-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
So, I'm doing a paper on video game violence
- Thread starter Reilly
- Start date
StarscreamLSU
Member
An important thing to note (assuming your paper goes into this much detail) is that a lot of psychological studies that promote the idea that videogames are violent do so by choosing really weird subjects to study.
I remember a study done a few years back that compared the heart rate and aggresive nature of kids playing Myst vs. kids playing Mortal Kombat. Obviously the nature of the mechanics alone in Mortal Kombat would prompt greater amounts of tension and a higher heartbeat, regardless of visual content. A proper comparison would have compared Mortal Kombat with an abstract version of itself that gave no indication you were "people" fighting but had the same exact mechanics. Be on the lookout for things like this.
I remember a study done a few years back that compared the heart rate and aggresive nature of kids playing Myst vs. kids playing Mortal Kombat. Obviously the nature of the mechanics alone in Mortal Kombat would prompt greater amounts of tension and a higher heartbeat, regardless of visual content. A proper comparison would have compared Mortal Kombat with an abstract version of itself that gave no indication you were "people" fighting but had the same exact mechanics. Be on the lookout for things like this.
Mr. Lemming
Member
Campster said:
That would actually be an interesting paper in of itself, looking at the successes and flaws of existing studies.
Mr_Furious
Member
I'd find a more interesting angle to analyze than video game violence. That topic is pretty much "beating a dead horse", as far as I care.
Ghengis Cohen
Banned
I always thought an interesting topic would be a comparison of the linguistic memes used by the media to discuss visually simulated sex/violence (see: GTA) versus the ways in which they descibe actual violence, especially in the explicitly editorial realm. I would like to see the similiarities/dissimilarities see if indeed there language made a clear differentiation between real/simulated violence. But I suppose that would take a herculean amount of research and I doubt you have time for that. I would advise against going for a glib paper that looks at the dichotomous phsychological "studies" published over the years. The medIa hysteria route would certainly prove more interesting, and if not that you will get some laughs from reading some of what is said.
not sure what the focus of your paper is, but you could always parralel the debate of video game violence with similar concern that faced movies, comics, music, etc, and their influence on people.
theres an interesting book called "killing monsters (more to the title)...." that a psychologist wrote that touches upon some of the more positive aspect of video games, such as potentially being one of the few areas in a little childs life where they are in complete control, hence it could foster responsibility. I believe in that same book he talks with how being exposed or acting out (not commiting, but pretend killing GI Joes or something) could be an abstract way that a child deals with things such as death and pain, and could help nurture acceptance or understanding of those things....
theres an interesting book called "killing monsters (more to the title)...." that a psychologist wrote that touches upon some of the more positive aspect of video games, such as potentially being one of the few areas in a little childs life where they are in complete control, hence it could foster responsibility. I believe in that same book he talks with how being exposed or acting out (not commiting, but pretend killing GI Joes or something) could be an abstract way that a child deals with things such as death and pain, and could help nurture acceptance or understanding of those things....
D
Deleted member 8095
Unconfirmed Member
Use this as a quote from a real life gamer in your paper:
I Hope you are going to explain how US gamers are NOT influenced in real life by Video game Violence, it makes me so MAD when people says it has an influance, i could JUST shoot them in the face and curb stomp them to death, then use my chainsaw to dismember them into little pieces
You should also keep in mind that there are legitimate reasons why games are so violent, and it isn't just because "Hurr shooting things is fun."
When videogames first popped onto the pop culture radar around the late 70's and early 80's, computers were a lot simpler than they are now. Way, way simpler. We couldn't simulate vast social networks or allow users to upload user-created content onto a webserver for all to see. Hell, we couldn't save your high score if the arcade managers decided to shut the machine off at night. We were good at pretty much one thing - making objects move around on a screen, and detecting when they collided. Of course, you could in theory do a lot with this. Look at all the classic arcade games from the time period - Frogger, Pacman, Breakout, Pong, Robotron, Missle Command, etc. But at a certain abstract level, your intereaction with these games was fundamentally limited - you could move around on a two-dimensional plane (as in Frogger or Pacman), and potentially cause other objects to move as well (bouncing a ball off of your paddle in Pong). The thing is, despite all the computational power that computers now have we still are really only pretty good at moving objects in 3D space and seeing if they have collided. Quake 4 is basically just Doom, which in itself is basically just good old arcadey Robotron. Computers crunch numbers really well, which means we can simulate physical reality and therefore physical interactions without a hitch. Simulating anything non-physical, however, has proven to be quite a challenge.
There's also a fundamental game design based reason that games are violent. Games by their very nature generally require a winstate. The player wants to get the system into that state, and the other agents in the system (be they controlled by other players or AI) want to prevent that from happening such that they are the winners instead. Only recently have toys and systems without winstates such as Animal Crossing, SecondLife, and The Sims really come into their own. And a common theme amongst them is that they are by their very nature inherently not violent. This is no coincidence. Conflict in systems where physical interaction is far easier to simulate than any other will inevitably lead to violence.
Finally, the third primary reason for the violent nature of games was the emergent demographic these games appealed to. As time went on the inherently competitive nature and physical metaphors of these games caused young men to become the primary patrons of arcades and videogame stores. This is probably the number one reason games today are still as pointlessly violent as they are. Hypercompetitive young men enacting violent power fantasies has fuelled the industry to great heights. And once publishers knew just who they were selling to, it became easier and easier to target this demographic - nowadays, the only two metaphors in existance seem to be either World War II or a generic Tolkien-esque fantasy world.
Of course, this is all a great simplification - there are a good deal of other issues, from developer's creative bankruptcy to a lack of useful/implementable yields from academic research into AI and more. But fundamentally, games are violent because they demand conflict by their nature, computers are good at simulating physical interactions but not much else yet, and the kids who buy these games eat this stuff up.
When videogames first popped onto the pop culture radar around the late 70's and early 80's, computers were a lot simpler than they are now. Way, way simpler. We couldn't simulate vast social networks or allow users to upload user-created content onto a webserver for all to see. Hell, we couldn't save your high score if the arcade managers decided to shut the machine off at night. We were good at pretty much one thing - making objects move around on a screen, and detecting when they collided. Of course, you could in theory do a lot with this. Look at all the classic arcade games from the time period - Frogger, Pacman, Breakout, Pong, Robotron, Missle Command, etc. But at a certain abstract level, your intereaction with these games was fundamentally limited - you could move around on a two-dimensional plane (as in Frogger or Pacman), and potentially cause other objects to move as well (bouncing a ball off of your paddle in Pong). The thing is, despite all the computational power that computers now have we still are really only pretty good at moving objects in 3D space and seeing if they have collided. Quake 4 is basically just Doom, which in itself is basically just good old arcadey Robotron. Computers crunch numbers really well, which means we can simulate physical reality and therefore physical interactions without a hitch. Simulating anything non-physical, however, has proven to be quite a challenge.
There's also a fundamental game design based reason that games are violent. Games by their very nature generally require a winstate. The player wants to get the system into that state, and the other agents in the system (be they controlled by other players or AI) want to prevent that from happening such that they are the winners instead. Only recently have toys and systems without winstates such as Animal Crossing, SecondLife, and The Sims really come into their own. And a common theme amongst them is that they are by their very nature inherently not violent. This is no coincidence. Conflict in systems where physical interaction is far easier to simulate than any other will inevitably lead to violence.
Finally, the third primary reason for the violent nature of games was the emergent demographic these games appealed to. As time went on the inherently competitive nature and physical metaphors of these games caused young men to become the primary patrons of arcades and videogame stores. This is probably the number one reason games today are still as pointlessly violent as they are. Hypercompetitive young men enacting violent power fantasies has fuelled the industry to great heights. And once publishers knew just who they were selling to, it became easier and easier to target this demographic - nowadays, the only two metaphors in existance seem to be either World War II or a generic Tolkien-esque fantasy world.
Of course, this is all a great simplification - there are a good deal of other issues, from developer's creative bankruptcy to a lack of useful/implementable yields from academic research into AI and more. But fundamentally, games are violent because they demand conflict by their nature, computers are good at simulating physical interactions but not much else yet, and the kids who buy these games eat this stuff up.
PhoenixDark
Banned
Reilly said:
Here's my article on the subject:
http://www.gamebunker.com/install/pages.php?id=71
I used it for a sociology class and got an A; it was also a debate, and I went up against this 45 year old woman who seemed to worship Jack Thompson. Needless to say, I "won":lol
Ghengis Cohen
Banned
Now Campster would you say that games that have sports and violence as the focal point for competition are popular merely because they are competetive and appeal to the primary audience for these things or that a game that has a winstate that more and more simulates something that occurs in real life (ie. victory or death) is taken to be a more precise example of the logic that makes zero-sum games work?