So Monday around 9am a shooter killed 32 people at Virgina Tech. Also on Monday around 10am people came out and blamed video games for this travesty. WE DID NOT EVEN KNOW WHO THE SHOOTER WAS YET and people said it was video games fault. Fuck you Dr. Phil! Now it is easy to blame video games for this travesty, there are numerous studies out there stating that video game violence is linked to real violence. Now I think this is a load of crap while my fiancee believes these studies. So as with any subject that we are divided on we spent a good hour or so last night debating this issue. Now she is a psychologist, so I am already at a disadvantage in the argument because we were on her home turf and I am fighting an up hill battle. I mean all she needs to do is bring up one of these studies and I lose. Not one to lose gracefully Today I have spent the better part of an hour looking up these studies to see what they actually say, and how they are preformed. While reading this paper "Video games and real-life aggression: review of the literature." I was shocked to see all the information that we are not told about these experiments.
Allot of the papers that are commonly cited by people as showing that video games violence can cause real violence; here use the testers observations as the means of determining the effects of video game violence on the subjects. And people are never bias.....never.
The age ranges that are used for allot of the papers that show any consistent correlation are that of kids between the ages of 4-7 now I don't need to tell anyone who has a kid or has worked with kids in this age range that they don't need anything to help them become "aggressive". One study had kids play either a karate game or a jungle vine swinging game. Then they were put in a room with jungle toys and a bobo punching toy that was dressed in a karate suit. Its findings showed that the kids who played the jungle vine game played with the jungle toys while the kids who played the karate game played "aggressively" as the put it with the doll dress in the karate outfit. To me all this says is these kids remembered what game they just played.
Adults studied appeared to have no real definitive relationship between violent games and violent acts. The only group that they could make real claims about was that known delinquents had a preference for violent games.
Another article reported that kids showed less empathy towards video game violence then real violence and movie violence. And they believed this was a problem...........So kids know that video game violence is not real..............i am missing the problem.
All I am saying is that people should not blindly blame video games for the violence in school. I guess the real problem here is that people need something to blame, since Demons,TV, and Music have all ruled out as a possibility the next logical step would be video games; Not society.
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Am I reading this right? Physiologist or psychologist? According to Craig Anderson, Video games are among a dozen of risk factors for violent behaviors. However, based on his arguments (see his webcast presentation in his website) and some of my logic. In order to achieve such a level of violence as depicted in VT shooting, other factors than video games must be at work which has a greater effect, most likely psychopathology. Anyways, violent behaviour is multifaceted and is based on multiple factors, so blaming on one thing is very difficult.
ReplyDeletejust to show off, google "grant devilly" and "video games"
-Janarius
Thank you for pointing out the "Physiologist or psychologist" thing out my proof reading sucks/non-existent.
ReplyDeleteMy big thing is that people want to blame video games as the sole factor; and while I do agree that they maybe a contributing factor in a small subset of truly disturbed individuals violent action, they are by far not the largest or sole reason those people act the way they do.