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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

To put it a different way, the people who grew up to be violent individuals are probably not posting on HN, nor working at companies with people who post on HN, so the fact that everybody on HN isn't violent, despite playing violent video games is only weak evidence against there being a correlation.

In fact, I would be surprised for there to be zero correlation (even assuming there is no causation), as it is a reasonable assumption that naturally violent people are more likely to play violent video games.

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How about the fact that gaming grew by every metric by orders of magnitude between 80s and now and violent crime dropped by half of more everywhere in the world.

If the effect was even 0.01 with growth by 10000% we would have noticed.

I'm not sure that provides the statistical proof it appears to. Assume there were 1,000,000 violent incidents in 1980 and they were all caused by lead in the water. Violent video games caused no violence at a level that would even show up. If today we had 500,000 violent incidents and none of them were caused by lead but all 500k were caused by the prevalence of violent video games.

(I'm not trying to say that violent video games cause real life violence, but the numbers you describe don't offer any type of compelling evidence without other data being considered as well. )

So you're saying if there were multiple causes and one of them was corrected, his numbers wouldn't catch it, right?

Yes. Total violence going down doesn't prove that violence from video games isn't going up.

Lets say the effect is 1 additional violent crime per 1000 gamers per year.

With 2.4 billion gamers we should have seen increase by 2.4 million violent crimes per year in last few decades.

It's very unlikely that data hides such an increase, especially given the fact that in different countries game adoption and crime follows slightly different curves so it should be possible to separate changes caused by other factors.

If there's any link it must be negligible for the data to fit.

If the question is whether or not there is a high chance of someone committing a violent crime caused by playing video games, then you are correct. If the question is whether there is any causation link between violent video games and committing real life violence, then you need more data than what you are using.

We have roughly 380 violent crimes per 100k people each year in the US. Just to keep it simple, let's assume they are committed by unique people. Half of adults play video games and about half of those play violent video games. (Very rough numbers but the right ballpark.) So in 100k people, you have 25,000 who play violent games of some sort. Of those violent video games, if only a certain type can create violence, you may be looking at only 10,000 people or fewer (per 100k people) who are playing the games that could cause violence. It also seems likely that the ability to cause violence would be tied to genetic and environmental issues in the person playing the video games. On top of that, for the violence to manifest itself, the person would need to find themselves in a circumstance where it could manifest. (Being bullied at school, etc.)

It seems very likely that by the time everything that might have an impact on violence is considered, you might be only dealing with 1,000 people out of every 100k who would be in the at risk group. If the effect for the at risk group is very high, say 1 out of 1,000, you are talking about one more violent crime per 100,000 people.

It would seem that an increase like this could easily be hidden due to other programs to reduce crime like cleaning up lead pollution, or better training teachers to to identify at risk students.

(And please understand, I'm not saying that there is a link. Just pointing out how it would be likely to show up if there was.)

> Half of adults play video games and about half of those play violent video games

The outrage was mostly about children and permanent damage to their brains caused by games. Almost all children play games, and certainly more than half of all games (weighted by popularity) are violent.

> very high, say 1 out of 1,000

That seems the opposite of high. High would be 1 in 2 or 1 in 5.

If the effect of everyone playing video games is 1 additional crime per 100 000 people I don't see the problem TBH.

I get what you are saying. Keep in mind I'm just saying this would be how we look for causation, not whether it makes sense to actually do something about it.

> That seems the opposite of high. High would be 1 in 2 or 1 in 5.

I guess I'm thinking of how we'd view a side effect in medicine. If 1 out of 1,000 people who had the problem the medicine was supposed to cure were likely to die or cause a death when taking the medicine, it would seem like a high number of deaths. You'll routinely see side effects of things that happened 1 in 50,000 cases being listed as possible side effects of medicine.

> If the effect of everyone playing video games is 1 additional crime per 100 000 people I don't see the problem

Whether this matters probably depends on what violent thing they do. If it is an additional Columbine type event for every 100k people, that would be much less acceptable than one additional instance of verbal abuse by someone in a disagreement at a bar.

In medicine they give the probability out of all people using the drug, you gave the conditional probability with many assumptions.

This would be like saying "this drug might kill 1 out of 1000 people who also have this rare gene which only 1% of population has".

> How about the fact that gaming grew by every metric by orders of magnitude between 80s and now and violent crime dropped by half of more everywhere in the world. If the effect was even 0.01 with growth by 10000% we would have noticed.

Have shootings not gone up? Has no one noticed it.

It’s counter intuitive to think that games that simulate practicing shooting people would have zero influence on people this inclined.

Shootings have gone down significantly in almost every country in the world.

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

A good friend of mine has conducted such a study some time ago (unfortunately I don't have a link at hand) and the team's conclusion was that the games themselves had no impact on violence, it was the multiplayer aspect that made the biggest difference. As in the frustration caused by the human factor in the game lead to far more negative sentiments and violence than the game itself with the same mechanics (playing against the game) ever could. This was exacerbated in games that allowed "humiliating" behavior from the opposing players (think fatalities and the like).

I tend to agree and I can confirm with anecdotal evidence from all around real life. Take traffic for example where road rage is always directed at other people no matter how small their trespass, while far more damaging incidents where no other person was involved are met with some swear words (getting 2 flat tires at once, seeing a tree fall on your car, etc.).

It's other people and their perceived trespasses that cause the buildup of frustration and violence.

This was my personal experience too. And people will find ways to humiliate others in games without such measures like Halo's teabagging.

In real sports such a gesture would be met with widespread condemnation and actual in game punishment, bans, etc. Which is why games following real sports do it the same way. No sports game will allow you to simulate a celebration, or score your points in a manner lacking fair play, trying to replicate real life.

Allowing things like "teabagging" without instant ban for the user, even building dedicated humiliating moves in a game, or emphasizing some animations like slow motion kill cams when a certain score style was achieved are the reason I have a hard time respecting the gaming industry or taking e-sports seriously (purely because of games' design decisions, not the player).

You're not comparing apples to apples. E-sports leagues will penalize you if you audaciously disrespect your opponents. Also, the majority of the most popular e-sports don't include extreme game play distractions like kill cams. In League of Legends, CS:GO, Overwatch, and Dota, a kill does not disrupt the killer's animations (it would be infuriating if it did).

Comparing the tea-bagging that occurs in online Halo play with the rules in place in the NFL is silly. Better to compare online Halo or Call of Duty with beer league hockey.

You were very selective with your reading of my comment, discarding any bit that inconvenienced your uncharitable and wrong interpretation. Not sure if this is bad faith or a reading comprehension issue.

Throughout my comment I made a few things explicitly clear. That I don't blame the gamers, rather the game devs for including the option and the leagues for choosing to play games that have this. And that many games are fine. You chose to ignore that when making your case.

To your point, plenty of games exicitly have such behavior built-in via fatalities, takedowns, executions, or some signature move and slow motion kill-cam to be shown to the victim usually, all with animations that go beyond "I defeated my enemy" into "I humiliated them". There's only one reason to include such mechanism in a game and that's that they want gamers to use them. A league promoting those games regardless of whether it punishes using that feature still endorses them in their entirety. Those are the ones I'm having issues with.

The gaming and e-sports industries don't do enough to call the offenders out on this behavior. At best they turn a blind eye while still playing and promoting such games. I'm sorry but this is like having Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein at your birthday party and thinking it's ok because they didn't harass anyone while you were in the room.

The fact that I still have to explain this already speaks volumes.

I've played DOTA 2 and Starcraft 2, and while both are exceptionally competitive multiplayer games - DOTA is far more toxic. I've had maybe 10 toxic communications in years of playing sc2. Almost every lost game of dota ends in name calling and blaming each other for the loss. Almost every game of starcraft ends with the losing player writing "gg" and surrendering.

In my opinion there's several factor contributing to this differences in cultures:

1. starcraft match usually takes about 15 minutes. Dota game takes about 45 minutes.

2. you are expected to surrender in starcraft when you recognize it's over - playing to lose condition is disrepectful; you cannot surrender in dota in practice (abandoning the game is harshly penalized by the matchmaking system)

3. there's more than 10% chance you'll be stuck playing a lost game that you have no influence over for more than 30 minutes in dota. This never happens in starcraft - either you surrender or you think you can win.

4. the culture of starcraft is influenced mostly by Koreans. Showing off isn't considered cool. Fountain diving is common in dota.

I don't think it's multiplayer games that are inherently toxic. I think highly competitive team-based multiplayer games played with random people with no way to surrender are :) And even then I'm yet to see an example of dota player becoming violent because of the game. If any game can do this it has to be dota.

So, to restate the problem as you see it: There is currently some overlap between games that include humiliation-encouraging mechanics and games that are popular as e-sports. There should be zero overlap; those games should not be played professionally because playing them professionally indirectly endorses all the features of the game, including those humiliation features? Even when professional leagues ban their use. I can at least understand where you’re coming from, but I still think your generalization of e-sports is as strange as generalizing meat sports.

My first question is, which games, which mechanics, and which e-sports organizations are we talking about here? Because from my perspective, the biggest e-sports in the world are LoL, CS:GO, Dota 2, Starcraft, and maybe WoW. Not one of these has any purpose-built game disrupting humiliation mechanics like the ones we’ve talked about. And as far as I know, the organizations that run the largest tournaments for these games are often, even usually, not the same organizations that run tournaments for other games.

So you have trouble taking all of e-sports seriously because some org runs tournaments for some games that happen to include mechanics that encourage highly unsportsmanlike behavior. Do you have trouble taking all of wrestling seriously because showy costume wrestling exists? Riot games doesn’t get to tell indie Street Fighter tournaments to shut down because they’re making e-sports look bad, nor would that if they could, because people who actually care about e-sports don’t assign Street Fighter’s problems to LoL.

The “gaming and e-sports industry” doesn’t act as a unit any more than all of cable television does.

So, call out your offenders, if you feel they aren’t being called out. But first, ask yourself: did that game developer even intend to make a game whose primary purpose was being a sport? Or are the tournament organizers just trying to make it work as one, despite it having some features that have to be disallowed? And why is that a big deal?

Personally I don't mind if games want to include humiliation as a mechanic. My larger point is that people will be jerks no matter the arena.

Still, it is possible that games with such mechanics--or graphic violence generally--may amplify bad behavior elsewhere. My guess though is this can never be conclusively proven true or false as there are just so many confounding factors.

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

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

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

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

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

- The vast majority of gun homicides are with handguns

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

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

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

Correlation does not imply causation.

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

I mean it’s either good science or it isn’t.

> as it is a reasonable assumption that naturally violent people are more likely to play violent video games.

It's also a reasonable assumption that people who naturally want to avoid actual violence play violent video games instead.

This paranoia against violent video games was obviously fake from the start, and such a typically American thing - in line with the American puritan view that blowing up people in films or broadcasting police car chases is a-OK but (female) nipples or saying "fuck" is a big NO NO.

- The paranoia was not uniquely American; as a minor, I could walk into a store in the US and buy e.g. Duke Nukem 3D, while my friend in Germany could not do so.

- I'm not making the claim that video games lead to violence, I'm just saying that we should apply the same level of analysis to studies supporting views we already have that we do to supporting views we do not already have. If this study was well done, great! If it was poorly done, then it is appropriate to call it out. If the study truly wasn't able to find any correlation (positive, per my hypothesis, negative per yours), then either there really isn't any correlation (meaning all of the potential forces that would cause a correlation happen to be perfectly balanced (which would be surprising to me), or there is something wrong with the study.

- To be clear, I don't think there is a causal relationship between violent video games and violent behaviors.

- There are likely correlations between video-games and ADHD, as well as single-player video games (actually any solitary activity) and depression. There are links between both of those and violent behavior, particularly self-harm.

> a typically American thing

Not only. Eg in Germany there's long been an enormous stigma against violent video games. I haven't talked with German gamedevs for some years so maybe this loosened up since. But basically, if you worked in gamedev you preferred to tell your neighbours and acquaintances that you work "in IT". If they would find out you work on video games they'd pretty much fully cut you out of their lives.

(Note, to my anecdotal experience this is a purely German thing. I don't know other European countries where the same stigma exists)

FPSes are cool in the US because of how we glorify our victories in WW2 and the Persian Gulf. I'd imagine it might be opposite in Germany for the same reason.

Most German PC games seem focused on trade / mercantile or historical themes. There are also some popular simulation and role playing genres.

- Anno Series (I just picked up Anno 1800 yesterday)

- Fugger / The Guild 1-3 / Patrician etc

- The Settlers / Die Siedler

- Games set in the Dark Eye (role playing framework similar to D&D but more popular in Germany) universe.

This is true in board games. German board games rarely involve combat or taking over territory. Where there are lots of classic American board games with these themes.

>In fact, I would be surprised for there to be zero correlation (even assuming there is no causation), as it is a reasonable assumption that naturally violent people are more likely to play violent video games.

There's a lot of violence in society. There's even more violent media available. From news broadcasts to internet forum posts to books. Perhaps violent video games aren't particularly worse at that than all of the other media that portray violence? The news tends to have stories that are more gruesome than the things that happen in video games. The violence in video games is usually toned down or limited.

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