great blog post rejected by huffington

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The simple fact is that most young males play violent video games these days and the overwhelming majority don't go out and shoot up a school. Noting that a mass shooter played video games is sort of like saying he was wearing shoes. A young guy who doesn't play video games these days is definitely the minority and so I don't think we can draw any sort of conclusion from the fact that mass shooters played video games, anymore than we could say that people who wear shoes will be more likely to shoot up a school than those that don't. So I do have to say that I think blaming video games is rather myopic not to mention I wouldn't want to see curbs put on video games (restrictions on the first amendment) anymore then I'd like to see them put on guns.

That all said, I could see how getting kids out in nature can have a very positive effect. I think there's something about camping, hiking, kayaking, etc that makes a person feel more positively about life and more confident/comfortable in their own skins. I think in general the solution (if there is one) is going to rely on people recognizing signs of problems and getting help to the person. That help might come from nature trips, help learning to socialize, or professional help. Even if we don't stop all mass shooters, it would be a good thing to help people feeling marginalized by society find a more contended life.
 
I'm not saying video games cause crime, or makes criminals out of healthy young men. I'm saying the influences have changed. Instead of peers, parents, and society encouraging healthy social interaction between people, it is now acceptable to imitate, and simulate, hours of violent confrontation and aggression towards those around you via violent video games.

I have caught myself driving too aggressively in the real world, after playing racing video games for long periods of time. It is bad, and wrong, and against the law, I was endangering myself and others, and I was disappointed in myself and my lack of self control,
but it still happened.
So I have a hard time believing that video games don't influence our behavior on at least a subconcious level. Some people are more susceptible to that influence than others, some people don't have the checks and balances of a peer group to level their behavior out, and to offer a dose of reality, so to speak.

No, I don't think video games cause violence, per say...but I believe they certainly don't diminish it either.
 
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I doubt that there is enough research to say one way or another and as the Blogger attests there is not much will to even explore it in todays socially active media.
One thing is certain and that is the overwhelming attachment or fixation on these first person games that these active shooters have had and the acting out the games in real life.
 
Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
--Frank Outlaw
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a little simplistic and overreaching, but he's on the right track
 
Very good article. While normally maturing well balanced kids are not going to run out and kill people because they play video games, troubled teens are easily influenced and they already have a bit of hate for society built up. Not a good combination.
 
If it was the games themselves promoting violence then, as was noted up thread, we'd expect to see an increase in violence tracking with the proliferation of violent video games. We don't. What we seem to see is more that violent video games are providing elements in the script followed by a tiny percentage of young males whose problems and pathology are such that there was likely to be some bad outcome. The video games are influencing how that bad outcome is expressed, but they're not creating the problem.
 
They, the games are not creating the problem but I think they are exacerbating it. Along with the graphic movies and music.
Not many people have voices in their heads and fewer listen to them, they are the problems.
 
Well I've been playing violent games since the first wolfenstein came out.
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I was playing them before video games existed. Me and other kids, playing "Cowboys & Indians", or"Army" with toy guns, and rules about how to determine who got killed and how long they had to stay down before they could get back up and be "reinforcements.

Then there was Paintball, LaserTag, AirSoft, and now I'm retired and I still play Call of Duty. Don't recall murdering anybody though. :scrutiny:
 
It's not the games in themselves, it's the weakness in composition of individual character and psychology. Some of that is just the particulars of the construction of an individual brain, and some of that is the parenting provided. A healthy brain well parented is not going to be driven by video games to commit violence.
 
Spawn said:
That is patently false, at some point when I have more time I will be sure to elaborate this further, for now it should suffice that as recently as WWI & WWII, we had great difficulty getting young men to pull the trigger on enemies in combat, this began to change(dramatically)through both the Korean & Vietnam wars, and it has gone in exactly the opposite direction in the wars on terror.

Repetitiously programming the human brain to objectify, rapidly engage targets, and drop the hammer on them produces not just dollars, but killers!
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Well, I'm betting improved training resulting from lessons learned from just those examples has a great deal to do with that.

But here is the kicker.

Even the U.S. military recognizes what video games do for their troops.

"One of the most widely used games in the military according to Mead is Virtual Battlespace 2 (VBS2), which was developed in 2007.
The developer, Bohemia Interactive, boasts that the game gives you the ability to import your own terrain as well as design almost any imaginable scenario.
The predecessor to VBS2, simply called Virtual Battlespace, was first used for mission rehearsal in 2005 when the Australian Defense Force used the game to recreate as Samahaw, Iraq right before deployment."

http://ticker.baruchconnect.com/article/military-uses-video-games-for-training-troops/

"America's Army" represents the official U.S. Army game that competes with commercial offerings such as "Modern Warfare 2" by also featuring online multiplayer shootouts. The free-to-play game has become a more effective recruiting tool for the Army than all other Army advertisements combined, according to MIT researchers.

Such blurring between entertainment and war may have unwanted consequences, according to Peter Singer, a Brookings Institute defense expert. He argues in a Foreign Policy journal article that the "militainment" phenomenon can lead to greater distortions in how people view war.

http://www.livescience.com/10022-military-video-games.html

"Stuart White, the senior producer of Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon series, has extensively studied military technology, researching all aspects of his hit gaming franchise. Boasting a healthy relationship with numerous defense contractors as well as the US military, White gets to learn about numerous military technology advances long before the public does. But White was quite shocked to see a Humvee equipped with a .50 caliber gun turret that was controlled by what looked like a suspiciously familiar device: an Xbox 360 controller.

I pointed that out to them and they said ‘Well, of course. We’re not going to reinvent a new way because we get all these kids into the military, they already know how to use a 360 controller, they’re already familiar with it. So we’re just going to use that in how we’re building the technology,’” White recounted. “And that was a really interesting moment for me to see how video games are actually affecting real life, and specifically the military.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregvoa...mes-and-modern-military-influence-each-other/

GRAFENWÖHR, Germany — The Army has created a video game unit and will invest $50 million over five years on games and gaming systems designed to prepare soldiers for combat.

Lt. Col. Gary Stephens, product manager for air and ground tactical trainers at Project Executive Office — Simulation Training and Instrumentation said Thursday that the $50 million has been approved for a "games for training" program starting in 2010.

"The Army takes this seriously," Stephens said of PEO-STRI and its Army gaming unit, which will handle military video game requirements. "We own gaming for the Army — from requirements through procurement," he said.

http://www.stripes.com/news/not-playing-around-army-to-invest-50m-in-combat-training-games-1.85595
 
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If young children watched 40 hours of hardcore porn every week do you think they are more or less likely to engage in sexual acts?
I don't know what parents are thinking by allowing them to watch and play unlimited hardcore graphic violence.
Just as you would want to teach your kids to think intelligently about sex when the time is right, same with violence, guns, martial arts, etc.
 
great blog post rejected by huffington

http://peterbrownhoffmeister.wordpre...-to-read-this/
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I agree with the writer. Too few fathers take their sons hunting today or teach them to fire and respect firearms. Hunting teaches them to respect for game and to respect guns. Kids that are taught to hunt learn that once you pull the trigger you can't call the bullet back. Instead, today fathers go golfing or spend time elsewhere, while kids stay home playing violent video games or watch violent TV and movies. When the game is over they just reset it.

I grew up in a medium size city in Connecticut many years ago, but my friends and I were always in the woods camping, fishing and hunting. We would walk five miles to get out of the city. We had BB guns at ten years old, mine were purchased with money that I earned. In the summer evenings, my father would dorp us off at a pond in the woods around 8 PM. We would build camp fires and fish for bullheads all night. In the morning, he would pick us up around 7 AM before he went to work. At twelve years old, I purchased a .22 and .410 with my earned money. At twelve, my father had a small business, but during the hunting season, he would take off Monday mornings and he allow me to skip morning school. We would go out hunting together. Rabbits and pheasant, this was our ritual during my junior and high school years. At thirteen, I purchased my first deer rifle and was going deer hunting in NH with my cousin. I had to save money for the $25.00 non-resident deer license and shot my first deer at thirteen years old. I always had odd and part time jobs from 10 year old until I graduated high school. I was fasinated with guns and purchased six or seven before I finished high school. At twelve, I started hanging out in a small gun shop, the ower was Eddy Pulaski. It wasn't long before the Eddy had me loading .38 special bullets. Several times a year, Eddy would take me to the range on Sunday and let me fire .45 APC pistol, MI carbines, .30/06 Springfields, and .45 Thompson sub-machine gun. At thireteen, I bought a .218 Bee with a Lyman 310 handloader w/bullets and brass. Eddy gave me a powder scale and old Speer reloading manual. I was set.

Now I was no saint, in junior high school, I was suspended twice for fighting. We had white, black and spanish gangs and many times I had to fight my way home.

In high school, it was different and I was on the rifle team. Captain of the team my junior and senior years. We had our own armory in school. During the shooting season, I and several other team members would go into the armory during class breaks to clean the guns and prepare stuff for the coming competition shoots or weekly practice. Plus in high school we all hunted and had guns in our cars in the parking lot.

I guess the moral of this story is: We learned to respect guns and life.

I graduated high school during the Vietam war and went right into the USAF. I servered 28 years and supervised many people. I came to believe 99% of people will perform to the level expected of them, no matter what the challenge is. For the youth of today who sit in front of violent video games or watch violent TV and movies -- What do they learn and what is expected of them????
 
Suuuuure.

Killing a couple dozen doves or shooting a deer from a stand is all about "mortality in nature".

Killing is fun.
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It can teach a respect for life and firearms that reading on the internet won't do. Video games portrays that killing isn't that significant and happens senselessly all the time. Actually experiencing what taking a life is like is truly different than what you see on a TV screen.

I don't hear about blood thirsty hunters going out and shooting humans, do you?
We are discussing violent crime. Violent Crime is WAY down.

...as for that other stuff, beyond the scope of this forum.
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Didn't it skyrocket in the 60s and we are still recovering from it? Granted the crime rate change has nothing to do with video games, it wasn't because of hunting.
 
That is patently false, at some point when I have more time I will be sure to elaborate this further, for now it should suffice that as recently as WWI & WWII, we had great difficulty getting young men to pull the trigger on enemies in combat, this began to change(dramatically)through both the Korean & Vietnam wars, and it has gone in exactly the opposite direction in the wars on terror.

Repetitiously programming the human brain to objectify, rapidly engage targets, and drop the hammer on them produces not just dollars, but killers!
Click to expand...

Apparently I should have specifically added "immoral" or "unlawful" violence. Are you arguing however that our modern soldiers are now more prone to unlawful or immoral violence than say in Vietnam due to their video games exposure? My argument is that a properly healthy/ordered and trained brain is capable of regulating use of what it has learned for proper purposes.
 
It can teach a respect for life and firearms that reading on the internet won't do. Video games portrays that killing isn't that significant and happens senselessly all the time. Actually experiencing what taking a life is like is truly different than what you see on a TV screen.
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Twas certainly my experience.

I senselessly killed several animals when I was little because of no good reason. Eventually there came a day that I killed some killdeer chicks and the gravity of my own violence fell on me like a ton of bricks. From then on I began to respect the life of animals and only took their lives when it served a genuine purpose.

The kids who don't pivot at a point like I did go on for the thrill. They are the ones who might end up killing dogs, cats, anything and everything just to watch it die, no other purpose. Feeding these kids violence on a screen does nothing good for them.

I guess for my own kids, I'll ask myself this questions when it comes to the stuff that they would be prone to absorb; 'Is this going to be good for them, or might it cause them harm?'. I was talking to my little boy a few weeks ago about a movie he had watched. I told him that the things he sees on the screen are not real, that it is make-believe; pretend. He couldn't understand this, he thought these situations were real and taking place somewhere else. Even after explaining the whole fact about actors and stories captured on a camera to make a movie, I realized that he's just not old enough yet to understand that there does exist a separation between reality and fantasy. He thinks there are dinosaurs somewhere on earth someplace and dragons are real, somewhere. He should not be left to absorb anything and everything out there and be expected to then know right from wrong.
 
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the video game theory is Full of holes, one if my best friends plays GTA for like days at a time but he wont kill a fly if he can help it.
I also read in an article recently that gun violence began a very sharp down turn In 1994 round about the time Doom the violent game every one loves to blame was released.
 
Throw one right under the bus to save the other, huh? It troubles me when I read an anti gun arguments regurgitated to fit anti media arguments, from so called freedom loving gun owners no less.

One: correlation does not equal causation. Folks didn't have violent video games back in the good ole days, didn't have a lot of others things either. Society has changed in many aspects and it's impossible to simply pigeon hole one factor as a root cause.

Two: Catharsis. Violent video games are cathartic for many including myself. Nothing beats an awful day at work being chewed out for others failures than going home and blowing some pixel dudes head clean off! Some of you are so sure going in that these games are responsible for the insane actions of the extreme few that you completely ignored this aspect. How many lives were saved because a guy real down on his luck was able to take his frustrations out on some computer generated model instead of the closest mall? The reaction to Rock music when it was first introduced garnered up the same arguments about negative, antisocial influences while denying the cathartic elements that drew people to it. And just because something is violent does NOT make it successful. A game is not a game is not a game, it has to be fun. Violence is only an aesthetic component, it has nothing to do with the actual gameplay mechanics itself.

Further, in regard to that guy who's only socializing is through a computer, most of these people suffer from an anxiety disorder of some flavor. So the guy who is nervous about leaving his parent"s basement is all of a sudden brave when shopping for firearms, shooting a gun for the first time, going through all the work to acquire what he needs?

A game is a game and reality is reality. No game I've ever played blurred the line between the two. Shooting an actual firearm is not holding the left trigger while tapping the right. It does not let you hear the impressive blast, feel the recoil or the gas blow back on your face, smell the powder burning, or allow you super human endurance for accuracy right out of the box. Violent video games prepare a human for armed combat against other humans as well as a silhouette target does over a standard bullseye.
 
Sam Cade said:
Imagine if they read a violent book instead.

...or if someone took them hunting and taught them to enjoy killing.


:scrutiny:
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Do we have any data on this? Did any of the mass shooters of the past couple of decades regularly engage in hunting?

It's a serious question, not rhetorical.
 
FIVETWOSEVEN said:
Didn't it skyrocket in the 60s and we are still recovering from it?
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We are about where we were in the 60's.

Consider that the accuracy of records and frequency of data are going to be worse the farther back you go.


Violent crime rates are falling as our population ages and as the instigation of violence itself becomes socially unacceptable for most of our population.

Look at our crime rate since 1994 to present.

What Changed?


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24crime.html?_r=0

B = f(P, E) where behavior (B) is a function (f) of the person (P) and the environment (E).

http://ksj.mit.edu/tracker/2013/01/lead-and-crime
 
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