Video games and violence

(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