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2 hours ago, Hodgman said:You could also speculate that he was a violent person and used airsoft and counter-strike as a coping strategy to deal with his impulses, and that they've helped to avoid similar incidents elsewhere. But that's just speculation...
In that case,. I move that we take another look at the regulation of stress balls. Dangerous things that may in fact be linked to increased violence.
I will have to say no on that one, as a matter of fact , a scholarly and peer reviewed study was done and it shows the exact opposite, that when someone is feeling violent/having violent thoughts playing a game like Grand Theft Auto 5 takes away these urges and satisfies the violent urges a person might have had. it also shows that even if you did not have any violent thoughts when you played the game and did things like kill hookers and innocent people it did not make people feel like going out and doing any of those things. sorry I do not have the link to the article as I am busy conducting a study of my own right now.
On 10/6/2017 at 11:28 AM, MarkJackson2000 said:I am currently studying games development at college and need a survey answering for my essay.
https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/W2LG7CV
If you answered, thank you. Please share if you can. I need 1000 responses for it to be credible
filled out the survey, hope it helps.
Honestly, no, games have nothing to do with violence or sexism as studies have shown. Every generation has their scapegoat for violence as a way to not talk about the stigma of mental health. For us and our children the scapegoat is games. The generation before that it was music. Generation before that it was movies. At one point it was an actual concern that certain types of novels would spark violence or adultery (yes I'm referring to romance novels as their was once a concern that women would read them and would seek an affair like that of the character in the book). Even now, when a person does a mass shooting, everyone blames the weapon instead of addressing mental health and if they can a reporter or news outlet tries to shoehorn games into it. The Aurora Theater shooting they threw in Call of Duty I think it was. During a press conference after one shooting, the NRA president blamed GTAV (the most common scapegoat).
It doesn't help that some show they don't know what the gun laws are. After the Las Vegas shootings and the Texas Church shootings, a Senator announced he was writing a bill to make it illegal for a person charged with domestic violence to get a gun (except that law has been on the books since 1996 I think it was [the Lautenberg Amendment]).
Let VR take off and you will see the argument change from video games cause violence to VR games cause violence and claim VR FPS are "REAL murder simulators" like Jack Thompson claimed with GTA.
On 10/17/2017 at 3:38 PM, ferreiradaselva said:" rel="external">This video from Pop Culture Detective shows the use of media (movies) as a medium to (intentionally) normalize the view of war and, by consequence, making army recruitment something more attractive than what actually is. Not exactly the same thing as individual violence, and intentional instead of accidental, but the same principle.
While I like many of the things Pop Culture Detective does, at the end of the day many of the things he claims are assertions that may satisfy his intuitions(or mine even) or verified things he's read, but are not backed up by any significant amount of data.
For example, he has argued that violent media affect the culture around guns - and when asked to provide evidence about it, he fell back to a (kind of indignant) "are you denying media affects culture?!".
This...is not how logic works though.
To make it more clear, in the "hard" sciences, when a scientist claims that a specific field F affects a specific particle P in specific X way, and challenged to provide evidence for this claim, their retort can't be "so are you denying fields affect particles?!". It's easy to see how such a retort would be laughable.
It's the kind of sloppy thinking that would be entirely unacceptable in "hard" sciences, yet seems to be very common in the "soft" social sciences, at least amongst the various pundits on social media, TV, etc.
In reality, if we want to verify that claim, we would have to conduct a research about what opinions people hold regarding say, gun control, and if we indeed saw a correlation between playing military shooters and the answers people give, we could hypothesize they have some causal link. If we didn't see any correlation, then we would have to abandon our hypothesis. I would seriously like to see a study like that, to determine if playing military shooters makes you have different opinions about gun control, or aggressive wars, etc. It could even affect my choice of currently working in a company that makes military shooters.
The problem is that it's very common for social commenters(especially the social media pundits) to engage in a kind of entirely "closed" system of thought, which is basically unfalsifiable - no amount of evidence will make them abandon it; they will patch their theories up in various ways in order to fit the data, and at the very least they will claim that there's no clear causal link but the whole thing just "normalizes" or "amplifies" existing behaviour and attitudes - but in what way? to what extent? How can we quantify that to see if it actually happens? In the end it seems they're merely arguing that because it seems intuitive and logical for them, based on their own preconceptions, ideas, things they've read... but that's not exactly how we determine if something is false or true.
I think violence amongst people is indicative of the human condition. I once heard a great quote talking about why war exists, it was stated that if people weren't interested in it they wouldn't participate. I myself participate by watching movies and reading books about it. Violent acts being committed against others is inevitable, in my opinion. If someone has a tendency towards violent action then it doesn't matter what media they interact with, they will be violent. That being said though, I do believe that the media they expose themselves to can and does influence the types of violent action they choose to participate in.
Some games are not as violent like Mario or Pacman but others like Man Hunt are just sick. The fact that a game like that can even exist is beyond me. Shooting games just make me cringe unless the game is Duck Hunt. Shooting games are for survivalists. Just look at H1Z1 - just looking at the game in action just makes me cringe at how little effort can be put into a game where you shoot people. At least in an RPG you embark on a quest and solve puzzles. In H1Z1 you just blow people's heads off and people find this fun???
On 12/15/2017 at 10:59 AM, francoisdiy said:Some games are not as violent like Mario or Pacman but others like Man Hunt are just sick. The fact that a game like that can even exist is beyond me. Shooting games just make me cringe unless the game is Duck Hunt. Shooting games are for survivalists. Just look at H1Z1 - just looking at the game in action just makes me cringe at how little effort can be put into a game where you shoot people. At least in an RPG you embark on a quest and solve puzzles. In H1Z1 you just blow people's heads off and people find this fun???
hell I would rather play Mario or Pacman over games like manhunt
And I find games that try to sanitize violence creepy... when I slash people with a sword in Soul Calibur and just some sparkles come out of the enemy, or I shoot people in some games and they don't even react, I find this way more offputing than a realistic animation of the enemy being wounded, or in extreme cases, heads being severed.
I feel it gives the wrong impression on the result of violence, which might be more harmful for minors than getting exposed to depiction of graphical violence (which they clearly shouldn't anyway, we have age ratings for that... but certainly nothing is stopping a kids game featuring characters slashing with swords at other characters as long as the violence looks non-realistic).
Now, I am pretty sure some people will strongly disagree... and I have full understanding for that. I have zero scientific evidence and only my gut feeling here. So while I might find it disturbing that games are allowed to sanitize violence to market their game to minors, while I find nothing disturbing about realistic violence in a game marketed towards adults, I am just as right or wrong with that opinion as the people lambasting manhunt and similar gorefests.
Fact is, there hasn't been enough hard scientific evidence on the negative effect of violence in games to justify acting on it. And this has been looked into since over 20 years. So by now we can safely assume that people wanting to rid games of violence are simply acting on feels, and not reels.
We all know by now how dangerous it is to take action on something because it is offending the feelings of a small but vocal minority... before long, games will become squeaky clean but boring as hell, as EVERYTHING will be offensive to someone on this planet.
I am also no fan of the core idea of snuffgames like manhunt or hatred, yet I find it disturbing when shooters like COD or similar get lumped into the same category. Violence that is working towards a story goal I find generally fine, even if that results in a very violent game... many of the anti war movies wouldn't work that well without the graphical violence, its essential for the story.
Then there are the snuff games/movies/books were violence IS the story... because the product wouldn't sell without marketing towards our monkey brain with sex, violence or a pointless love triangle, as the product has nothing else going for it.
Lastly, never forget the streisand effect. Calling for something to be banned will just make it more successfull. If you want something to fail, don't tell anybody about it and hope it will stay obscure and eventually die.
Violence in games is always a topic i do discuss with my wife very often so..
She thinks that there should be more violant free games and she dislikes any kind of man-hunt games, but she has no problem watching me killing monsters in RPG´s. So there are differences between several violence types, some can be tolerated (Killing monsters, not-existing creatures) and some we dont (Any kind of human/animal killing games).
Take for example the Uncharted/Tomb Raider series which we both like, we wish to be a games like this without the humans killing each other part - just jumping, climbing around, solving puzzles, following the story in a awesome looking environment. Does nobody except us wants that?
But on the other side, i dont want to play games where i tickle unicorns and collect flowers to make it happy or something... that would be just... not interesting for us? Or maybe we want to tickle unicorns, but dont want to collect flowers... i dont know...
What i wanna get to is: We want more violent free games, buts its hard to get an actual idea.
I love tower defence games and i made several prototypes, but really the concept is just killing defenceless mobs with cannons and shit. So my wife does not like that games at all - maybe because her grandfather was in war and talked about getting shoot from a walled tower or something...
Personally I think it would be a good and novel concept to create a game like the Uncharted series, and make combat an option, but not the only way to get around obstacles. By making sure that players CAN find ways to get were they want without killing, by choosing a harder, longer route that evades the human obstacles, and instead tackles more challenging non-human ones (like scaling a wall instead of killing the guards).
As far as I read it, Thief gave you such options back in the day. This would result in a game that would give you the option to be Indiana jones with the wip and revolver gunning down tons of movie nazis, or a very athletic archeologist that has to constantly evade pesky nazis trying to ruin his day.
Of course, that might still not be 100% what you want, but I don't see the big AAA companys abandoning the violence filled action flick stereotype anytime soon. Most players probably expect more excitement out of their AAA Uncharted game than a non-violent version would give them. I might be wrong here, but I would say the interest in a non-violent, powerfantasy free Uncharted would be considerably lower.
While some of the non-violent walking simulators, or puzzle games have been surprisingly successfull in the Indie space, none of them has really been successfull enough to challenge the likes of Uncharted, and personally I'd say no amount of marketing will change that. We can even go back as far as Myst to see how not even the most gorgeous graphics at the time could make a non-violent game a success to rival Doom or the likes. Apples and Oranges sure, Myst was the definition of a walking simulator with tacked on puzzling elements, but then we are talking about a time when RPGs also were pretty basic at times yet highly successfull.
That might be my personal bias speaking more than anything else though...
On the other hand, this is why the digital distribution model and Indie development is such a great thing. If there really is a market, as long as its big enough to feed a small studio, a game will probably be made at some point to fill that niche. Probably not going to compete with uncharted in scope or graphical fidelity, but still....
