How the Video-Game Industry Already Lost Out in the Gun-Control Debate
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I'm not a big gamer these days but it seems like a huge cop-out to try to blame the games for the ills of others. Many, many people play the same games, own the same firearms, have the same history of being abused, are on the same psychoactive drugs, have done any number of things that a few random sickos have done... and yet they have NEVER committed such atrocities. Some times there is no better answer other than: Some people are just fucked in the head.
If anything it reduces the the urge for someone to do it by redirecting the urge into a simulation, kind of like a punching bag.
Now it seems video games are the punching bags for the gun violence debate instead when most studies show they have the opposite effect.
A punching bag makes you better at punching, it also wears you out and gets the urge to punch someone out on the bag rather than the actual person. You never heard of someone wanting to go hit the punching bag for a little while because they had a bad day at work?
What does the phrase mean when you call something a punching bag that is not actually a punching bag? Think about it, it's all related to redirecting aggression.
I'm an avid and pretty hardcore gamer, but come on, this is supposition. Is there really strong evidence that simulated violence is a deterrent to actual violence?
I've seen some "studies" trotted about gaming forums and the such, whose methodology and provenance are highly questionable. Has there been any real scientific evidence on this matter?
Most arguments I hear from gamers use plausible, and even persuasive, theories on why games wouldn't contribute to mass shootings, but I don't recall hearing any empirical evidence backing them up. And the older I get, the more I find that plausible theories and reality don't match up often enough to be fully convinced.
There is an interesting disconnect in public discussion about influence. Many people say that games and movies do not make people more violent, or that they only have a very small influence.
And many people say that "Thinspo"[1] or advertising is evil and should be banned because we're creating a generation of women (and also men) with body dysmorphia.
It feels odd to me that people can be so sure that games have no influence yet images of thin women in magazines has such a strong influence.
[1] thinspo style images are banned under quite a few company terms of service.
There is clearly an invitation to mimic the presented behaviour in both cases, however whether or not people follow up on this is another issue - mainly shaped by social norms. Being thin is socially acceptable and encouraged(whether or not it is a good thing is irrelevant). Killing people - isn't.
Also the action presented has to be related to the context it is presented in. An ad shows thin people in everyday life - so kids try to imitate by starving themselves in everyday life. Wargames present murder in context of a military conflict - well since we are NOT in the middle of a military conflict, there is no point imitating.
We can talk about more gun laws, less gun laws, less video game violence, a psychological approach, a strong-family-as-a-deterrent... or anything else we can imagine. But those solutions will never stop these crimes. We can only attempt to control this issue on the margins, and hope that we can find practical solutions that try to curb these random acts of violence. But the brutal truth is that they are a part of the nature of our species, inherent and practically unstoppable. Sometimes I'm shocked they don't happen more in a world of around 7 trillion human beings.
So this debate disgusts and annoys me to no end. How about we keep this national conversation geared towards respecting the memory of those who have passed, instead of as a vehicle to progress our personal politics. Because we're not solving this issue and we're looking at it all wrong.
Changing the way we approach video games will have no appreciable affect on these tragedies. People who are so mentally bent as to carry out heinous acts of violence against other humans will always find a way.
I don't believe in a stark concept of "Good vs Evil" in a biblical sense. However, as much as people do not like to admit it, as much as everyone wants to think that a few hours of psychotherapy and some modern pills will turn any lost soul around, there will always be those people who are outliers and are simply "broken".
We may never stop all violence, but this debate is worth having specifically because other societies of our species (i.e., not American) have been able to achieve much lower rates of violence in their societies than we have.
Not everywhere is as violent as the USA. These mass shootings are statistical outliers no matter which way you cut it, but violent crime (involving firearms or otherwise) in the US is substantially higher than many developed nations.
The question remains as to how, and why, these other nations have been able to achieve a dramatically lower incident rate of violence.
BTW, there are ~7 billion people on Earth, not trillion.
> "People who are so mentally bent as to carry out heinous acts of violence against other humans will always find a way."
Violent crime is not in and of itself indicative of mental illness. There are many perfectly rational (at least at the local level) reasons to hurt or kill someone.
Unfortunately, humans are pretty bad at handling Bayesian inference implicitly, so we have to use some tricks to keep ourselves in line. A particular problem that we face is that once we start investigating a hypothesis, we seem to upgrade our prior for that hypothesis, and so when we find weak evidence, we become overconfident in the hypothesis. This is related to the prosecutor's fallacy[1], and is also known in rationality circles as "privileging the hypothesis"[2].
The other bad thing about privileging the hypothesis is that we only have so much time to investigate hypotheses, and we have a ton of bad hypotheses. In fact, because of Occam's razor, we actually have way, way more bad hypotheses than we have decent ones.
So investigating hypotheses with low priors has a low ROI
So in summary, we don't really need to (and shouldn't) gather evidence to see if video games can be linked to mass shootings because the hypothesis "video games aren't linked to mass shootings" has such a massive head start over "video games are linked to mass shootings". If, however, simply surveying the data available at the outset revealed significant reason to believe that video games might be linked, it would be different. That's why it is worth investigating the link to guns, even though the prior for that connection was also low.
The thing I really want to say is that this is all really obvious when you stop and think about it. If there was an actual causal link between playing video games and becoming violent, we would expect much more violence than we actually see. For some reason, no one seems to look at it that way, though.
Ha.
This is clearly political, rather than based on any sound research or data. But if there was hard data, historically the legislatures haven't cared: It looks good to their constituents.
Looks like I'm going to have to give money to the games lobbies now, too.