Video games and violence

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And speedrunning is interesting because it attracts some of the most withdrawn and introverted people, and yet intimate communities form around the games that they run so it's heartening to see people connect who may have/had trouble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