Video games and violence

"The games are probably harmful and should be avoided"

and yet

can't stop. addicted to the headshot.

single player games probably not, online competitive games maybe

there is no negative effect

the main negative effects of "violent video games" are in the way the military shooters generally serve as american military propaganda rather than any link to mass shootings

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (new, not old) includes white phosphorus as a reward for a "killstreak". That is, if you kill enough, you get the joy of committing a war crime.

Call of Duty and its collaborators in the US state are advertising war crimes. https://t.co/icJLEjA0FN

— ☭ jrbml ☭ (@GlumBird) July 30, 2019

good idea thx Neanderthal

These games probably impact individual aggressive behavior more than we admit

What do you base this on?

(Before your "lol u mad gamer" the only shooter I've played in years was Sniper Elite and I have yet to go out and blow up any Nazi testicles.)

I'm wiped out on this from the other thead but in short: I don't believe there isn't at least *some* desentization to and conditioned pleasure from these playing these games that for gun-owning incels is not a great additive

So basically gut feelings driven by your disconfort with something.

You’re focusing on “might have played a game once” instead of “incels and Nazis with easy access to guns.”

As covered repeatedly: it doesn’t happen elsewhere in the world and it doesn’t happen with leftists or liberals or centrists or black Americans or etc.

nope, nothing abt "might have played a game once"

On kids, nah. People whose job involves carrying a gun, especially soldiers, should be kept well away from these things though.

If there is an impact, it is infinitesimal. It's safer to err on the side of correlation rather than causation.

The problem is a uniquely American cocktail of firearm fetishism, dearth of gun control, nonsensical free speech laws, obsession with pwning, MRA culture and a lax attitude towards violence in general.

it doesn’t happen with leftists or liberals or centrists or black Americans or etc.

Ohio shooter was purportedly a leftist Warren fan. Colorado STEM school shooters were probably on the left.

Virginia Beach shooter was black. Umpqua Community College shooter was mixed. Aurora Illinois shooting (that I had never even heard about) was a black man. 2017 Fresno shootings were committed by a black man.

I don't believe the gist was 'it literally never happens'.

i believe the fair rejoinder is that it happens with american left leaners and american people of colour more often than it happens in other modern countries in toto

notwithstanding that they are small, small percentage of the overall american shooter demographic, iykwim

the important causation question is not per GOP "do FPS games promote IRL gun violence in the average gamer?" because of course not.

The narrower question is are FPS games desensitizing/encouraging gun violence in people already predisposed by ideology to believe that guns can have a positively transformative role in society. "People with guns stop gun violence" etc.

For such people wouldn't these games tick several boxes in Pomenitul's responsible factors^ like "firearm fetishism, obsession with pwning, lax attitude towards violence in general"

i doubt anyone is going to quibble about that, really

its just that its...quite clearly (?) not the critical factor, so much so that it hardly bears discussion rly.

The narrower question is are FPS games desensitizing/encouraging gun violence in people already predisposed by ideology to believe that guns can have a positively transformative role in society.

If you are so predisposed, how much extra encouragement do you need, really. I think most of the work that pushes people to act on this impulse takes place in the increasingly-dissociated mind, not on the tv screen.

If anything, video games more often than not provide a healthy outlet for aggressive behavior. If I have a shitty day at work, I go crash a video game plane into a video game mountain and things don't seem so bad.

Hadrian, if you're trying to make a pedantic point about video games having a sliver of influence on the already sociopathic, I concede it, although I doubt it's enough to spur them to action. But it's a case of seeing the forest for the trees, really, and doubly dangerous in light of its rhetorical cooptation by the political class.

This is the only thing that matters:

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/11/09/666209430/deaths-from-gun-violence-how-the-u-s-compares-with-the-rest-of-the-world

And the only possible conclusion is that nothing short of legally-enforced, stringent gun control will make a difference in the long run.

I dunno, me, I feel like teaching/endorsing empathy and critical thinking skills (particularly to kids) does about eight million times more good than making video games the boogeyman for the eight millionth time. Like you can (and probably should) try but you aren't going to keep kids away from FPS games. Making sure they understand the difference between fantasy and reality and the impact that violence has in the real world can help to greatly diminish whatever impact those games might otherwise have.

Also, yes, throw every last gun in a fucking volcano.

i doubt anyone is going to quibble about that, really

its just that its...quite clearly (?) not the critical factor, so much so that it hardly bears discussion rly.

^otm, and yet...

i doubt anyone is going to quibble about that, really

its just that its...quite clearly (?) not the critical factor, so much so that it hardly bears discussion rly.

― phil neville jacket (darraghmac), Monday, August 5, 2019 8:49 AM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

The narrower question is are FPS games desensitizing/encouraging gun violence in people already predisposed by ideology to believe that guns can have a positively transformative role in society.

If you are so predisposed, how much extra encouragement do you need, really. I think most of the work that pushes people to act on this impulse takes place in the increasingly-dissociated mind, not on the tv screen.

― COOL DUDE'S ONLY, NO NERD'S ALOUD (Old Lunch), Monday, August 5, 2019 8:53 AM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah agreed and w/ deems too

what ppl need is *zero* extra encouragement... and I just feel that in light of this crisis even the most marginal potential factors are worth examining (and can be w/o ceding to asinine GOP talking points) and w/o knowing the answer I'm not comfortable dismissing this one

clearly something is seriously fucking wrong in this country, something politically wrong and yeah, something psychologically wrong

To piggyback on OL's point about catharsis, you would also have to demonstrate that this 'marginal potential factor' doesn't also prevent certain psychos from acting out their homicidal fantasies.

fair

what I'd like to see as part of the gun control movement is countervailing messaging that guns are fucked up, there is nothing romantic or fun about them...if it means looking closer at how guns function in our fantasies I'm all for it

I'm cool with that.

Games are the boogeyman the right and all their bought politicians reach for any time one of these tragedies happens and people start asking questions.

what ppl need is *zero* extra encouragement... and I just feel that in light of this crisis even the most marginal potential factors are worth examining (and can be w/o ceding to asinine GOP talking points) and w/o knowing the answer I'm not comfortable dismissing this one

― The Ravishing of ROFL Stein (Hadrian VIII), Monday, August 5, 2019 8:03 AM (nineteen seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

But...guns. Just...get rid of them.

Like imagine this discussion wrt any other tool with the potential for mass destruction that was equally widely-available. Like what if it was hand grenades that you could walk two blocks and buy with ease. We could sit around and fret about how all of the movies fetishizing grenade use are responsible for the uptick in unstable people blowing up department stores and churches, or we could maybe address the thing where people who don't make great decisions have easy access to grenades as a shortcut way to solve their 'problems'.

That's the thing: if we're gonna shoot the shit about this on ILX, I think it's totally fair and a discussion worth having. If it's going to take over the airwaves and further dislodge what little discursive pushback there is against the prevailing death cult, we're just shooting ourselves in the foot (apologies for the – unintended, I swear – dual shooting references).

Incidentally, didn't Trump ultimately blame 'the media'?

xp

I'm all for demonizing the hell out of IRL gun use and, as I say, banning them altogether.

I'm a huge fan of the horror genre, ie fictional depictions of all kinds of horrific acts. I don't condone any of those acts taking place in the real world.

xp Yes get rid of guns, yesterday.

The big-picture political hurdle however is the now accepted wisdom even on the left that guns are romantic, a force for good sistered to Manifest Destiny. How to eat into that idea?

By painting gun ownership as cowardice, maybe?

Likely the correct strategy against the majority of alt-right talking points tbh.

the ratcheting up of every conceivable political tension from all sides and the medication (if treated at all) of mental healthcare strike me as fertile ground for consideration here but both of those items are of their nature personalised and polarised to the extent that im not tbh convinced any forum currently exists for the discussion

xp an image encouraged by the NRA and everyone who gains from the easy availability of guns

OL for purposes of this q I'm trying to establish a difference btw "fictional depictions of horrific acts" and 22 hours a week (the average!) of first person endorphin-generating identification with mass killers

I mean I know it's not as simple as 'gun owner = coward', but if you want a paradigm to shift you need to give it a hard shove in a totally different direction. Just like how I don't expect to see a full gun ban in my lifetime but calling for a repeal of the second amendment at least keeps the counterargument from being too mealy-mouthed and ineffectual.

As a side note, the fact that the El Paso shooter will be justice'd out of existence via capital punishment is another piece of the American nihilist puzzle that merits further consideration.

As a side note, the fact that the El Paso shooter will be justice'd out of existence via capital punishment is another piece of the American nihilist puzzle that merits further consideration.

― pomenitul, Monday, 5 August 2019 13:20 (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

😎 we disagree

I think the negative effects of these games have little to nothing to do with the subject matter and more to do with feeding into addictive behavior. I hated FPS with a passion but pretty happily spent several years playing WoW 40 hours a week, which looking back was an insane amount of time to spend on a single game given every other thing I like to do.

OL for purposes of this q I'm trying to establish a difference btw "fictional depictions of horrific acts" and 22 hours a week (the average!) of first person endorphin-generating identification with mass killers

― The Ravishing of ROFL Stein (Hadrian VIII), Monday, August 5, 2019 8:20 AM (fifteen seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

I mean any monomaniacal pursuit that allows you to retreat altogether from reality for a significant portion of your day is unlikely to result in the healthiest of mental/emotional states. That's kind of a whole separate public health crisis unto itself.

Or what Dan just said.

I probably spent at least three hours yesterday watching Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and now all I can think about is getting back home so I can wax my floor.

Wasn't expecting that, deems. One for the challop thread? Unless you're only quibbling with the implication that there's a connection between these (to my mind) complementary facets of the American Death Cult.

xp OL I'm just supposing for purposes of this q that this is different than just "any" monomaniacal pursuit—that there is some aspect of shooter identification specific to this technology—not watching it or reading it but the repeated, conditioned sensation of pulling a trigger, seeing a fictional person die, and feeling good about it—that can't be helping.

And I'm not looking forward to the day when these games are predominently VR, with attendant real-world spatial relations, and dudes start taking their goggles off and transitioning, holstered, out of their living rooms

not YOU, not ppl itt or 99% of gamers in general, but the increasing number of angry white men already doing this

To clarify, re: capital punishment: the prospect of a glorious, state-sanctioned death is an incentive for some of these 8channers. They want to be acknowledged as enemies in a time of war.

^consistent w/ terrorism in general

I get what you're saying, Hadrian, but I feel like even with something like FPS games, you don't make that leap to actually reifying the behavior unless without a whole bunch of other issues going unaddressed. Like failing to see other people as real or their lives and well-being as worthwhile.

no doubt it's a soup, there's a broader sickness

I don't want my kids growing up here

I voted "There are negative effects, but not significant ones".

It would be a different thread, but if I were to look into the American Death Cult, I would look instead to the place of the car in USA life, rather than to video games.

Any video game can be harmful insofar as there is potential for addiction. I’m inclined to think that Hadrian isn’t wrong. The entire basis of video games is manipulating the player’s brain’s reward system in direct response to their actions.

It probably depends on the person, how much they’re playing, and what they’re doing in between rounds of gaming. (I played Secret of Mana earlier this week and I had to cut myself off because I had the music stuck in my head going to bed each night & waking up each morning.)

ILXors aren’t afraid to call out e.g. songs and films that promote a predatory, nihilistic agenda. Why let video games off the hook?

Definitely a big part of it, yeah.

Voted for the same thing btw.

xp

leaving this country would involve persuading my ex's partner to leave also, to the same place, and in turn his ex—the mother of his kid—to go also, and in turn her partner, ad infinitum, a human centipede of stepchildren and second marriages

single player games probably not, online competitive games maybe

― ciderpress

i think there's some interesting stuff here, how do people playing online shooters behave with each other

there's a lot of toxicity in gaming culture. i actually had an argument with my brother the other week because he was talking shit about gaming culture as a whole and i said that there were good and positive aspects to it. there's this sea of nasty and vicious bros that make it really difficult to game online.

also wondering what the correlation is between violent shooters and playing sports video games. shooters get all the press but are these people also playing like madden?

there's a conversation worth having about games, I don't think anyone could seriously suggest some sort of hard causal link.

but I don't know, people who like games even here, just get really mad at any perceived criticism even here...

I think the Lieberman/Kohl MK hearings were really traumatic, at that point the industry wasn't as established and ever since people view these discussions as existential threats to the hobby. now this stuff is just misdirection and Kabuki theater, games make too much money they won't be threatened

but I don't know, it was always funny, gamers will grasp on to any study that says games improve hand eye coordination, Wii Fit is helping ppl lost weight, but the suggestion that they could possibly have negative effects it's beyond the pale

i guess i just don't see any significant difference between playing through a single player game and watching tv. it's the online social/competitive side of gaming that messes with people's heads

My pet theory is that most of these problems can be traced back to the increasing balkanization of American society on numerous levels, largely facilitated by the internet. We live in an age where you can theoretically exist in your home without ever interfacing with another human being directly. Those conditions can both create and expedite mental health issues. People in that bubble can construct any version of reality they see fit, and to the extent that they're deficient in critical distance or empathy, they're likely to skew towards an unhealthy perspective. You can see an expression of this in any internet comments section, where damaged people approach the most seemingly-innocuous news story or video as if it's further proof of fallen world they've constructed in their minds. Playing an FPS game is only going to lead to real-world violence in an instance where that pump is already primed, any number of other factors could just as easily have been tipping points for someone that close to the edge.

xp have you ever seen somebody throw a gameboy across the room because they were mad at Tetris?

change that to championship manager 4, a text based football management sim, and ive fucked full mugs of tea at the far wall, yeah

There's a causal link between these games and violent crime

when you play as spurs, definitely

ever since people view these discussions as existential threats to the hobby

w/o getting pied or anybody itt inferring some greater mutual equivalence (I'M OBVIOUSLY NOT, so please save it): yes, and this^ response is not unlike the reaction in some quarters to criticizing a certain other "hobby"

makes u think

Do I get pissy when I miss a jump for the 415th time in a video game? Maybe swear at the TV? Sometimes. Do I then punch my neighbor or shoot at a passer-by? No. No, I do not. Because it's a video game and it has nothing to do with my real life outside of that video game.

Vape Store (crüt) at 8:59 5 Aug 19

xp have you ever seen somebody throw a gameboy across the room because they were mad at Tetris?

I called Mario a cunt once, I'm not proud of it

w/o getting pied or anybody itt inferring some greater mutual equivalence (I'M OBVIOUSLY NOT, so please save it): yes, and this^ response is not unlike the reaction in some quarters to criticizing a certain other "hobby"

― The Ravishing of ROFL Stein (Hadrian VIII), Monday, August 5, 2019 9:04 AM (forty-four seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

Okay, if you're going to start negging on masturbation, that's where I draw the line.

lol

(xp)

https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/video-games-shootings-el-paso-gamergate-8chan-connection.html

The countless demons I've slain whilst playing Diablo make up for whatever ill deeds I may have committed in other areas of my life. You're welcome.

A broader point I will grant you re: this discussion is that I think human beings are generally ill-equipped to manage or fully-consider the implications of our technological innovations.

And for the sake of challops, I think smartphones are on the whole much more damaging to society than FPS games.

Playing an FPS game is only going to lead to real-world violence in an instance where that pump is already primed,

OL this is all otm I agree entirely w/ the exception of "only" here, on the basis that the effect on this anomalous individual manifests in the lives of all his victims and their families

xp that's not very chall at all imo

also yes i was talking abt beating off

(replaces "console")

IMO, the question is whether competition increases aggression. If you are "primed" than any competition, but mostly that which has people talking shit or being a foul winner (tea-bagging, bragging etc.) can trigger someone who is primed. I think the racist mass shooters aren't influenced by being a victim in a video game. They are angry racists. To sum it up, mostly negative interactions with other humans and HATE that will make someone a killer.

then*

i went to the mall of america and went to the Void, this VR place and did this Star Wars VR experience

https://www.thevoid.com/dimensions/star-wars-vr/

me, a friend and his kid... you get a VR helmet, haptic feedback vest and prop blaster, once you enter these elevator doors, everything is VR you see each other as Storm troopers, even your gun is skinned.... anyway, it's not perfect but I was just dazzled by it.... they have hallways and elevators and moving platforms to give you the feeling of real motion as your skiff descends from the ship to the base .. they even blast heat even you're over lava and cool steam at other points...some wonkiness but wow, completely different than home VR. the combination of moving in real space with two other real people, nothing like it

anyway, it's cool, but it was the first time in the whole VR thing when I saw wow like they will GET THERE, we will be playing in virtual 3d worlds indistinguishable from real life....

so I don't know what the violence in games means but we should probably figure it out before we have guys making racist mass shooting simulators feel real

The one crime a significant amount of mass shooters do have on their record (maybe with the exception of this week but I’m unsure) are charges of domestic violence, but if DV charges barred ppl from gun ownership this would disarm about half of US law enforcement. Another bonus

— Danie Darko (@daniecal) August 4, 2019

i do think - and maybe i'm broadening the conversation beyond games, where there's plenty of specific fruitful room for discussion... i was watching this weekend somebody speedrunning zelda, and they seemed like an ok human being, i mean like not a chud, but he was kind of an asshole. i don't know if he was just basically an asshole as a human being or whether it was the sort of people you find on twitch chat, but i feel like twitch chat doesn't help. and that's not a shooter by any means, he was going around collecting poop.

anyway, the broader conversation... there's this desire (as seen upthread) to dismiss violence as a right-wing problem, which i don't think it is anymore. one of the things i struggle with is, in the wake of 2016, the belated realization that the united states' use of force and coercion is not fundamentally fair or just and, accordingly, is not legitimate. it's pretty easy to get to some ugly and bad places from there and i'm trying not to go to any of them.

livestreaming rewards being a loud asshole, that's a whole other topic entirely

I would argue that gaming culture is more detrimental than the games themselves. I play video games but have approximately zero interaction with gaming culture and the little peeks into gaming culture that I occasionally get makes me 100% okay with that.

u gamers are wack

go shoot some pixels in the head

One thing to consider is that in an online FPS gaming scenario I would bet that almost nobody is invested in the setting and role playing... Basically nobody is immersed in the narrative premise of "I'm a terrorist and I want to blow up the bomb site and need to kill the counter terrorists to succeed!!" In reality all the setting does is ground the game mechanics to fit a theme. Otherwise it might as well be laser tag. People are just invested in the competition and their ability to do well via skill & strategy.

I think that's true. The only online gaming I do is Dark Souls, and what's nice about that is that there's no voice chat, no in-game communication except for gestures. But I still occasionally get hate mail from enraged teenagers.

Mostly I think about how video games can be damaging for an already depressed and isolated person, they can be so immersive, addictive, and such a time sink that it can enable remaining in your depressed and isolated situation more or less indefinitely.

What speedrunner is rushomancy referring to?

And speedrunning is interesting because it attracts some of the most withdrawn and introverted people, and yet intimate communities form around the games that they run so it's heartening to see people connect who may have/had trouble with social situations otherwise.

🇬🇧Pop. 65 million
🇺🇸Pop. 330 million (5x)

🇬🇧Video game revenues: ≈$5 billion
🇺🇸Video game revenues: ≈$25 billion (5x)

🇬🇧Gun homicides (2017): 31
🇺🇸Gun homicides (2017): 14,542 (469x)

Stop blaming the video games you absolute morons.

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) August 4, 2019

hmm can we get a comparative analysis of spend on fifa/pes vs fps tho

otm

undecided on this but just popping in to say that the Fortnite font enrages me more than just about anything else in our culture, it is approximately 400x worse than Comic Sans

otm

http://fortnitefontgenerator.com/img.php?fontsize=38&textcolor=000000&text=otm

^inciting violence via video games in real time

i can't help but feel visceral reactions of loathing even looking at it

it's the font of 15 year-old nihilist scum writing FEMINISM IS CANCER all over the internet

Nostalgic for the days they used to do that in Minecraft font

in fact my hatred of this font suggests to me that maybe the aesthetics of videogames are becoming more loathsome, that maybe something that wasn't very true before is becoming truer now. discuss

I apologize in advance, but it is simply impossible for me not to repost this right now:

https://i.redd.it/j1zbow89212z.png

have tbh id have more sympathy for the theory against video games if we'd seen OWS seriously attempt to disrupt mako production

xp it's not just happening in games, see also the sonic the hedgehog movie, that cats trailer

some sort of market research must have spat out that ironically unaesthetic is the new aesthetic

that klass tweet presents a meaningless set of numbers wrt the question as to how FPS addiction works on the minds of gun owners/enthusiasts. We simply don't know.

Anyway ban all guns.

xp it all feels deeply garish and pornographic. art is over and all we have is the outsize apparition of maximum spectacle. we are being treated like fucking lizard-brained idiots and we are lapping on-the-go fuck up. children are raised on five little monkeys and they grow up to be cunts

*lapping it the fuck up lol

these games are probably harmful for certain people. more certainly they’re bad and immoral and people should not play them

Hard to gauge how much of this is just senescent 'kids these days' rhetoric tbf (not saying it's wrong per se).

Fuck up any time, anywhere® with NEW! on-the-go imago

you watch I'm about to connect this all to Sheeran, Love Island and Brexit

since we’re not going to actually do anything about guns, I I’d consider it a highly qualified victory if we just ended up banning violent video games or video games in general, go outside or read a book, thanks

I'm curious to know what people find harmful about video games in particular. Is it just the fact that it's interactive?

Another cultural product I'd proclaim more harmful to society than video games: tv 'news'. If I'm watching something that ends just as the local news comes on, I have to shut the set off immediately lest I be reminded loudly and with dramatic music and whooshing sounds what an irredeemable hellscape we inhabit.

Cut to warcorpse666 reading Jordan Peterson at the beach

xp

I read books probably 15x more than I play video games, violent or otherwise, thanks.

Going outside, ehhh. There's always, like, weather going on out there.

There's nothing intrinsically harmful about video games ffs. Lest we ban all books because of Ragnar Redbeard or the guy who 'wrote' The Art of the Deal.

I've felt that all dogs should be shipped to an island somewhere ever since that one dog told Son of Sam to do those murders.

And before someone argues that 'the NRA makes the exact same case when it comes to guns', I don't recall video games (or books or dogs, although the jury's still out on the latter) having been specifically designed to kill.

short version: it’s not the games, it’s the communities that have sprung up around them, which have become steadily more far-right. this predates YouTube, predates GG (some of us remember the dickwolves thing), predates 4chan, probably predates goons. plus games are also only one part of it — you could just as easily point to, say, anime, which is another entry point into the community

xpost I dunno, man, think of the damage you could do with an Xbox inside a pillowcase.

I would've voted for katharine's post if that was an option in the poll. xpost

One thing to consider is that in an online FPS gaming scenario I would bet that almost nobody is invested in the setting and role playing

I would suggest that you google "hentai foundry overwatch" except I would also recommend that you not do that ever.

What makes the new games worse than say Counterstrike? Something obviously does but I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it's the aesthetic. Has Contrapoints done a video on videogames lol

Katherine's post rings true - maybe the games are now pandering to the communities. Always comes back to fan service

(this is why fortnite is a particularly bad example—it is so hugely popular among the mainstream that you can’t really point to a specific group of “Fortnite fans,” and since it’s so mainstream/“normie” it’s not particularly popular among the far-right crowd, which is why they put it in shitposts to mock it)

Anime is definitely a big one as well. Doesn't much of this just boil down to 'the internet + the 2nd Amendment'?

xps

I'm curious to know what people find harmful about video games in particular. Is it just the fact that it's interactive?

to me its close identification/transposition with perspective of shooter + agency

I don't object to violent vdeo games per se, much less violent entertainment in general...but even in books and movies where the killer is the protagonist, and sympathetic, the identification comes at a much greater remove

why does anybody need/want to pretend they are shooting people?

I would recommend David Kushner's Masters of Doom, the story of id Software....it's a great book and I think id's two main - Romero and Carmack - really lay at the heart of so much of the ugliness that sprung up in the culture - Romero's sexist assholish proto-edgelording....Carmack's dead-eyed technofestishism and flat affect

also very much a texas company

https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Culture/dp/0812972155

to me its close identification/transposition with perspective of shooter + agency

Does this apply to all first-person games? Fallout: New Vegas? Morrowind? The Witcher III?, etc.

I don't know

A question for those who do think violent video games are harmful: do you think that if you played those violent video games you might become violent?

xps to Katherine I think we're talking about two different sorts of videogame aesthetic erosion then perhaps. The normie descent into the Fortnite void (although it's probably a gateway drug for young teens!) and then the actual-fascist chan scene that peels away from the plebs and begins to fantasize about a world where everything is permitted. I think those two worlds are much closer than they used to be though

that said the political tone of this crowd has gone from a generic libertarianism/occasional “lol bush sucks” to, well, this; not sure how much is due to stormfront types deliberately targeting this community and how much is due to backlash against whoever’s currently president, plus people (a lot of whom are kids) unconsciously soaking up the societal attitudes around them, which have moved rightward

xp no, of course not

xp — when PUBG was popular I played more of it than is probably wise (not least because it’s a buggy piece of shit game) and I have not become a mass shooter, nor violent; but I’m not a neo-nazi and neither were the friends I played it with, which is the difference

...and I am not a white nationalist, do not believe in vigilantism, am not interested in keeping "them" out, not angry at chads and stacies

pubg also doesn't try to paper over its straight faced military sim-ism whereas fortnite is a pretty thorough attempt to make a tactical shooter look outwardly as unobjectionable to parents as a FPS could possibly get

maybe that's the insidious thing about the aesthetic

Now I have to say after a little consideration that if people want to call for a ban on ONLINE video gaming, I can spare at least a few minutes to hear your pitch.

Hadrian, would it be fair to say that your stance is: violent FPS video games are helping to radicalize a subset of gamers who, for various reasons, were already prone to such radicalization, but nonetheless the VGs are a contributing factor and shouldn't be overlooked

I really think it's kinda trivializing to connect one's dislike of an aesthetic with the issues of violence being discussed itt, whether or not games have negative effects on ppl I doubt it's down to whether they look pretty or not

Age of Empires 1 still encourages Babylonian on Hittite violence to this day.

pubg also doesn't try to paper over its straight faced military sim-ism whereas fortnite is a pretty thorough attempt to make a tactical shooter look outwardly as unobjectionable to parents as a FPS could possibly get

― ciderpress, Monday, 5 August 2019 16:13 (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

maybe that's the insidious thing about the aesthetic

― ciderpress, Monday, 5 August 2019 16:14 (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yes!

it's the weird pervasive memeification of pop culture and its consequent targeting of the young. big bold colours, cheeky dumb lettering

I fail to see how that's new or any more dumb and flashy than G.I. Joe?

people seem to be looking for vectors, and one vector is a specific quirk/feature about how discords are set up. most games have a discord, and there are a couple of key features to discord:

- most game discords have off-topic channels, and usually an off-topic section for channels, which it's reasonable for people to wander into. what they wander into depends -- these channels can vary wildly from reasonable to outright white supremacist, depends on who hangs out there and who moderates it
- it is seamless and generally accepted practice for people to post links in semi-public discords to join their private servers, which is how people end up rabbit-holing themselves into more and more extreme communities. the only analogue I can think of in social media, besides niche stuff like mastodon, is probably facebook groups, but facebook has a real-name policy and existent, if capricious, moderation

Just for the sake of anecdotal context: my siblings and I were raised in a military family, my dad owned guns and I think we all probably fired them at some point or another, we played with toy guns, watched shows and movies featuring lots of gunplay, played violent videogames, etc. None of us own guns now, none of us have a history of violence, and I'd like to think we're all fairly caring and empathetic people (not to mention a buncha stinkin' pinko lefties). I know that our experience isn't reflective of everyone who's followed a similar trajectory but I also can't imagine that it's terribly exceptional.

xp -- if the argument is that gritty, hyper-realistic simulated violence makes people desensitized to real violence, wouldn't cartoonifying things interfere with that process?

i actually really like that discord is pushing things back towards small communities rather than everyone in the world being in the same chat room 24/7

well sure, unless those communities are the blood and soil club (I know not all of them are)

Anyway, 8chan is back online.

I would argue that gaming culture is more detrimental than the games themselves.

Visible gaming culture is heavily linked to young white males - that's not the real demographic of 'plays games' but it's the demographic of the loudest people who identify as gamers that we see online etc..

Pretty much every subculture/community where white men (young and old) are walled off from people not like them quickly moves into horribly toxic territory.

Katherine wildly otm all over the thread.

I think the negative effects of these games have little to nothing to do with the subject matter and more to do with feeding into addictive behavior. I hated FPS with a passion but pretty happily spent several years playing WoW 40 hours a week, which looking back was an insane amount of time to spend on a single game given every other thing I like to do.

I want to bring this back to WoW because I think it's pretty instructive... when that game was in its heyday, one of the principle features was that it was an online community. Many people met their spouses on WoW, or made lifelong friends from it. And part of that was that the game forced you to interact with each other to make progress in the game. You might have to even communicate outside of the game to coordinate your efforts, but a lot of it was in WoW's chat, and it was arguably one of the biggest chatrooms on the internet at that time.

One of the most significant advances in games in the last ten years or so has been the various systems that pair you with other people to participate in game events, subtly removing the need to communicate. For example: I can communicate tactics with my squad in complete silence because so many of the tactics are baked into the emote system. I can just press LB right analog to say "wait here" instead of saying "wait here." I can matchmake and immediately find three appropriate squad members who will work together with me in silence, and I'll never see them again as soon as the session is over.

The reason these features were introduced, in part, is because of the stigma of playing video games online. People don't want to open a live channel to 12 year old who will yell hate speech while he's murdering you over and over, so games have responded by giving you control to remove that aspect of the experience. But while in the old days that might accidentally result in some sort of political dialog between two people suddenly speaking to each other over the void, now you don't have to experience that. You can just mute the mic of the one guy you don't like, or mute everyone you don't know, or even mute everyone. So much like the many of other ways that technology has allowed us to isolate ourselves, even "violent video games" themselves can be more isolating.

Even in Warcraft they've introduced these sort of features. Chat has moved more to the Discord channel or the Twitch stream, and not with random people you meet in game. So it has the same tendency to create social bubbles than we find in social media.

Hah I should have read more of the thread before I posted as I see some of these points have been made already. :/

counterpoint: I’m fine with isolating myself from 13-year-olds shouting racial slurs

Hadrian, would it be fair to say that your stance is: violent FPS video games are helping to radicalize a subset of gamers who, for various reasons, were already prone to such radicalization, but nonetheless the VGs are a contributing factor and shouldn't be overlooked

― rob, Monday, August 5, 2019 12:15 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

no I don't think FPS games are radicalizing anybody, I think ppl are getting radicalized online and increasingly by our own govt

it would be more accurate to say that I worry FPS video games are desensitizing/inuring people to gun violence who are already ideologically predisposed to think of guns as "a force for change" and angry at the people who don't look like them

When I was last playing WoW seriously, I was on Discord with 10-15 other people who were working together to accomplish something - while also being aware that some of them were happy being sociopathic little shits in PvP.

(I know WoW has taken more steps to bring voice chat back into the game - I don't know how successful that's been, but it's also something that they try to do every 4 years or so)

I'm sorry if I've missed this above - Hadrian, have you ever played a video game?

what's a video game

yes I've played video games

I broke two controllers in anger in a week playing FIFA 15 on Xbox live and sold the console a year later. It's not for me

counterpoint: I’m fine with isolating myself from 13-year-olds shouting racial slurs

Oh I mute everyone, don't get me wrong. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i81qr9j-pug

xps I'm also a boxing fan, have enjoyed Sam Peckinpaugh, am guilty of craning my neck at the site of a terrible accident, and one of my favorite novels is Peter Handke's Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

I don't think exposure to excessive violence is problematic, it's as old as man and integral to storytelling

but I also recognize that this kind of repeated, addictive identification with mass killers, in lieu of any narrative but with a directive only to kill more, is a relatively new thing...and as someone else said way upthread I am confused abt why we generally accept that our brains are being rewired by other combinations of technologiy+content (e.g. porn) but are reluctant to wonder the same about this one

do you really not know why? because stupid awful ppl have been using it as a scapegoat for 20+yrs while studies show it not to be a factor

A hand that's wielding a joystick is a hand that isn't wielding a gun.

(Countdown to repost in trenchant observations thread in 3...2...)

yeah I don't think it's intellectually thorough or good-faith reasoning to reject an idea because of its adherants (veggie HItler to thread), and I don't really get what's at stake in terms of talking about it here (?)

Obviously using video games as a scapegoat to fight back gun control is reprehensible, it's not like Trey Gowdy's gonna tweet out this thread

All of ILX is on a watch list

I dunno, I feel like there's been reasoned discussion itt but without much traction, ultimately.

agreed but with initial great umbrage

Like, yes, violent video games are probably an adverse factor when added to an already toxic stew, and so are any number of other inputs under those circumstances. The fact remains that the vast majority of people who play violent video games remain functioning members of society who don't spree kill other members of society, so isolating that particular input as problematic feels...problematic.

haven't read the thread to see if the actual answer has been mentioned yet, which is these games and mass shootings have no causal relationship to each other but are separate symptoms of a broader single phenomenon which is patriarchal violence.

Oui.

This argument for some reason feels to me like the insane people who thought racism was solved because we elected Obama. It's like...no, all that shit is still there and festering, no matter how much we pretend that this was in some way a solution. Does anyone legitimately think the problems with violence in this country are likely to be resolved one iota by a ban on violent video games?

xp applause applause applause

fwiw I did not take the question this thread is asking to be "are video games solely responsible for mass shootings?" but rather "do video games actively contribute to a violent/aggressive mindset?"

The twin nails I've been obsessively hitting forever but particularly since Trump came into office: empathy and critical thinking skills. Foster them, teach them, disseminate them. You can ban this and illegalize that and send thoughts + prayers about this and none of it is going to make any difference without restoring people's basic sense of respect for the sanctity of other people's well-being and their ability to at least occasionally think for themselves rather than modeling their thoughts + feelings on bad actors.

with video games you can recreate patriarchal violence and do it in a moral vacuum where you are rewarded for it even more than IRL

OL I'm not isolating video games, I think that point has been made a bunch.

And "the vast majority....don't spree kill other members of society" isn't exactly reassuring. This shouldn't be happening at all. The vast majority of people involved in yesteday's shootings were the victims.

Anyway I'm not arguing for censorship or anything (!) I just believe there should be more honest discourse about it...and that ppl should be looking at what happened again yesterday and asking wait, why is this carnage *also* something we also like to simulate in our fantasy lives?

I mean there’s also the slight confounding variable of the white nationalist manifesto the guy wrote

Like I don't think discussion of this topic is lacking in value generally, but when you frame it in terms of immediate response to an insane ongoing tragedy that shouldn't be happening, it (to me) takes a distant back seat to 'ban all guns now + forever'.

i really do not see what is particularly controversial about the point that for example crut is making here, like how many of us have relatives who immerse themselves in Fox News nonsense all day and have their minds warped? or people who watch videos about flat earth theories and come away asking tough questions to Buzz Aldrin? a ban on violent video games isn't going to do shit at this point, afaict. though it is worth having the discussion imo since the core reason people decide to massacre strangers is more complex than the availability of guns. it's a deep sickness w/many reasons. video games are perhaps a very slim piece of the pie chart, maybe barely visible. i guess idk why not talk about it, keeping in mind that guns should be banned immediately and first, whereas i do not believe video games should be banned.

but I also recognize that this kind of repeated, addictive identification with mass killers, in lieu of any narrative but with a directive only to kill more

See this is why I was asking, as I've played a lot of video games, including a lot of FPS, and this doesn't describe anything I recognise at all - to dial the argument back to it's antecedent, this would be like Tipper Gore asking "but why do you listen to this music that has hidden backwards satanic messages?", it's a begging of the question that should be resisted first and last.

I'm probably misremembering or half-remembering anecdotal evidence here, but more than a fair number of the individuals who have been attracted to the ideologies that have produce recent shooters are wash-outs when it comes to the actual military

I don't think it's an inherent anti-authoritarian streak, but an inability to actually work cooperatively with other people. To go out on a limb, I'd guess that these aren't people playing cooperative multi-player video games -- they're not into constructive interaction with others, and games where you work toward a common goal just don't hold their interests.

I think the message board dopamine hit of being upvoted/downvoted, catering posts to be edgier or provoke more of a reaction, is a lot closer to the mentality in play.

this would be like Tipper Gore asking "but why do you listen to this music that has hidden backwards satanic messages?", it's a begging of the question that should be resisted first and last.

do you support Antifa showing up to protest Death in June and Boyd Rice (a huge Might Is Right fan iirc) shows?

people who want to ban video games are more likely to want to legitimize more national/colonial violence imo.

i feel like one of the effects of violent video games *can be* that some of the libidinal fuel that feeds real violence is redirected towards its visual/narrative representation.

people have different opinions about the worth of violent video games, i personally find little of interest in them, but i'm pretty convinced at this point that on their own they don't drive people to be more violent irl, that they're a fantasy collection pool for what's already in the culture doing the driving towards violence, and by being a place where exploring those fantasies to their absurd ends is allowed, they *could be* but probably aren't usually a place where the libidinal appeal of violence can be parodized and deconstructed or at least made less serious.

Yeah I don't think I've ever experienced a dissociative moment where I'm 'shooting' a bunch of pixels on a screen and thought 'this must be what it's like to kill real people, how rad', in the same way that I can encounter hundreds of people in a given day and pay them cursory respect as real-life fellow human beings who value the sanctity of their lives and never get my wires crossed that they're soulless wraiths who must be destroyed. In that fashion if no other, my mental health is pretty sound. The fact that those lines get blurred for some people...that doesn't have anything to do with the games.

right now some dinkus located somewhere on the radicalization spectrum is privately, probably somberly, justifying the El Paso shooting in political terms, trying it on for size. He's a patriot after all, and his country is at stake, and he is most defintely imagining what it would feel like to do that himself. Is he doing that while playing Far Cry or whatever all night long? Yeah probably.

Does that mean the game is at fault? Obvoiusly not. But is it juicing him up right now? Maybe not, I have no idea. Is it helping, at all?

It just all makes me wanna puke, that whole culture. I don't understand the appeal.

^^^^ this is who we are talking about guys, not functional ILXors...why do you guys keep saying "I just don't get it, it certainly doesn't make ME want to kill abybody in real life..." Yeah of course it doesn't!

And "the vast majority....don't spree kill other members of society" isn't exactly reassuring.

― The Ravishing of ROFL Stein (Hadrian VIII)

The point wasn't "90% of the time nothing comes of it so it clearly only affects a small group of people" it's that we can perhaps conclude that video games don't actually contribute to the problem.

The one thing I think video games MAY do that is related to irl violence is to further the dehumanization of other ppl & the derealization of reality, which has been a constant of "modern" industrial/post-industrial societies. Other people aren't as human as you, if they are at all. They're side characters in your game, and you can treat them as m/l disposable.

^^^^ this is who we are talking about guys, not functional ILXors...why do you guys keep saying "I just don't get it, it certainly doesn't make ME want to kill abybody in real life..." Yeah of course it doesn't!

because this would seem to be illustrative of the fact that there’s something else going on besides the games

also “He's a patriot after all, and his country is at stake“ is... kind of glorifying these kids, unless you consider “Latinos are ruining America” patriotism

um...that was me imagining *his* thoughts, what *he's* being told

He definitely considers “Latinos are ruining America” patriotism

Again, to Granny's point, if you're modeling your real life behavior towards others on how interrelationships between characters and NPCs in video games function, you are suffering from some underlying issues that need to be addressed. The modeling in that case is just a symptom of something else.

that probably isn’t what his actual thoughts are! this shit doesn’t come from a place of righteousness but more often nihilism (the “blackpill” stuff)

(also a point against the “it’s just warped patriotism!” argument—rarely do these people only care about their own country, but find time to rage about Europe as well, South Africa lately, basically anywhere with white people)

https://www.instagram.com/p/B0yjSSCjqKJ/

(that's not an intended slight on ilx or most messageboards!)

I was within a couple months of graduating high school when the Columbine shootings occurred and the dialogue about how the shooters were influenced by playing Doom took an outsized role, and one of them actually had written, "I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy...so I will force myself to believe that everyone is just another monster from Doom."

That always read to me as if video games weren't a motivating factor, but a fictional comfort they were trying to hide behind. Perpetrators of violence always dehumanize their victims, but it's seldom that they admit it so plainly or write about consciously forcing that dehumanization.

we can perhaps conclude that video games don't actually contribute to the problem.

I can't. I really don't know. Nobody knows, all this stuff is nascent. We're talking about rapid, massive behavioral changes. The studies haven't proved causation. That's different than saying causation been disproved, much less that FPS addiction like umpteen other things may not be a small contributing factor.

whoops, big xps there

I feel that this imaginary person is also drinking Mountain Dew, can we not fight the real enemy?

also not helping

Who the fuck are you helping?

what? I was agreeing that the Dew is not helpful.

Not you!

jeez

honestly kinda back-footed by the intensity here, I guess it's to be expected given the nightmare we're living in

There are some other practical effects. When I was in my 20s, my anxiety wasn't medicated and i was often depressed or angry, so sometimes I would grab GTA Vice City, mute it, turn on Moroder's "Scarface theme" on repeat,and just run around shooting people and blowing up vehicles for an hour or two.

I do recall hearing the copter sounds in my head after I turned it off, but also when i got in my car, I noticed i was driving a wee bit faster than usual.

It'd wear off quickly, but those are some of the things i think about as effects

Xxxposts

Who the fuck are you helping?

― Andrew Farrell, Monday, 5 August 2019 19:44 (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

af

where does this rage of yours come from

its bizarre

how bizarre?

I don't have intense feelings about this particular discussion, but I do think it's pernicious to keep singling out tertiary factors when trying to get to the dark heart of why the US has a disproportionately-high level of rampant gun violence.

if you want to know more about video game violence.....

buy the rights

Video games validating violent thoughts vs. inspiring them... thoughts? Same difference?

where does this rage of yours come from

its bizarre

what if it’s.......... video games

😮😮😮

They were avid fans of Doom especially. Harris said of the massacre, "It's going to be like fucking Doom." He also wrote "I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy...so I will force myself to believe that everyone is just another monster from Doom." In Harris's yearbook, Klebold wrote "I find a similarity between people and Doom zombies".

Harris named his shotgun Arlene after a character in the Doom novels. Harris said the shotgun was "straight out of Doom". The TEC-9 Klebold used resembled an AB-10, a weapon from the Doom novels that Harris referenced several times.

it's simply not *not* a thing. It might be thing #5 or thing #80, but it's a thing.

thread title to thread

thought this was the safe space for the topic at hand

I did read that wrong, I took it as finger-wagging that I wasn't helping, and my apologies for that - but I also have a lot of issues with Hadrian's tone throughout the thread. But also also I'm on holiday and should go out and enjoy Toronto.

s/tone/approach/

ok I apologize in turn for my tone

probably feeling a little cornered and like I just leveled up and have two dozen ILXors to mow down ; )

FPS isn't really a popular genre these days, for what it's worth. Most people are killing people or monsters in third-person these days.

the bizarre thing about the correlation between video games of twenty years ago and today is that by and far the majority of games back then had fantastical weapons and enemies

now we have games that still have a bunch of ridiculous rules and kludges to differentiate them from reality and make them playable, but with slavish gun fetishization and some actual work with gun manufacturers to portray their products and use their licensing
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2013/04/29/179853504/a-real-world-connection-between-video-games-and-guns

I think the actual gameplay of video games is less of a threat than the blurring of cultural lines, and video games being mainstream is less of an issue than the mainstreaming of gun advertising and fetishization in video games

while still not really being a major factor put beside gun availability, societal fracture and negligible mental health infrastructure

Overwatch is still pretty popular. But regarding my initial point, games like overwatch and fortnite embrace the fact that gamers don't really care about the setting and the role-playing aspect very much. Those things just communicate the game mechanics. People aren't "pretending" to be a violent mass shooter, hired killer or terrorist... they're playing laser tag. Nobody is watching counterstrike e-sports tournaments and thinking "I am so hyped to see the terrorists successfully slaying those militarized police forces! It would be so cool to be a terrorist, too!" That's the silly thing about e-sports and popular online games. Regular sports don't come with narrative themes and set pieces.

Basically just rewrote my earlier post in the process. Oh well.

I guess that ties back to the second part of Hadrian's quote, there -- a book isn't a video game, even if it's based on one. And it's the interest in the ephemeral part that's driving the violence, not the game itself

It's telling that one of Trump's advisors on video game issues is the same guy who popped up in the 90s, Lt Col Dave Grossman, who's got an... interesting take on things: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xdp3g/trumps-video-game-meeting-dave-grossman

there's this complete social and mental disconnect as he goes around telling police that kids are using murder simulators and that schoolteachers should be armed, when most of these police officers and schoolteachers are probably of an age where they grew up playing these same games

Think maybe the Left gets caught up in the Right's simplistic "everything is black and white" outlook and so are nearly forced into making antithetical black-and-white response statements to them.
So the Right's "video games are a major factor!" gets a response of "video games have 0 connection to real-world violence, and if you even doubt this fact for one second, you're horrible and awful and dumb".

I don't doubt that games where you shoot at things are a cause for more violent literature, talking about guns, etc. but for the few people who are actually prone to violence, the cultural availability of a vocabulary to describe and envision that violence is something I could see as enabling in a way it isn't for the majority of the population

where does this rage of yours come from
its bizarre
what if it’s.......... video games

xp FPSes are still super popular, the annual call of duty game is still the highest selling retail game in the US almost every year

also feels weird to single out FPS right now rather than shooter in general when Fortnite exists

it really is just as simple as games being one of the things that a critical mass of nihilistic young white men congregate around, creating a community that st*rmfront and other far-right types infiltrated.

it's simply not *not* a thing. It might be thing #5 or thing #80, but it's a thing.

I hear they also listened to Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails.

right that is exactly comparable

why is it inconceivable that music would have an effect on someone's actions?
maybe it's thing #81, but it's a thing

and on a related note: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catcher_in_the_Rye_in_popular_culture#Shootings

right that is exactly comparable

the annual call of duty game is still the highest selling retail game in the US almost every year

Sure, and it probably will continue to be. But it's sort of atypical among popular modern titles.

Call of Duty tried to do a battle royale thing because they were losing so much ground to Fortnite/etc.. They might sell a ton of games at retail to casuals but it's the whales who play day in day out and buy all the other shit that really make them money.

fp'd you for using the word "casuals" in earnest

I bet we're going to figure this out

i think someone just did

Rep @GOPLeader McCarthy: “There are no mass shootings in Japan because there are no video games there.” pic.twitter.com/8aHDW6sgHq

— Shomeo (@SassBaller) August 4, 2019

Are they filthy though?

Xposts

I feel like my best catch-all response to questions of this kind is: anything in the phenomenological world has the ability to impact us to the extent that we lack defenses against its impact. An impact against which we lack a specific defense can be offset by strengthening more general defenses (i.e. the ability to recognize and avoid those phenomena likely to impact us negatively). Where defenses are lacking, impact can easily become imprint. There are, I'm sure, unfortunate circumstances that result in people modeling video game violence in real life, but the unresolved factors informing those circumstances are the greater issue.

The incidence rate of young men doing awful things to other people is higher than it is for other types of people

If you can occupy the time of young men in ways that minimize their time possibly spent doing awful things to others, everyone wins

Ergo let the screens do their thing

Also Yglesias warning but whatever the research backs him up https://www.vox.com/2019/8/5/20754769/trump-video-games-mass-shooting-el-paso-toledo

Universal Basic Income but it's weed and records given to males between the ages of 16 and 25.

That's better than my idea of putting them in cryogenic freeze for that duration.

sex workers is the surest thing

Universal Basic Income but it's weed and records a fucking job given to males between the ages of 16 and 25.

https://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/making-commitment.html

sex workers is the surest thing

Because men never do awful things to sex workers?

Hey so I just saw a story about how the Dayton shooter kept a kill list and a rape list in high school so just spitballing here but maybe patriarchal violence is a problem.

― There's more Italy than necessary. (in orbit), Monday, August 5, 2019 7:16 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

indeed. and video games are one of many conduits for that.

oh god the "give nerds free sex workers so they won't shoot us" argument again

Exactly. Give them women's bodies to own and use, exactly like they believe they're entitled to? Fucking disgusting even as a joke about adolescent boys.

I naïvely assumed Hadrian was making a crude joke but otherwise it's FP-worthy.

No I don't think there was any seriousness, I think it was more a reflection on the presumed nature of teenage boys. But that suggestion HAS been made before with some seriousness, like, maybe women should take one for the team, so to speak. And then someone is like, okay not, like regular women, but how about sex workers? As if sex workers also don't care or don't matter. It's an avenue that doesn't get any better the further you go.

Also the problem is patriarchal violence.

Patriarchal violence is a highly significant factor, for sure, but it's one pillar among many. Katherine did an excellent job of explaining how this toxicity festers online and nothing short of a repeal of the Second Amendment will make a serious difference in the long run. Still, there's no question that the role of structural misogyny is severely underplayed in these discussions. Last year's incel attack in Toronto led a few commentators to take it up – and I remember liking Gary Younge's analysis – but this angle seems to have subsided since.

Yeah the thread kind of slept on katherine's posts but she is otm.

And yes availability of guns is what makes toxic masculinity & misogyny so deadly for so many people and of course we should repeal the 2nd amendment. But gun culture is also underlaid by patriarchal violence.

https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/192651

The patriarchal paradigm lies at the root of this violence. It teaches that men’s superior physical strength gives them control over the family and places their will above the will of women and children. Even when it’s not imposed through violence – though it often is – society’s standards reinforce this concept, which gives men more prestige, more economic power, more liberty, and more positions in power. Their role is to protect or discipline– never to empower–those who are supposedly weaker. Because of that, the most vulnerable end up seeking protection from the most powerful, who are precisely the ones who present the greatest threat.

The role of the state mirrors this model. Far from a social compact, the capitalist state today foments relationships of dependency, oppression and inequality. The system uses guns as a caveman’s club, to bludgeon the subordinate into permanent submission. From police brutality aimed at African Americans in U.S. cities, to the paramilitaries unleashed against the indigenous people of Chiapas, to the abusive husband with an AK-47 in the closet, the forces of repression disguise themselves as providers of security, even as they feed off the violence they themselves provoke. Militarism proposes that violence must be met with more and stronger violence, which generates a death spiral as it consolidates the domination model and strengthens the patriarchy.

xxxpost apologies if Hadrian said it in jest but I've seen it said in earnest too many times

I naïvely assumed Hadrian was making a crude joke but otherwise it's FP-worthy.

I mostly agree, it's just that there are plenty of hyper-patriarchal cultures (see: Saudi Arabia, or Japan) that are nowhere near as exposed to this kind of violence.

2xp

sorry Hadrian!

Right. The USA stands alone in the developed world with its gun violence. It does not stand alone in the developed world with patriarchal domination or love of video games.

Ban guns.

That Gary Younge article is great btw, thanks pom.

On the one hand, there is the hatred of women, born for the most part from a sense of entitlement. These men do not just resent the fact that they can’t get a girlfriend. They feel women are denying them the sex that is rightfully theirs. They belong to broadly the same demographic as the Gamergate movement earlier this decade, in which male gamers systematically harassed female game developers and media critics, subjecting them to rape and death threats, and publishing details of their personal lives online. ...

These men, wherever they are, now have more political space than they used to. There is considerable overlap with the American hard right. And they have a role model in the White House in a president who was accused of rape by his first wife, boasts of grabbing women by the genitals, makes up sexual stories about women on the internet, and openly disparages their looks and intellect. ...

We don’t know what proportion of these men go on to have abusive relationships or if they enter relationships at all. But we do know there is a significant correlation between domestic abuse and mass murder.

An Everytown for Gun Safety report last year revealed that between 2009 and 2016 more than half of mass shootings in the US were related to domestic or family violence. In a third of the public mass shootings during that time period the gunman had a history of violence against women – domestic abuse is a more common trait among mass murderers than mental illness.

Literally in the NYT right now:

Nanny Asked Ex-Boyfriend to Return Key. He Arrived With a Knife.

Those who knew Mr. Porter are shocked at the charges he now faces. Victor Toro, a superintendent at the Elizabeth, N.J., building where Mr. Porter lived with his mother, said he saw him often walking in and out of the apartment with his girlfriend.

“She was always really quiet, next to him,” Mr. Toro said.

You don't say.

I haven't added all that much to the conversation because katherine and in orbit have said what I wanted to better than I would have.

Every time an incel with a manifesto goes on a murder spree, there are always random assholes that pipe in with:

"Now obviously I don't agree with murder, but can't you put yourself in his shoes? He was lonely and girls wouldn't pay him attention".

The idea that a guy is entitled to physical and/or affection purely by virtue of existing gets sympathy well outside the incel community.

So weird that women might not be drawn to someone with a disregard for the lives of other humans.

xp I think a lot of people make the leap from "everyone needs to be loved," which is reasonable, to "I am entitled to affection" which is not. This is getting off-topic, but I think the moral constructs at work there are worth picking apart.

As for violent videogames, they are an expression of cultural attitudes toward violence, rather than a cause. The important question IMO isn't "do videogames influence violence" as it is "why do we have such violent fantasies to begin with?"

FWIW, I pose that question as someone who enjoys Doom as much as any idiot

I mean it's simplistic as explanations go but we do still have canines. We're clearly still a few hundred thousand years away from purging all of our baser animal impulses.

Video games do not make murderers. If they did, China (which has almost as many gamers as the US has humans) would have constant domestic attacks.

HOWEVER.

Gaming-related media in America is filled with Nazi trolls working hard to recruit children.

— Christopher Keelty 🏳️‍🌈 (@keeltyc) August 7, 2019

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

weird results!

impressive double tie

I voted “more than we admit” because it felt like the responsible empirical choice - we don’t know enough about what playing shitloads of Fortnite or PUBG does to individuals’ personal capacity for aggression.

I’d love to see convincing research that they don’t have any effects on that, though. And I’m still in the camp that says giving bored young men something to do with their idle time that doesn’t hurt others is a net plus.

rare numbers for a poll these days

results kinda otm

Ok boomer:

https://www.techspot.com/news/83623-joe-biden-calls-game-developers-little-creeps-who.html

Biden in "what if you could *talk* to the monsters?" shocker

fuck you biden you handsy senescent i'll noscope you in fortnite anytime

i think the man has a serious point, this is the first time in US history that a major form of popular culture has been saturated with celebrations of violence and gunplay

“And then one of these righteous people said to me that, you know, 'We are the economic engine of America. We are the ones.' And fortunately I had done a little homework before I went and I said, you know, I find it fascinating,” Biden continued. “As I added up the seven outfits, everyone’s there but Microsoft. I said, you have fewer people on your payroll than all the losses that General Motors just faced in the last quarter, of employees. So don’t lecture me about how you’ve created all this employment.

"let me tell you this, jack, the real economic engine of america is our military-industrial complex", added biden, thumping the table for emphasis. "that's why i voted to kill hundreds of thousands of people in iraq and afghanistan and i'd do it again in a heartbeat, you little shit"

going for the gamer vote by promising to shut down EA

lol, touché

Ok boomer:

https://www.techspot.com/news/83623-joe-biden-calls-game-developers-little-creeps-who.html🕸

using actual fucking xbox controllers iirc

not many game developers are in silicon valley

feel like Biden's maybe confusing two different meetings again

xp I knew there was a reason I always liked the PS more, I mean that & Tekken

69 ilxors believe playing video games have a negative impact vis-a-vis violence vs 9 who say they don't

i think probably playing violent video games lowers violence rate bc it keeps young violent men indoors playing games

nice

Vape Store (crüt) at 8:59 5 Aug 19

xp have you ever seen somebody throw a gameboy across the room because they were mad at Tetris?

I called Mario a cunt once, I'm not proud of it

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, August 5, 2019 10:05 AM bookmarkflaglink

still dying at this, a year later

i know this will seem a little dated, but there are a lot of really good points in here

Intoxicating time warp. Every detail better than the last. pic.twitter.com/NXSNwktSsg

— Rob Delaney (@robdelaney) October 30, 2020