Video games and violence

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.