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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

I remember all the fear mongering about violence in computer games (especially first-person shooters). Now, there is a whole generation of 20-somethings that grew up staring at the screen and shooting people and monsters, and crime rates have not gone up (in fact, they are falling IIRC).

Accordingly, I don't think marketing can change our desires and behaviour. Sure, it can change what we buy through brand-perception, but the desire to buy must already be there (e.g. we want shiny rare objects -> we buy diamonds (due to marketing)).

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1) fearmongers gotta fearmonger. There's a couple animal fables about how a scorpion has gotta be a scorpion because thats its nature etc. So if they were not fearmongering about violent video games, they would be fearmongering about internet social media, or pr0n, or immigrants, or liberals, or whatever. Their whipping boy of the day doesn't really matter. Also their market share of the overall population is extremely small.

2) Speaking of pr0n, I note the monkey see monkey do epic failure WRT violence stats, and notice that despite better pr0n availability that ever in the history of the species, monkey see monkey do birthrates are not going up.

3) However, taking into account your point and #2, people do not copy activities very well, but they do copy appearances. Mere observation tells anyone interested that "scary looking black guns" are a ridiculously popular fad right now compared to a nice hardwood finished stock. Its exactly the same firearm but just wanna be scary looking, sort of. Also it is supposedly a well known fact that womens, uh, bodily hair shaving habits WRT hair below the neck, or however you want to phrase it, have in recent decades been nearly universally oriented to match hairless pr0n images. Pr0n images have to be hairless otherwise guys are staring at a wool rug or whatever, and now women in general want to try to match that. I don't think either example has important social ramifications other than being somewhat profitable for certain mfgrs and retailers which is in direct opposition to your claim that marketing is ineffective. Go ahead, try and find me jpeg of a woolly mammoth of a woman carrying a classic traditional wooden stocked hunting shotgun to prove me wrong. Bet you can come up with 100x the number of counterexample pixs.

Now, there is a whole generation of 20-somethings that grew up staring at the screen and shooting people and monsters, and crime rates have not gone up

Accordingly, I don't think marketing can change our desires and behaviour.

But first person shooters and the marketing thereof were never intended to make people more violent. They are designed to make people like and play more first person shooters. Even the crazies who claim games do make people violent, mostly don't claim that making people violent are their intended purpose.

Makes me think of this, obviously causation != correlation but it's a funny graph1[1] nontheless.

[1]http://blog.sid3windr.be/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/crimegam...

Don't ads create false memories[1] and consequently our behavior?

[1] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/ads-implant-false-...

> We steal our stories from everywhere. Marketers, it turns out, are just really good at giving us stories we want to steal.

What's interesting about this is that marketers are now stealing stories from consumers and selling them right back, either by monitoring our behavior (both on- and off-line) or direct solicitation. "Tweet your favorite Dunkin' Donuts memory with #DunkinMemories!" There are even promotions that encourage consumers to write and produce their own commercials for a product -- there was one a while back where the winning ad was shown during the Super Bowl.

Your example may be a proof that violence in games does not cause violence in person, but it isn't a proof that it has no effect. In essence I may be fearful of the wrong scenario, but that isn't the same as me not having a good reason to fear.

Personally I think opulence of violence in media makes us number when confronted with images or stories of real violence then we would be otherwise.

Crime as a whole in the United States has gone down, yet school shootings, which First-Person Shooters emulate, have gone up since about 1993, the year Doom was released. Yes, I have a source.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the...

Note that the list of the US shootings, where Doom was released, has its own page, and far outstrips the number of school shootings in the rest of the world.

You can also see a graph of this at http://i56.tinypic.com/29uo8wg.jpg

Roses are red, Violets are blue. They don't think it be like it is, But it do.

I think that there are many other factors (law enforcement policies, gun control policies, economic climate...) that would affect raw crime rates much more than violent video games (in any way or the other).

If there is an effect of sorts, it's probably lost among the various other factors.

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