Video games and violence

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