there is some utility to being able to be forceful.

The same reason we read stories like Hamlet, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill A Mocking Bird, etc in school. So much of what we read has to do with awful things people do and a reflection on that.

In the case of video games, there are some that are mindless violence, but The Last of Us Part II is an example of a game that reflects on those and show the real outcome of what people can do to each other and how evil and pointless it can be.

Is it any different than any other forms of art (eg. movies, tv, books) that depict human cruelty?

I agree with you, and the GP. Hyper-realistic movies depicting human unpleasantness aren't much different to hyper-realistic games depicting human unpleasantness.

Why do people enjoy spending their leisure time experiencing that? It's not a rhetorical question.

> "about [...] the awful things that humans can do to each other"

> [...] How is that entertaining?

I know what you mean. I have the same feelings, but restricted to depictions in my native language of people hurting each other in psychologically realistic ways.

I'm not bothered with any physical violence especially voiced with English dialogues. They somehow seem cartoonish to me.

But I pretty much have to avoid all Polish movies because they often use those really unpleasant themes.

They are made because they have audience. I have friends who love those movies and themes.

I tried to find out, what exactly appeals to them in those themes and best I could get out of them was that those brutal themes are somehow more 'real', that they expose how people 'truly' are. And that somehow has a value for them.

Probably morbid fascination pays a part in this too.

Isn’t this beating a dead horse? The video game/violence link has been debunked many times. OTOH, a comprehensive study determining whether violent games and movies contribute to people becoming desensitized to actual violence would be interesting. I recall an interview with US soldiers in Iraq saying that shooting people was “just like playing a FPS game.”

It can’t be denied that our society is obsessed with violence. Americans have been like this for a while but recently produced movies and TV shows in Europe and the UK feature much more graphic violence than they did two decades ago. Why? Is it a reflection of a more ruthlessly competitive society or are there other reasons?

Well yes, but the study was started over ten years ago :)

Sometimes these studies ask the wrong questions. I don’t want to censor video games but I do wonder what the effect of murder simulation is on people, along with regularly witnessing the frequent sexual assaults that get dramatized in our media (movies, TV). Does it lead to aggressive behavior? Maybe not, but I’d be surprised if these influences are a net positive for the well-being of individuals or communities. We’ve lost much of any ability to have community standards with any toolset other than the force of the law, but all this energy people put into trying to ban words or speakers, topple statues or cancel companies might be better focused into social disapproval of the portrayals of murder, rape and the rest of the violence we inundate ourselves and our kids with on a daily basis.

I've been playing violent video games my entire life. Depictions of rape and murder still make me cringe. I can't even sit through 20 seconds of slaughterhouse footage. But I love watching statues of dictators or pro-slavery losers topple.

>all this energy . . . might be better focused into social disapproval of the portrayals of murder, rape and the rest of the violence we inundate ourselves and our kids with on a daily basis.

I tend to agree, and the "rekt/gore" threads on 4chan strike me as particularly low-hanging fruit.

At least 4chan is in a narrow corner of the internet - most people don’t get exposed to it, ‘specially not like prime time TV and mainstream movies, which contain just gratuitous levels of physical/sexual violence and are readily and regularly accessed by the majority of society. 4chan is comparatively inconsequential I think.

I doubt there's any kind of direct link between video games and people becoming violent, but I do think it reflects poorly on our societies that we seem to be fine with young kids shoot each other in the face with realistic weapons in CS:GO and Call of Duty but if you show one women's nipple it's unacceptable.

While it probably doesn't directly incite violence in well balanced individuals, it does in my opinion trivialize war and glorify armed combat.

I'm reminded of that French soldier who "cosplayed" Ghost from Call of Duty while on duty in Mali.

I guess it's not really new, literature always told stories of war and it's an extension of that, but a book and a game are not the same thing.

I wish that was what the discussion was about, instead of this dumb tabloid-tier "Doom creates serial killers" narrative.

I believe the US military uses COD and games like that in their recruitment. I definitely think that part is real. I personally always liked quake and doom, disliked Counter Strike and Call of Duty, so this might be my bias, but it seems easier to use the latter to soften people's perspective on war and conquest while the former are just so cartoonish levels of violence that you can easily distinguish it from reality. That might just be my perspective.

> I doubt there's any kind of direct link between video games and people becoming violent, but I do think it reflects poorly on our societies that we seem to be fine with young kids shoot each other in the face with realistic weapons in CS:GO and Call of Duty but if you show one women's nipple it's unacceptable.

So the problem is that the weapons be realistic?

I've always noted that rather extreme violence has always been a case of children's entertainment — in something such as Looney Tunes, the characters are frequently the subject of violence that would surely kill a man. Is this acceptable because it's not realistic?

Yeah, I do find the realism troubling at times. I think it's a bit obscene when kids teabag each other in some middle-east inspired CoD map when a few thousand kilometers from where they're playing people wearing similar garbs kill each other in similar places with similar weapons.

It's something fairly unique to videogames too. Imagine the outrage if some American propaganda war movie à la Black Hawk Down showed American military personnel engaging in 360 noscope kill streaks, trying to rack up headshot combos.

> but I do think it reflects poorly on our societies that we seem to be fine with young kids shoot each other in the face with realistic weapons in CS:GO and Call of Duty but if you show one women's nipple it's unacceptable.

I havent seen this personally, but isn't this more of an American tendency than a general western thing? On the American side media violence is penalized less (in terms of adult ratings) than nudity/sex while across the ocean you see the opposite trend.

Can anyone with more exposure to European (or Aussie/Kiwi) media confirm/deny this? I'm curious to hear the reason why if true.

It's definitely worse in American media but I think this bias exists even in Europe, just to a slightly lesser extent.

Also, even though we're not quite as prude this side of the Atlantic ocean, we still have to abide by American cultural rules when we use Facebook, Twitter and similar services that have strict no-nudity rules. Similarly, any media produced over here that ambitions to enter the American market will also have to follow these guidelines.

American culture is very pervasive.

Call of Duty is a slightly more subtle problem because they tend to superficially claim to depict "realistic" warfare but remove all "politics" from it which really distorts any validity of the approach they take.

I always thought violent video games had the opposite effect of aggression - desensitization. At the beginning of playing "The Last of Us", I sort of felt bad whenever a (non-zombie) human died (either by my hands or part of the story). I especially felt bad when I made a 14 year old girl kill someone. But by the end I remorselessly hunted and executed every human I came across no matter which character I was.

Of course, that didn't translate to any real life loss of empathy (I don't think), but it was interesting how quickly the game desensitized my regard of fictional humans so that I stopped seeing them as anything of value but rather an enemy/monster to be unquestioningly destroyed.

Here's my hypothesis: in healthy individuals, video games do not lead to violence. But in an unhealthy person who is already looking for an outlet, shooter games provide a template to follow, that may allow unfocused anger to turn into an actual plan. Is there any good science on this idea?

Guns and mental health problems had already been present in America for decades before mass shootings started happening. Video games are the only new ingredient I can see. I can't take seriously any full dismissal of their role until that timing is explained.

Maybe I'm having a brainfart, but the abstract seems illogical to me. Can someone help me understand how

> [the] group with low initial violence “was no higher [don't they mean no lower??] in aggressive behavior than the high initial violence group at the final time point.”

leads to their conclusion

> adolescents who played a high-level of violent video games at an early age did not show more aggressive behavior later in life than those who played fewer to no hours of violent video games at an early age.

(words in square brackets added)

I had an idea games should be made as hyper-realistic, brutal and bloody as technically possible so every gamer would know actual war is nightmare, not fun and they really want to avoid it at all damn cost - the way those who has actually witnessed war feel.

That’s the thing with media portraying violence (and I’m saying this without judgement) it is always glorifying violence (“gewaltverherrlichend” in German) since one doesn’t experience the violence itself.

Even if (war) video games were to be made “gorier”, bloodier, more brutal one still doesn’t experience losing someone, re-building a life in a country that has been bombed to ruins, or dealing with the aftermath such as physical wounds or mental trauma.

There's a part of a mission in Medal of Honor (recent VR version) where you're trying to make your way up Omaha Beach in WWII. The way it's done is very good, and really seems to drive home to the player just how utterly harrowing the whole experience must have been.

The primary difference is point of view - whether you make audience to imagine themselves as perpetrators and emphatize with them. Or whether you show the point of view of victim, civilian and make audience emphasize with them. Super realistic blood is not necessary, treating victims as primary fully developed characters would be.

The entertainment is designed to make you feel good and make you feel like soldiers are overall good heroes.

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 agreement with its supposed conclusion.

It's probably confirmation bias.

Same reason a study with positive outcomes about coffee/alcohol/gay parenthood/gender reassignment/<insert issue> are not criticized as much as a study on the same topic that had negative outcomes. We want certain things to be true so we (consciously or not) avoid criticizing studies bolstering what we want to be true and harshly criticize studies we want to be false.

I like to think science always prevails in the end (like with tobacco), but it can take half a century or more to converge on the truth.

I mean, part of this is probably also some degree of us intuitively knowing the answer.

If you have a friend group of 10 people, 4 of which regularly work out. You will probably notice that those 4 friends have less body fat and are more toned than the other 6. At that point, if a study came out saying that working out had no impact on body physique, you'd reflexively question the results.

That might sound ridiculous, but lots of people here grew up playing "violent" video games through the 90s-00s, and had large friend groups who did the same. And it's pretty likely that, for most of us, none of our friends ended up with violent or aggressive tendencies.

Anecdotes are not scientifically rigorous, but they aren't completely useless either. If violent video games caused measurable increases in aggressive behavior, people who were around a large cohort of people playing these games would notice this fact in action. Just like they'd notice that friends who eat a lot of cake tend to be larger than the one who don't.

H.N. is also a place where one will simply be downvoted for criticizing the methodology, even if the post reveal nothing about whether one support the conclusion or not.

But any place with “votes” has such effects.

Yes, I think that confirmation bias is very strong here.

My rule for analyzing social science articles is pretty simple: If the study contradicts your intuition or understanding of human behavior, it is likely that it does not support the conclusion because of extensive methodological errors or statistical skullduggery.

If, on the other hand, the study confirms your intuition or understanding of human behavior, it is likely that it does not support the conclusion because of extensive methodological errors or statistical skullduggery.

More important than that is the result of the Grievance Studies affair.

When there is such heavily biased review of social science papers, it calls the legitimacy of all of them into question.

My rule for analyzing social science is: “it's bullshit till proven otherwise.”.

The simple fact is that I cannot ever think of any solid methodology to investigate a “link” between these two things and that the man who devises it would deliver a rather groundbreaking idea.

How would a study such as this even work?; it's all Quatsch.

There has historically been fairly consistent and repeated claims that teens and young adults are influenced by fictional media into anti-social behavior, despite the lack of strong evidence. There has also been consistently a strong need to explain divergent and deviant behavior, and a desire to stamp it down.

So since we have learned that violent song lyrics does not cause anti-social behavior in teens, nor that of violent movies, it seems as a good default stance that neither does violent video games. I would also default the same stance to porn consumption, based on the same logic.

I would prefer if we got a final study that gave a definitive answer if consumption of fiction causes anti-social behavior. It seems to me that fiction is simply an medium for which people can safely explore cultural norms, but in terms of causing anti-social behavior we would need to look at social environment and biochemical triggers for social behavior.

It's hard to avoid confirmation bias when it comes to things everybody experience in their everyday lives. Almost everybody games at some point in their lives. Everybody know people who play video games for significant percent of their free time. If the link was significant we would've noticed by now.

It's very hard to argue video games and crime are linked when the curves are:

https://i.imgur.com/hSHDyoH.png

https://cdn.statcdn.com/Statistic/190000/191219-blank-355.pn...

Of course it's possible that the link is small and other factors overpower it. But it's unlikely, and given the everyday experience with people who play games and people who are violent - there's very little evidence of any link.

So indeed we fail to the confirmation bias. Or, said in other words: "ordinary claims require very little evidence".

It's entirely confirmation bias; try posting a study or meta-analysis showing the inverse, or - and I think this will fare even worse - a meta-analysis of the effects of pornography on attitudes or sexual aggression.

The literature on pornography is more mixed and contentious, though. On violent video games and "gaming addiction", there seems to be less and less going for the hypothesis that they cause violence or aggression.

However, from what reading I've done, you will find that longitudinal results in porn and video games are dissonant with experimental results in lab settings. This suggests that while there are effects, they do not persist to the level thought. More complex models (such as the confluence model in porn effects research) which try and explain apparent hidden variables are also gaining steam. There are actually only four or five major contemporary figures in porn effects research; Wright and Tokunaga finding that porn has negative effects on everyone; Hald and Malamuth finding that the main or only worry only lies in those low in agreeableness and predisposed to aggressive behaviour.

To a bunch of gamers and porn-users (including myself in both of those categories), these things are either things we spend a lot of time doing (for a portion of HN, I suspect their entire leisure time is taken up by video games), or they are very personal and private. Nothing is more personal than what we get off to, so any analysis of porn tends to be taken as an assault on sexuality itself (though interestingly, much as with advertising or propaganda, the very same sexuality cultivated by porn consumption).

I've tried discussing the literature on video games, porn, violence, aggression, and morality before on both HN and Reddit, and the discussion is either ignored or shot down with downvotes because any discussion at all feels like a personal attack.

I'd recommend for anyone interested in the topic of video games and aggression or behaviour, and indeed the hot topic of "video game addiction" to check out the papers by CJ Ferguson, who has a positive view on video games. At the same time, check out the people he replies to and the people replying to him. It's ridiculous to draw any conclusion from a study that happens to reach the top of HN.

We're all bayesians in some sense. If you show me weak evidence for what I alreaddy believe, I'll just believe it even more strongly. I'll argue for it, but mostly based off my prior belief. If you show me weak evidence for what I don't believe, I'll adjust my disbelief of it just a little downwards. I'll argue against it, but mostly based off my prior belief.

I think you're seeing an important difference between acceptance of a conclusion versus agreement with it. I doubt this study is changing anyone's minds.

You're very right; it's probably a combination of confirmation bias and the fact that this has been result has been shown by just about every serious study on the subject so far.

Besides: claims of a link between violent video games and aggressive behavior was never backed by anything other than assumptive moral arguments, much less studies (or even coherent reasoning and valid logic).

The biases of the tech crowd, and HN specifically, wouldn't be half as bad if they occasionally showed a willingness to investigate them, instead of continually insisting their reasoning is uniquely based on "logic" and "science".

There is certainly bias, however it is worth pointing out that the cited research is not rejecting the null hypothesis. Issues around sample size, methodology and study design are much more serious when a study claims to reject the null hypothesis where the burden of proof is considerably high. Furthermore, it was an almost universally accepted truth in the 90's that violent video games would lead to the total collapse of civil society (a claim that was asserted with no real evidence). The fact that a large number of people grew up with violent video games as children and now lead totally peaceful lives means that the result of this study is really not that shocking in light of people's priors.

Free on sci-hub.

https://sci-hub.st/10.1089/cyber.2020.0049

Probably because it's a 10 year longitudinal study, which is significantly better than the endless stream of small sample limited observational studies. Also without the full contents and methodology, we can't acty evaluate the study very well.

Thise leaves bias from confirmation of existing beliefs along with more anecdotal evidence not directly connected to videogames, such as decreasing crime rates over the period of time that videogames have become more violent. However relying on that correlation alone is a post hoc ergo proper hoc fallacy.

In short, we simply don't know enough about the study to overcome comment with substance, at the same time that the study corresponds to conclusions based on similar research. I'm hesitant to declare "confirmation bias" though when it does ostensibly confirm other research, though it's not really a replication, so I'd withhold final judgement.

No surprise. Even among scientists there is an issue where the level of critical review a paper gets is largely dependent upon how agreeable the findings are to the person reviewing it. This is a reason that even science isn't fully trustable in areas where personal beliefs are very strongly held.

For one fun field, look at the level of criticism papers in parapsychology (the study of the paranormal) and compare it to if they get more criticism or not than the average paper in psychology. There is a particularly fun study (which I do not recall the name of) where two scientists teamed up, one who thought parapsychology was a true field and one who thought it was fake. They worked together on the same experiment and each produced results that agreed with them, but neither could find a flaw in the other's methodology or results (other than they disagree with their own results).

You are not wrong generally about potential HN bias, but to be fair, the onus is on the people who believe video games are causative factors of violent behavior to first show correlation. If they can't even do that, then we are under no obligation to throw away the null hypothesis.

Here’s a test:

Design this game with negative stereotypes and see how many people suddenly flip on how they think about the influence of the in-game social and anti-social aspects.

Hatred came out in 2015, and was effectively banned in some regions. A true test on this topic will never happen in the public, Adults Only rated-games only get so far.

"Mike Splechta of GameZone questioned the game's timing and how it could become the "next scapegoat" in a climate that already held video games responsible for school shootings and other violence."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatred_(video_game)#Reception

Hacker News users aren't smart, we just type good

Wouldn't it be better to use an adverb here?

Link to the paper for anyone that wants to look more critically at the study. https://sci-hub.do/https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.10...

Even though I think there’s probably no causal link between video game violence and real violence, I feel I can safely condemn this study to the trash heap without reading it. There’s no chance it is at all scientific or ever had any chance of changing the minds of the people who ran it.

Perhaps it's because it's confirming something that we all knew anyway? I'm sure most of the HN crowd have played all sorts of video games, and we lead pretty non violent lives (I have to assume).

I think maybe there is some discussion to be had about the difference between personal violence, such as a particular person carrying out a violent crime, and the general acceptance of violence as a viable solution to a myriad of problems.

I both do not know any violent criminals personally, and have witnessed a rather staggering amount of acceptance of violence in our culture.

I’m reminded here of when the director of communications at Lockheed Martin responded with the following when asked about a possible connection between Columbine and the manufacturing of Triton missiles just down the street (Lockheed being a major employer of many parents in the area):

“I guess I don't see that specific connection because the missiles that you're talking about were built and designed to defend us from somebody else who would be aggressors against us.”

We also accept violence in the criminal justice system even to stop non-violent crimes. We also support wars, see it’s approval rating of post 9-11. I’ve had many a person tell me the solution to some Perceived racial problem was to “wipe them out” and only one of them physically assaulted me.

So it seems to me that we are okay with violence but often do not like carrying it out ourselves in personal disputes. Yet this may only be detoured but the treat of violence being carried out on us if we were to. Unless of course we are in the military and have been told/trained to carry out violent activities with impunity. All in all I am not convinced we are a peaceful nonviolent civilization, quite the opposite. Nor am I convinced that seeing accepted violence everyday on your T.V. Screen, be it video game or otherwise, does not affect this pervasive psychological mindset, agin the opposite.

It's funny how some folks have been trying to prove there's a link for 30 years now? And every step of the way there's really nothing to show for.

Reminds me of the Dungeons and Dragons moral panic of the 80's [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/us/when-dungeons-dragons-...

Also because it's been shown time and time again in study after study.

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

I observed this phenomenon in a few other subjects too, like articles about benefits of certain supplements or substances, that praise some parenting styles, etc.

I don't need a study to know that's true.

Didn't we just have a HN about a depressing amount of food studies being sponsored by food conglomerates?

no one outside of the video game industry would waste their time with this study because they already know the outcome from having passively observed several hundred million children not become violent from video games.

Video games do not make people violent - and based on my observation of at least several thousand peers - it actually has the opposite effect. The truth is video games are a healthy outlet, as well as self train an individual to deal with defeat over and over and over again.

I bet if you took groups of individuals whom played sports for X hours a week, and compared them to an equivalent number of individuals whom played video games for X hours a week, the sports group would have more violent tendencies. This isn't just hyperbola, after observing as many humans as we have in both these activities, it's practically self evident.

Here on the HackerNews, we have a lot of fretting about facebook manipulating the moods of people, the control of people by targeted social networking ads, and many other mind manipulations as a result of our media and (mis)information firehose society.

Yet we get to the effect of ultraviolent gun-worship games, and the reaction is swift to absolve them of any role in our society.

Still smells like "the preciousssss" undercurrent on pot legalization. Which I'm in favor of only because of the failures of the drug war, especially in destabilizing Mexico and Central America into narco mafia states.

America has radicalized around guns and gun violence, to the point they are religions. Sure, go ahead and say there are no effects from violent gun games, then go talk to your kids about the school shooting drills. Sure we can argue that gun manufacturers and partisan wedge politics have elevated gun worship and not 25 years of shooter games.

I get there aren't smoking gun game studies. But we are way far from the days of cartoon Doom.

The assertion that violent video games cause violence is pretty non-sensical to begin with given that violent media already existed before video games. It’s just another way to push censorship. You see a lot less criticism when the same thing is done for pornography and eroticism, even though there is no real hypothesis for why it would be any different.

While I don't think violent video games cause violence, it's not a completely ridiculous premise. Interactive video games require you to take and execute the decision yourself, putting yourself in the shoes of the player character.

If you've played the Last of Us 1 or 2, you know what I'm talking about. If you saw it, it would affect you deeply. But actually doing those things hits so much harder. Is it possible that has a deeper effect on us compared to a movie? I don't know, but it's not a ridiculous proposition.

Well violent media and violent video games can both cause violence? Just cause violent media already existed doesn't mean violent video games don't still cause violence.

One thing I don't quite get is the extent that people who are against the idea that (violent) videos games cause violence seem seem to have a very significant about face in opinion when the topic switches away from strictly physical violence to those that would fall more under the topics you raised, yet the logic is pretty much the same either way.

Violent media is not interactive. It is one-way.

When I was a kid our activities included regularly running around shooting from imaginary guns, forming "bands" and watching cartoons where characters would constantly be doing/trying to do harm to each other.

I think this isn't an issue because a healthy person can not confuse fantasy and reality.

I can see how these kinds of activities can give ideas, but you would have to be already dysfunctional in the first place.

I'll tell you what does make me more aggressive. It's not the content of the video game itself. It's the other players in the multiplayer. I've basically sworn off of multiplayer for well over a decade now, with only vanishingly brief revisits to confirm things are only getting worse.

Indeed, growing up my parents banned Super Smash Bros., because the outcomes of matches would sometimes enrage us so much that we would get into fights in real life.

But that's true for more than just multiplayer video games. Sports come to mind. Basically anything involving intense competition and taunting is going to cause a temporary increase in aggressive behavior.

>Indeed, growing up my parents banned Super Smash Bros., because the outcomes of matches would sometimes enrage us so much that we would get into fights in real life.

Personally, my take on this is you were seeing and effect; not a cause.

As a kid you MAY have had a common issue expressing loss or disappointment. The game MAY have brought this up, there was always a loser every match. So, your parents MAY have considered this the cause of your inability to properly handle it.

I MAY be wrong. I have no idea about you. But that fits ME perfectly.

I found the thing that brought me out of that was stressful singular competition, fighting, shooting, chess, performance, etc. Things that you excel on your skill not anything you can blame someone else for.

I learned the value in making a plan, executing it, and learning when and why if it didn’t work.

Now as an adult, I find myself more ready to deal with stressful things like dogs fighting on walks, medical emergencies, criminal activity, and things I just see other adults completely lock up on. I think this comes from an inability to process loss and stress.

This study is strictly about whether you are more violent 10 years after playing the game.

If does not study at all the actual issue most of those who lived with excessive gamers (whether kid or adult) have. Meaning, annoying aggression right after playing and verbal abuse toward household members because they dare to exist if same flat where he lost the match.

Anecdotally, nearly all of my friends growing up played violent video games. I did see this behavior from one of my friends and his aggression following losing a video game. But he also had the same reaction after we lost a soccer game as well. I think that video games may show this effect, but it is not necessarily the cause. After all, all of my friends played the same violent video games (often together); the individual was the common factor in the aggressive activity, not the game.

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 the games may encourage violent behavior, person A with a stable environment and strong social supports may not be effected in the same way (or enough to measure). Person B with a different environment and fewer supports may exhibit violent behavior. Some studies may claim to account for these, but that should be met with skepticism and rigorous discussion.

Ironically, the entire business model of silicon valley is founded on the belief that digital media can be designed to influence behavior. So the lack of such design in video games, while possible, should be seen as an anomaly.

Yeah, I doubt that video games will take a perfectly balanced healthy person and turn them aggressive. The problem though I think is that people who are aggressive to begin with may in fact normalize violence and in a stressful thoughtless moment IRL they may act on that violence. Again, this is not for most gamer folk but the ones who are predisposed to violence in the first place. Also sedentarism in children may be a factor to increase of violence.

I'm not surprised if there's no link between violent games and violence in real life. But as a subtler concern, I do wonder if (some) violent games help to cultivate a sense of general nihilism and lack of value. I work with teens and maybe 15% of them have this sense of "blankness" in the spot where a sense of value/meaning/morality should be. (Not even in the classic 90's sense of "teen apathy" -- more like they've never even been notified that anything can mean anything.)

I do wonder if spending 40% of your waking hours playing simulators where you dice people up for no good reason, might contribute a little to that attitude. Especially the kids that already aren't being socialized particularly well (abusive parents that barely talk to them, etc.)

Hell, I'd even be alright if it were games that have loads of violence but with a sense of purpose (e.g., the Half-Life series, or many Bethesda games). The truly aimless violence is what kinda worries me.

I would argue if they are spending 40% of thier time on games, than it's the lack of other stimulation required for development that's the problem. If they were playing Atari Pong for that long, I would suspect he same outcome you observe. The violence in the video game had little to no impact on this scenerio.

Consider the rest of their environment. I think the nihilism among young people has more to do with coming to terms with the mortality of your country and planet than anything else. Violence is not a new thing, but haven't solid evidence that it will only get harder for you and future generations is pretty new.

More likely, teenagers play video games, if not just for fun, to escape from the "general nihilism and lack of value" that our society exudes on them, despite society desperately trying to blame all it's flaws on video games.

I wonder how they define "aggressive behavior." In learning about and practicing nonviolent communication, I've come to realize there's a lot of normalized behaviors out there in terms of interpersonal interactions, but without physical violence or even the threat of it.

Someone who's choosing to ostracize another person within a social group is a bit more covert and difficult to detect. Is this considered "aggressive behavior"? This is one example of a type of behavior that I'd consider to be aggressive and likely not fitting the definition of the study. There are many others out there. And I'm betting some of them are impacted by the games.

Why? Because I'm recovering from gaming/media addiction and I would adopt behaviors and lines from things I played/watched to use in real life.

I'm waiting for the study that actually detects me and people like me. I suspect it'll take about as long as the tobacco industry took to conduct and release studies showing tobacco can cause cancer.

This is only tangentially related, but one thing I find interesting is how video games contributed to us being desensitized to violence. It's funny hearing from my mom about how The Exorcist was terrifying back then, while nowadays it's borderline funny to watch (and not only because of the technology not aging well).

Makes me wonder if any studies have been done regarding that.

Dunno, I watched The Exorcist a couple of years ago and it's one of scariest horror films that I watched. Not even in the same league with modern stuff.

Not saying I'm not desensitized to fake on-screen violence (I eat comfortably watching The Walking Dead), I just think horror being scary has nothing to do with violence being scary.

Eh? If someone doesn't think the Exorcist is terrifying then I'm not sure what is, speaking as someone regularly playing violent games (though not usually horror or gory stuff)

Beware of generalizing: I find The Exorcist terrifying. It also remains at the top of most "scariest movies ever" lists (based only on a DDG search)

Lots of talk about desensitization. Personally I can't watch any gruesome "beheading" videos or anything of that nature, and to the best of my knowledge it would sicken most others as well so I'm not sure the idea holds water.

I think cartoon violence desensitizes you to cartoon violence, and real violence desensitizes you to real violence.

Cartoon violence is so over the top and symbolic when you see actual violence. The stomach turning aspect of real violence/torture/murder/rape is its bland mundane banal nature. No dramatic music, no redemption, no happy end, no heroism. So raw.

I've seen quite some real gore online, similar to many online people. I don't know how it affects my psychology. I like to think it has at least some positive effects, like not fainting and less of a shock if I need to act in such a situation. But maybe real world violence seen through my eyeballs not through a screen is a whole another thing again. Maybe hearing and seeing real abuse is not something you can "prepare for" through gore videos.

Perhaps in the case of some individuals, there may even be a negative link: finding a non-destructive outlet for violent tendencies. I recall seeing a recent article (the title and site escapes me) that posits something similar with regards to the rise of internet pornography and a seeming reduction in serial killings.

> Perhaps in the case of some individuals

Sure, but that’s my problem with this whole thing.

Some idiots and media claimed there was some obvious links to violence and video games to use as reasoning for increased government control... and now the push back is NO NEVER HAPPENS!

But in some people yes, of course it hurts. There are definitely some people who are unstable and seeing hyper-graphic depictions of violent mutilation is not healthy. There are some people in the opposite.

These studies always end with a DEFINITE correlation or lack of. The truth is obviously it’s a scale. And while the result is yes, some people might be negatively effected that doesn’t mean the population at large needs to be “protected” with censorship.

I really hate the black and white of this.

Probably not the article you were referring to, but I’m reminded of this interesting piece I discovered the other day; https://jacobitemag.com/2018/04/24/uncanny-vulvas/

I doubt it very much.

Certainly, games aren't to blame for real killings, terrorism, shootings, etc., but they ARE part of the equation whether we want it or not.

Our society still has a cultural foundation on violence. As the time passes it _seems_ to be diminishing - as we can see by the rejection of violence against woman or other minorities becoming ever more common - but our heroes tend to be aggressive, our tales and stories contains death, killings, etc. Again, less than before, but far from zero.

Studies so far are controversial (to say the least) and it's hard to take sociological statistics at face value, therefore is hard to conclude anything. But it's impossible to believe that spending several hours a week pretending to do violence against ever more realistic cyber impressions of life wouldn't have ANY effect on our selves.

I sadly do not remember who came up with this quip (c.2000), but it went something like this -

"If video games influenced behaviour, those who grew up in the eighties would run around in dark rooms, listening to monotone music while popping brightly coloured pills."

If you assume there are two types of people: prone to violence (not necessarily violent, given socialization and incentives) and not prone to violence (possibly due to physical skills or a more generally submissive personality):

- Sociological stereotype goes that videogames are mainly popular among those not prone to violence. Therefore most results on the matter might only mean that videogames cannot make people not-prone-to-violence act violently. If they're physically unfit (and not deranged enough to use guns) this may be obvious a priori.

- The data says little about whether videogames increase the likelihood that someone who is prone to violence will act violently.

Not sure if this was taken into account, but I think there's a huge issue with the study subject itself: violence has always been there, especially in the past, death was not hidden, people were beaten and executed in public, and that violence was not necessarily what would draw people to more violence.

The real question is ethics and morality in a violent context.

And I don't think that aspect was taken into consideration.

László Mérő, Math-Psychology prof here told me like 20 years ago that it is simple: if you see others committing violent acts, it increases the violence in you. Even if it is an abstract drawing on screen. If you control it and you do it basically, then it does not.

Just remember: were you agitated more after a Tom&Jerry session or after Call of Duty.

With my brother we always were crying 3 minutes after one VHS of Tom&Jerry ended :)

Never after killing 1000 nacis on screen or similar.

Otoh there are studies carried out by Stanford, iirc, demonstrating the opposite. I guess the studies that support the conclusion I like are the correct studies.

It's interesting that many games show violence but not many show suffering and pain. People just drop dead when shot. Quake 2 had very painful death animations for the weakest enemies. Games that want a PG16 rating need to remove blood splashes.

In most game, your shots don't hurt bystanders. There are no ricochets and usually no civilians. No one's running away, putting out fires, crying over dead bodies.

Even with a 10 year study, there will still be groups/collectives soliciting political posture and donations on the back of fighting all this with the usual "think of the children" trope to push it along.

Simple fact is we have far more evidence to prove the Earth is not flat and yet there are those that still insist in going against all the evidence in the World. This will be no different.

Examples of violent behavior by playing PUBG

https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/belagavi-mo...

https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/india/india-boy-fakes-kidnap...

https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/karnataka/2020/jan/2...

https://www.republicworld.com/technology-news/gaming/three-p...

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/rajkot/boy-addicted...

Well, the whole problem is that you need more information before you can claim that the activity they happened to be addicted to on their phone is what caused the violence rather than the addiction itself, or other possible factors like mental illness and unexpected variables.

Here's an article of a 16yo killing his parents because his iPod was taken away: https://time.com/138601/teen-kills-parents-because-they-took.... You'd be jumping the gun if you looked at his most played tracks and concluded that Bruce Springsteen or the iPod's uni-wheel interface caused violence, though I'm slightly more open-minded to those ideas.

You're getting a lot of replies to this comment saying these examples show correlation and not causation, which is a fair thing to say, but also dismissive.

A similar question worth considering is whether or not violent people are drawn to violent videogames. In my somewhat-informed opinion, they are, and that's significant.

These could also be described as examples of violent behavior by drinkers of water, for that matter.

There is nothing pointing to a causative relationship here.

Looking at my children, when my wife stopped them from playing video games, they fought much more. Gaming is the opium of the children!

Maybe rather valium for children?

I’d really like to see a similar study comparing modern military combat video game playing with attitudes about war and overseas military occupation and invasion.

The US military partners with games like Call of Duty and uses them as recruitment tools. I’d be surprised if they didn’t contribute to a sense of dehumanization of our proclaimed enemies.

I think for those of us who have played any amount of shooters can attest that the game itself wouldn’t make you any more violent. It’s one of those “common sense” things that for non gamers seems obvious: “violent games make you more violent”, and the for the gamers out there the opposite is true, it’s obvious that they don’t.

Yeah. After a game of pew pew you simply don't feel like getting up and out to f__k s__t up. If you play to your satisfaction you just feel like doing something entirely different for a while.

With possible exception of multiplayer games that you loose too much. Those things can enrage you.

Maybe? It depends on how you look at it. I've heard of a guy inspired by playing Prison Architect to become a corrections officer. Or I wouldn't be surprised if many people joined the military because of being inspired to by COD.

I wonder if there's a similar "no link" between 'educational' video games and improved education.

I believe there’s a very narrow link between the specific thing you practise in the game and any real life use of that. Nearly every game is gamified too much to be useful in this way. The n-back games may be an exception.

I would be much more interested in that topic. But like this one, I suspect there is a gray area that no one wants to talk about at all, and for some reason the answer must be black and white. Which makes me suspicious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_s...

I mean it's hard to say there's "no link" given that the above link is a link.

> The final report by the State Attorney did not make a link between video games and the motive for the shooting.

From that same section of the article.

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 original person.

- video game violence causes real word violence - vaccines cause autism - insert conspiracy theory here

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.

I think any study has validity, but when religion is involved, my suspicions begin: Dr. Sarah M. Coyne, School of Family Life, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA.

Specifically: https://familylife.byu.edu/ "Provide instruction that fosters commitment to the principles in The Family: A Proclamation to the World."

...and that proclamation is....

"THE FAMILY A PROCLAMATION TO THE WORLD

The First Presidency and Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

We, the First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, solemnly proclaim that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and that the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.

All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose."

I think if you actually knew Dr Coyne you would see your suspicions are unfounded. She is an excellent scientist and often provides research counter to what is comfortable at BYU.

I don't know her personally, so I went to the guiding principles of who is funding her research.

They already had this debate in the 1980's -- that video games were "taking over teenager's minds", that they were "promoting violence", etc., etc.

What a lunk of crap!

I mean, back then we didn't have 16 Million colors or high-resolution monitors with small fine pixels -- all the games used color palettes of 16 or 8 colors, and they were blocky as hell... like my tank (represented as a block) shot a smaller block (the bullet, use your imagination, work with me here! <g>) into your tank (represented by yet another block of a different color!) and the "explosion" was that the other tank would turn a series of (lame) colors -- and disappear!

So my question is, WHERE IN THE HELL IS THE ACTUAL GRAPHICAL DEPICTION OF VIOLENCE? -- in these early video games?

This is like saying that "Pong" -- made people violent!

It didn't! (Well, unless they were violent to begin with and lost a game of pong, and were prone to violence when they lost various games! But those people are the exception, not the rule! <g>)

You see, that video games cause violence

was a lie back then,

and

it's still a lie today! <g>

Is this like the studies paid by fast food chains on whether eating fast food is healthy or not? :D

In my experience, video games didn't desensitize me to violence -- the world just hadn't sensitized me yet.

I spent my youth playing first person shooters. Now, with a little bit more life experience under my belt, participating in a war simulator feels a bit tasteless.

I heard it was also a thing that there are less murderers, because the type of people who are targeted by marketing and generally play video games is young men. Essentially, shifting the pool of potential murderers inside to play video games.

Can someone explain this "person-centered approach"? The slickness of the name makes me a bit suspicious: "I didn't use regular statistics, I did it the person-centered way"...

Is anyone studying how violent video games affect the mentally ill?

It seems like most of our mass shootings are perpetrated by people who are both mentally ill and obsessed with playing first person shooters.

I think that even if there are negative consequences, there are just as many benefits of putting kids into the systems with rules and structure to learn and improve.

I would be more interested to see a study on whether there is a correlation between violent video games and police violence.

Just speculating: While there may not be a link with aggressive behavior, might there be greater ambivalence toward it?

If only we could conduct a similar study to understand why criminals (yes - individuals with intent to commit violent acts or felonies) overwhelmingly prefer stolen serialized firearms to 80% "ghost guns"?

A curious compromise could be agreeing to defund and dissolve both the ATF and ICE. Constitutionally, both are "unnecessary" and infringe on the rights of citizens.

For The Children TM

Time to regurgitate the last same statistics people have been saying for the last 20+ years

"Participant families were recruited through “a large north-western city” beginning in 2007 (Wave 1) via telephone directories and required to complete questionnaires. 65% were Caucasian, 12% black and 19% multi-ethnic, 4% other. Families of lower socioeconomic status were underrepresented as part of the initial sample group and therefore needed recruitment via referrals and fliers to add and diversify the sample group."

The sample size of the study in the article is way too small in my opinion to apply to the whole US population, I wish they didn't put it behind a paywall because they still might have some interesting insights on the local/regional scale :(. They mention the only city used in the study is "a large north-western city". Doing some back of the envelope math I just used Seattle as an example.

- Seattle has ~800k people today and ~610k people 10 years ago. Source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/seattle-wa-popul... - Today there are ~2.5 billion gamers in the world. ~27% of those gamers are under 18 (all genders) so ~650 million kids play video games. Source(Not sure how accurate but assuming on the same order of magnitude): https://techjury.net/blog/video-game-demographics/

At best if their sample size was the entire city of Seattle that would be ~1% of kid gamers. Their real sample size is probably at least an order of magnitude less than the size of the city so < ~0.1%.

I am interested in the study though just not $60 interested :(.

No one who thinks video games are to blame for violence is going to be convinced by a study of any length. People form their beliefs on COVID, vaccines, video games, and anything else in an irrational way. We need to pierce information silo's and echo chambers so these studies actually affect the ignorant who feel they are right with bad evidence and their misfounded opinions.

Does anyone think that psychological research into videogames and violence is an epistemological dead end? In the same way that saying books cause violence is also practically meaningless.

Societal violence isn't as simple as neurological desensitization to stimuli. To take Call of Duty for example, the violence is so incredibly unrealistic, the only thing I could imagine it desensitise someone to is the cocophenious stimuli of Call of Duty itself; the actual reality of soldiering is too corporeally miserable to form any meaningful connexion between the comfortable experience of playing a video game. However, Call of Duty creates a very reactionary world where you get to be part of the machinations of a barely legal extra-judicial dark operations. While I do not think it is obliged to do so, it never really comments on the morality of what you are doing, as you are always fighting evil - and this evil happens to be either Russian, Brown, or Marxist. It's not scientific to draw the connexion between videogames (as literature) and violence, but you'd have to be deliberately obtuse to deny that ideas (even within videogames) effect change.

No one today talks about opera as a medium being a catalyst for violence, but opera was a surprisingly common source of riots; sometimes even igniting revolutions. Following the July Revolution in France, the Belgians enthused by 'La muette de Portici' and its nationalist idealism, rioted and occupied the government buildings, and splitting from the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Anyone who claimed it was the soprano's vibrato rather than the librettist's lyrics would be dismissed as mad today. In a way it's similar to claiming that a red pulsating vignette in COD causes bloodthirsty violence. However, it's completely valid to critique games as literature that encourages dehumanisation that leads to violence.

Fine. But my kids are still not allowed to play them. My house, my rules.

one of the key questions is that who sponsored this study, e.g. if the gaming industry is sponsoring this kind of study it got to be biased and misleading to say the least.

The authors clearly never had a bad night playing Tarkov...

I can't help but think that we'll need a few more ten-year studies before this notion goes away.

By which I mean enough time will have passed that the primary proponents of the theory have died or no longer have the limelight.

Who funded the study?

From the full article (https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cyber.2020.0049):

> Author Disclosure Statement: No competing financial interests exist

> Funding Information: No funding was received for this article.

Brigham Young University, the employer of the two authors by paying their salary. The paper states that «No funding was received for this article.».

They should run this study for Twitter and Facebook.

Kind of sad there isn't much discussion on the positive effects of video games, which can boost reaction time and teach kids critical thinking skills.

The gamers from my school years have all ended up being pretty good at coding, hacking, and bringing together a functional solution to difficult technical problems.

The effort and skill required to play a multiplayer game back then may have been part of this.

‘Who’s got a spare terminator?’

I killed a man and I played video games

I have no doubt that people with violent tendencies are attracted to violent games, I believe that's probably the only correlation. I think regular people can separate fantasy from video games so these games are fine for them. It's a like enjoys like problem not X causes Y. I always tried to explain this to people but parents rarely seem to get it when they complain to me about their kids playing COD and headshotting people.

> a large north-western city... 65% were Caucasian, 12% black and 19% multi-ethnic, 4% other.

What year is this from where Caucasian is still used? And northwest of what country? I guess US since the authors are from there?

Original article is behind a paywall. -1

Does anyone have a non-paywall link to the PDF?

It's pretty annoying that so many studies are paywalled.

You could check out sci-hub(.do) and plug the DOI (https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2020.0049) into the search field. One of the greatest resources for researchers and the scientific community at large.

Studies backed by the tobacco industry showed that there were no adverse effects and doctors recommended them for a long time. How is this different?

As long as there is a lot of money in video games, there will be enough scientists whose research budget will be covered by interest groups with representatives from the video game companies... and the research will largely continue to show that video games are good for people.

Public hangings, an event where you could go and watch someone be drug out into the town square and hung from the neck until they were dead, used to be an event people would gather to see.

People used to fill bags with cats, dose the bag in oil, and then light the bag on fire for the joy of watching the cats die from the fire.

During combat sports you are watching two fully grown people destroy their brains and their bodies for your enjoyment. People regularly died from these sports.

Video games have no stakes. Even children understand this. Clicking on a pixelated simulation of a nondescript soldier who always comes back for the next round is Disney cartoons compared to what people used to get up to.

I recently came across a description of how people reacted to blood sport in arenas. Apparently the moment of death/gore/violence would elicit a gasp in the audience followed almost immediately by raucous cheering. It’s something we just don’t do anymore maybe with the exception of UFC but that’s not even close.

> People used to fill bags with cats, dose the bag in oil, and then light the bag on fire for the joy of watching the cats die from the fire.

damn. that was unexpected

additionally, in past, we were much more connected to slaughter of animals as a normalized activity.

As if that wasn't super obvious to everyone except fascists.

It's extremely important to scientifically verify "obvious" things, both because some people disagree and because things that are widely believed sometimes turn out to be false.

More likely those looking for an easy scapegoat.

"except fascists"?

Why the downvotes? I'm asking for a clarification.

Not yet, but this could change with VR, I suppose, as games become more immersive.

Definitely. I'm about half way through 'Medal of Honor' on the Quest 2 and I've never really been in to war games (or movies) at all. But I've been having an absolutely great time doing the various missions - and training - where you get to mow down the nazis with a variety of weapons.

And naturally, different to a console game, I'm physically pointing the weapon (controller) at the (virtual) target. It's really more fun than it should be ;)

It feels like being a character in a (cheesy) WWII movie.

(Also, I don't think stabbing zombies in the head in 'Walking Dead :Saints and Sinners' will ever get old)

I think the change might be multiplayer. The games where you loose half of the time (often in ways that seem unfair) can be really infuriating.

FarmVille doesn’t turn people into farmers either. I wonder if we need a study for that.

I'd be interested in seeing some studies that focus on possible links between gaming addiction and violent behavior, or other addictions in general (or other undesirable outcomes).

They should do the same thing with porn.

Paper - https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2020.0049

It's not particularly compelling to me. Not sure what the formal term is but it's a sidecar study of another project. There wasn't much investigation into how the kids were playing the game, and level of personal aggression was determined by self-survey.

>They should do the same thing with porn.

What's the hypothesis?

Fox News and Facebook did to our parents

what they said video games would do to us.

Credit: https://twitter.com/allymayn/status/1328448039497867264

One of the big pushes for this came from Tipper Gore and slightly the Clinton Admin in the 90s. Do you think that was Fox News or Facebook?

I think you missed the point of this quote.

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