Okay...

[threadwalker]

Since people have kept up the violence/video games discussion outside of lj, let me add just one more point in counter to one I keep hearing.

What about books? Couldn't books corrupt the youth, etc?

Answer: Of course books (when people actually read them) have a huge potential influence. That's why governments intent on controling ideas have

Comments

[ruespieler]

I think the big difference is the interactive thing. There have been studies that counted how many thousands of murders and other crimes (on TV)every kid not growing up in a religious compound somewhere in the sticks has seen by the age of ten, and the answer is a lot more than you would think.

But, yeah, there is a neurological thing going on with video gasmes - the intermittent reward when you hit a target, say, and there is lights and music ans stuff that goes with it - slot machines work the same way - and you get the little dopamine surge that is meant to re-inforce whatever it is you just did (because it registeres as something that worked) and it's literally chemically addictive and it's keyed to your action.

Parents have some interesting choices to make...

I was reading a thing today about the big watergun wars they have downtown and the commentator was asking why it's okay to play murder as a game when we wouldn't play rape as a game. (I know I know, but people don't do it in the mainstream) If Professor Plum was sexually assulting Miss Scarlett with a pool cue in the billiard room you wouldn't play that with your 8 year old, right?

[threadwalker]

You're dead-on with the dopamine surge/addiction factor. It's among the many more-detailed bits that are contributing to my viewpoint on this, along with studies from developmental psych, cognition and social psych classes at the graduate level, and studies I have found elsewhere. The really disturbing thing was seeing an interview with Dave Grossman (a West Point psychology professor, Professor of Military Science, and an Army Ranger who wrote Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence

Did you see the original post and the follow-up one?

Hmmm. An intersting idea about Clue. I think it seems removed enough from reality that you don't think of it the same way. Also, you're in the role of the detective solving a murder. Stories were very consciously used for as long as we have records of them to teach roles in society. They have lots of gore, but the point is which side the story is set up for you to identify with. You play the detective, you're on the opposite side of murder. It gets ahirier when the protagonist kills the "evil" character. Usually the story shows what the evil is, and a reason why it must be stopped, a struggle with the concept of killing, even sickness and remorse from the hero (Harry Potter has this, for example). I think the stories that just blindly kill "bad guys" contribute quite a lot to the simplistic "good guy/bad guy" mentality that lets us so easily fall victim to say, a government that will label someone "bad guy" to get our support in hunting them down at all costs.

[thecompassrose]

I hate to open this can of worms, but I saw David Grossman speak last Monday (as I had mentioned to you in an earlier post)(and went out to lunch with him) and he's not anti-video games, or violence in movies, he is just against games like GTA that basically condition people to be able to shoot accurately and have no respect for life. He showed us sample brain scans from a study at IU showing that teenagers who are exposed to high levels of media have an overdeveloped "primal" brain and an underdeveloped forebrain. His arguement is that they work in the same way that police/military training works, to condition someone to shoot at a particular target, and this time to be rewarded in a fantasy setting. sorry my cat is climbign on the keyboard_
I'll gmail you about this if you want...

[threadwalker]

I'm not anti-video games either, I'm just advocating care and awareness about the effects of games like GTA and other games/media that densensitize or condition for violence. These are things that need to be thought about, not mindlessly handed off to kids.

Also, even if he advocated both mass densensitization and teaching the entire population to kill, his findings as a psychologist, experience in the methods of military training, and comments about how conditioning to kill/desensitization stand.