Video games and violence

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

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