Um, a quick breakdown of the sheer bull here:
Why guns, rather than fist fights or knives?
1. This is obviously a self selecting statistic. an individual killing several people with in a school with your bare hands is incredibly difficult proposition.
2. Blunt instruments or knifes are somewhat easier but if you are facing a classroom or hallway full of people you will be pretty quickly incapacitated. If you kill several people on a one on one basis, it gets classified as a string of murders, not a school rampage.
3. Fistfights, knifings, and other close quarters fighting causes a considerable amount of exertion which bleeds off adrenaline. This dissipates blind rage and extreme emotion.
As for Michael Carneal's amazing combat skills:
1.Read this account:
http://www.michaelcarneal.com/
a.)Carneal had extensive shooting experience, complete with target practice several days before the event.
b.)Carneal had brought guns to school on several occasions before the event. He had stolen several longarms and pistols and stockpiled them.
c.)Carneal had been the subject of heavy homophobic bullying. This including printed assertions in the student paper.
d.)Carneal was severely (and probably clinically) paranoid. He believed that "people under the floorboards and in the air vents in his house had chainsaws and were going to cut his feet off". He slept with multiple knives under his mattress.
Suddenly, this isn't a kid stealing a pistol and miraculously knocking off flawless shooting. This is a severely deranged individual, who has been heavily provoked, who is well acquainted with guns and shooting, who has access to multiple guns. I.E. Carneal was a literal madman, and his rampage like Dylan and Kleybold's only occurred due to total lack of school, parental and police oversight.
2.As for flawless shooting as a result of video games, yeah sure real guns have recoil , imperfect sights, loud bangs. Video games don't teach proper stances actual aiming etc. Here's a fun test you can try at home, grab a point and shoot camera, walk into a room and attempt to photograph every person in the room (without arranging it in advance). Did you get a perfect picture each time? No blurring, every picture in frame? Probably not, since you didn't get a chance to line up the shot, brace the camera, and had to deal with the reaction of your targets.
3.There's only one school of shooting that teaches you to stand in one place and put one round into each target's head: video games. Or Dirty Harry, or every Western/action hero. Arguably one of the central motifs of American action movies is the hero's ability to knock off one shot/one kill while the villains fire hundreds of rounds to no effect.
4.Michael Carneal...never moved his feet during his rampage. He never fired far to the right or left, never far up or down. What video game was he playing? Battlezone, Missile Command or Asteroids? Modern FPS'es other than multiplayer sniper spawning point campers emphasize constant motion. Even I, one of the worst twitch game players on the planet moves continuously.
Frankly, this series has no credibility. Breathless descriptions of disputed research indicating partial correlation as objective causation. Accounts of events which simply do not match reality.
Actually, I'm all for the incorporation of realistic consequences in violent games and films. Good anime often does that now.
My acid test for a code of conduct would require that Shakespeare's plays could pass. For example, try to run the samurai adaptations "Throne of Blood" or "Ran" (without mentioning Kurosawa's name). In the same fashion both "The Maltese Falcon" and "Casablanca" couldn't pass comics code muster.
"Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal, to promote distrust of the forces of law and justice, or to inspire others with a desire to imitate criminals."
This is thought police. Something you would find in 1938 Germany. Basically, you're here to teach people to be obedient slaves of their overlords.
Then, it shouldn't be a surprise that this came right after the peak of Mc.Carthyism, and could be considered its brainchild.
At the end of the day, the Code is probably one of the main reason why I tend to dislike so much the Comics.
And of course, "Even Columbine has links to video games" has as much weight as the "Well, they went to a M. Manson concert, you know" argument.
I was seriously bullied in school back in the 1960's. But never resorted to a gun. What was different? Guns weren't controlled back then.
Several ideas:
1) Bring back the mental health profession big time. Back then there were all sorts of counselors, encounter groups, and if worse was worse, hospitalization. There was someplace to go if only for someone to talk to. Budget cuts and managed care leave too many people who need professional help without it-especially troubled kids who cost a great deal and don't pay premiums.
2) Options to school imprisonment. There were ways for kids to get an education without suffering the bullies-they could go to night school, for instance, self-directed learning through teachers, quit school, get a job and come back, Job Corps for some. Violence is less attractive as a solution if people have somewhere to go. It's no accident that homeschooling has become more popular as other options have closed down due to budget cuts.
3) More and more ways for kids to get outside. Running around in the neighborhood allows kids to make friends not necessarily from the same school or even neighborhood and blow off some steam. If school is the only social world, then problems there are lifethreatening to self-esteem. Bring back Boy/Girl Scouts, Lodge Groups, Neighborhood Sports teams, Church activities, Bowling leagues. Groups that cross neighborhoods and even ethnic groups break the power of the school cliques over the bullied. A kid could say that he's unpopular in school but has friends elsewhere who see him as a person with true worth. Suburbanization, with its sidewalkless streets and the emphasis on the mall as the only place for a kid to go, isolates troubled or poor kids too much to be healthy.
So take the lid off the pressure cooker instead of regulating video games. Even if you could get an agreement going about them, there would still be plenty of legacy games out there, hacked games, and of course file-sharing of games that come from places that don't bother with any such rules, whether agreed on or legal ones. So programming would still continue. And it would be too late for some kids who already have been programmed and who are suffering now for such moves to take effect anyway.
Eh. Sorry. Color me unconvinced. Evan, I'm genuinely surprised at the tripe that you've swallowed here.
As Michael Moore points out in Bowling for Columbine, why doesn't anybody blame bowling for Dylan and Klebold?
If there is a video game issue involved to these shootings, it is utterly peripheral. Much bigger issues are undiagnosed (or misdiagnosed) and untreated mental illness, and in some cases, bullying was part of the picture, but not all.
As the father of a child with psychological problems (which are being treated successfully) who has seen the edge of the abyss in the past, I can tell you that blaming violent, antisocial behavior on video games is like blaming the sinking of the Titanic on the poor music selection of "For Those In Peril On The Sea" for Sunday Services on the fateful Sunday she struck an iceberg.
20 years ago, we were hearing this same, half-baked tripe with regard to pencil and paper RPG's.
Then it was metal.
What are we going to blame it on in 20 years, when the shootings are still happening, when we're still selling guns to the mentally ill, when we're still stigmatizing the mentally ill, when we're still not treating mental illness like physical illness in a lot of states and we've chased First Person Shooters from the market shelves.
I've played racing games and WWII flight simulators, Evan. Does that mean I'm now able to race in NASCAR or pilot a Sturmovik?
Have you ever fired a gun, Evan? As somebody who plays first person shooters, and has hunted and fired guns (didn't like it much, which is why I don't do it now), I'm not sure there's a whole hell of a lot of similarity other than a pixellated set of gun sights that look and act too artificial to be anything other than a game.
Anyway, nice try, but I didn't buy it in 1982 when it was wild claims about how D&D was causing people to kill themselves and others in steam tunnels and perform spells and satanic rituals, and I'm not buying it in 2008 as the main explanation for why a few sad, mentally ill, antisocial teenagers walk up to a gun dealer who doesn't give a shit who he sells his product to, and then turns and uses said product to kill a couple dozen people.
Seems to me there's a much more believable, and simpler explanation for these than Doom or Call of Duty 4.
Just one point to make:
kids in Japan, Singapore, Korea, Great Britain, Spain, the Netherlands and many other developed countries NEVER shoot each other. Yet they are exposed to the very same movies, TV shows, and video games as American kids. In fact, every single cultural issue you cite are equally present in those countries.
I think the difference between the US and those countries is obvious. And it has nothing to do with movies or video games.
"What are we going to blame it on in 20 years, when the shootings are still happening, when we're still selling guns to the mentally ill, when we're still stigmatizing the mentally ill, when we're still not treating mental illness like physical illness in a lot of states and we've chased First Person Shooters from the market shelves."
I don't know what they will be blaming it on in twenty years, but at least one author, in a book called Freakonomics says the increase in violence is due to tighter restrictions on abortions 18 years prior.
Evan -- I love the bumpersticker message!
There's only one school of shooting that teaches you to stand in one place and put one round into each target's head: video games.
This is incorrect. Simply false upon it's face. And I have about 30 years of personal experience to back that statement up.
I have played video games quite a bit these last 10 years. I have also practiced pistol shooting practically and extensively.
"Practically", as in IPSC "Option" targets for second 2/3 of every one of my regular structured weekly drills. The first 1/3 consisted of one handed and two handed bullseye shooting at 25 yards.
My technique differed from modern practical shooting in that I practiced with Weaver stance rather than Isosceles, which has been favored for more than a decade now. But then, I started training in 1978.
"Extensively", as in 100 to 150 rounds of live fire practice per week. For about 10 years.
The constraints of location and drill pretty much forced me to shoot from stable positions. I.e., standing in one place.
If circumstance had constrained me thus, my physiology would have. Because for most of this time, I was subject to asthma attacks if I spent significant time running.
The result was precisely the "stand, shoot, and move on" that you credit solely to video games.
Now, let's take this from the other end: video games.
Have you ever actually played some of the classic first-person shooters? "Quake II", "Half-Life 1", "Half-Life: Opposing Force", "Quake 4", "Doom 3", and "Painkiller" come to mind immediately.
If you stand in one place in those games, you aren't going to last very long.
Play through "The Docks" (Chapter 5, Part 2) of "Painkiller". The very first fight of that level is an excellent example of what I'm talking about. You must move, move, move. Constantly and as fast as you are able.
Because that whole fight is an ambush, you are outnumbered many to one, and if you stand in one place, you're going to be swarmed.
"Swarmed" == "Dead".
And you had better not rely on one bullet per foe. You hit them until you see them fall. Otherwise, when you turn and deal with the next one, you're going to get yourself back-shot. By somebody you thought you'd killed. And you don't have enough health to spare to permit that.
Spend some quality time playing any of these titles. If you manage to get through several hours without getting killed out and having to restart, I'd lay odds you've absorbed this lesson to some degree.
I suspect you will draw the same lessons from "Gears of War" and "Cryis", but I cannot speak from experience just yet. I'm waiting on a more muscular GPU. Particularly for "Crysis", which by all reports needs a bloody supercomputer to manage the video.
Evan, you are spending a great deal of time, thought, and electrons dissecting a phenomenon that you yourself admit is a statistically trivial cause of death. You also commit errors of fact while doing so.
This makes me wonder if your actual intent is not to justify Hillary Clinton's old jihad against video games. Gods know her record needs some shoring up here.
Because given her frank, well-known, and unquestioning support of the war in Iraq, this particular Idiot's Crusade makes her look ridiculous. That, of course, is something she can hardly afford, since her campaign to become President has been blindsided by Barack Obama's superior organization and message.
Aside from the other practical objections to the video game connection others have mentioned, the main one is just simple common freaking sense:
The vast majority of video games are played either with a controller or a keyboard/mouse. Those things in no way whatsoever are anything like handling a real weapon. I'm another one with extensive shooting experience and who plays games now and there's utterly no way to transfer physical skills (except in full size shooting simulators which isn't available to your average kid) between the two. Tt's as stupid as claiming that a kid who kicks ass in FIFA 2008 or Madden 2007 can be placed on a football field (of either type) and play competently without having done so in real life.
it's an argument that's stupid on its face.
I appreciate the time you put into this, Evan Robinson. I don't agree with you though.
Standing and aiming is part of shooting a gun. A REAL gun. In shooters you run around and shoot all over the place in crazy ways, and then you start hopping around in order not to get shot by others. Not that realistic I'd say.
And what is CounterStrike: Condition Zero? Is that some proper title of Counterstrike: Source? Or Counterstrike 1.6? I have logged an insane amount of hours playing source(perhaps a future post should focus on game addiction), and I can tell you there is no real world analogue. If you're Counterterrorist you either go free hostages or prevent the Terrorists from planting the bomb, and vice-versa.
The games I don't like are the ones that are completely tasteless and purposely so. Rockstar has a record of making games like this that have gimmicks of say beating a hooker to death with a dildo. Young teenagers love this stuff and want to play these games so badly, but for most adults gimmicks are gimmicks and get boring fast.
It is always interesting that most anti-gaming violence commentators haven't picked up a controller in their lives, and push their message to an audience that also wallows in ignorance when it comes to gaming. As an employee of that industry, it makes your opinion on this subject interest and perhaps more valid. But I just don't see how games could be anything but a reinforcement mechanism for mentally troubled kids. Other behaviors might include reading violent stories, watching violent movies and perhaps torturing and killing lesser creatures.
Playing games is just an enjoyable way to past time. Most of them aren't violent, but that doesn't mean that a good one doesn't include violence. The corporate media and politicians look for easy answers to these things and are never willing to look at themselves in the mirror for the answers. No one listened to these teenagers and young adults. They were mentally ill and speaking out, but most everyone wanted to make sure that they weren't their problem. For the teenagers especially, this subject is much more applicable to the 'bully' post below.
What's missing for me in the criticisms of Evan -- and why I don't take the criticism seriously -- is anyone addressing why the military uses video games to train soldiers, why the police uses video games to train cops, why everyone from driving instructors to the FAA to the VA uses video games to train drivers, pilots (in huge simulators, granted) and PTSD patients.
The body is always "on", and thus, is unable to distinguish between adrenaline from "reality" and adrenaline from "practice." Both cause the body to reorganize itself in very real ways around the new set of practices. This is why practice works, regardless of the mechanism through which it is delivered.
I stopped playing video games (12-16 hours a day) many years ago when I noticed I was stopping before I went around corners and tensing, looking for the monster to jump out and eat my face, while reflexively reaching for a weapon, as well as dreaming of the monsters and how to kill them. All that, after only perhaps two to three months of non-stop play on what was then the leading FPS of its day.
As for the person who wondered why there aren't so many shootings overseas in places such as Japan, isn't it obvious? Japan (and most of the other places you mentioned) have strict gun-control laws. Only the United States lets damn near any fool who wishes, not only own a gun, but carry it concealed.
Finally, my thanks to Evan for his series. I found it informative and useful. I especially appreciate his willingness to share with us that it was only in the writing of what turned out to be a series, that his position was turned around 180 degrees. Thank you for your work and intellectual honesty.
None of the people you cite that use games as training simulators use them exclusively. Traning simulation + real time in the air = completion of course. Training on the range + simulation of target acquisition = completion of training. Playing Half-Life 2 and shooting combine soldiers + (Mountain Dew?) = a fun gaming experience.
Shooters can be a reinforcing experience, but it is just among a spectrum of things that are. Everytime I read a leftwing blog can be a reinforcement of an opinion I already have. Everytime I read a post on John McCain it reminds me yet again that he's a crazy old coot. So it really is a cause of nothing. I already knew McCain was a crazy old coot, but it's nice to have that opinion reinforced by someone else's opinion.
I specifically cited in my earlier comment the parts of shooting games that AREN'T at all part of a training experience(bunny hopping and supply cache camping to name a few) so it really is hard to for me to find Evan's argument very convincing.
Having said that I think that it is important for adults to know the games their kids are playing. Rockstar and Take Two market the GTA series to young teenagers like crack, making a mediocre to bad game(in my opinion) seem fresh and cool by adding gimmicky antisocial aspects to it(such as the before mentioned beating a hooker to death with a dildo). Adults can buy Mario Galaxy instead and actually play the game with their kids.
Once again I have seen no evidence to prove a causal connection proven between gaming and school shootings. I like the denunciation of Jack Thompson in the post, Evan. That guy is a nutty media whore that is on standby to blame games(*ahem* murder simulators) whenever some tragedy occurs. He was out there last year during the Virginia Tech massacre telling everyone that the perpetrator played violent video games when he didn't at all.
Evan, thanks for sharing your view of this. I don't have the experience of the other folks here with guns or violent video games (I'm a Myst/Sim City kinda girl 
), but I thought that another perspective on violence and its causes might be useful:
Bill Moyers on: Race, Poverty, and the Inner City --- 40 Years Later
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/
Yeah, in most if not all of the cases, video games were found not to be a link. Heck, in many of the school shootings including the one in my home town, the kid actually played zero video games. In this day and age, with their ubiquity, I was surprised myself and the parent groups were furious that they couldn't find the usual boogymen to blame it on.
What has been consistent in each of these stories, from Columbine on, has been actual shooting experience or the ease by which a weapon that requires no experience was acquired.
The kids from Columbine, the kid in my home town, and nearly all of the shooting cases mention as an aside the fact that they often practiced shooting a real gun in some form. Each of them went to gun clubs, taught from a young age to fire weapons, and purchased or stole poorly tracked or hidden weapons.
As many have pointed out, those who think there is as neat a correlation as they want to see, miss very clearly the fact that becomes apparent when you are an actual gamer. For most systems minus the wii, you are sitting on a couch with minimal movement, your eyes the only thing reacting and as many of pointed out, many games considered eligible for "training" status requiring constant movement.
As for the need to "disprove" the police and military argument, I offer these two examples.
1) Have you ever gone to a movie theater and seen the arcade machines off somewhere in a corner and seen a game called "Police Trainer". In this game, you have a light gun and do actual police tracking exercises shooting various targets and silouhetes. This provides similar training guidelines and is a simulation of actual training ability. It is also, even as an abberration from the norm, not a substitute for live fire. One cannot responsibly fire a gun without actual experience with the weight, feel, and recoil of an actual weapon nor the overcome of fear from how loud and horrible they are and the true cost of firing it. The point of this example is that even at its most authentic, even with the use of a pistol controller and dead-on representation, video games cannot fully represent the actual experience nor prepare people fully. The live-fire chambers are still neccesary. This does not stop people being stupid and being new technology because it's new.
2) The space shuttle simulation is in fact a video game. The ideas behind simulation can be similar in basic construction. However, to be authentic, an engineer crew has to be on hand to run through the scenarios, a wholly immersive environment that accurately depicts the interior of the cockpit formed and every switch has to correlate in the simulation. It is for accuracy purposes, one of the closest devices available in the history of simulation and gaming to a real thing and a real trainer. Every astronaut that has completed a mission, despite having exceedingly high IQs and the help of some of the smartest people in the country and possibly world, still says it's paltry preparation for the real thing.
In every case, a simulation can provide rudimentary training, but always requires live fire for any form of expertise or competence. It is not a trainer for perfect shots. I know, the initial excuse for the shooting at my hometown was that he learned his perfect shooting skills from teh games. He had never played a game in his life. His uncle had regularly taken him to the shooting range though.
All that being said, there is a point wherein video games are a force that adds to the problem. Video games, like movies, and other media form an overwhelming narrative. Despite being a medium to overcome that narrative, it is still an unfortunate minority (as is the case with movies and television) that tackles the moralities of the violence option. While GTA and the mindless shooters are brought up again and again, we forget about Metal Gear Solid, Bioshock, and Shadow of the Collosus which use the medium to drive home the reality of destruction and the horrors of violence in meaningful soul-shattering ways.
Despite this, many instead are a part of culture and as such are a part of the dominant narrative of violence good, sex bad, and the tropes of kill the bad guys who are the other. This is unfortunate, but it would be a lie to target this one medium as the weak link. It is pervasive, much as the shameful cultural and sexual representation and is a reflection and a propagation of the sins of our society, no more, no less. To throw the baby out with the bath water and pretend we "fixed" the problem when all stats show that kids today are less violent than previous generations thanks to the growing death of opinions along the lines of "this is dominant, all else must die", would be a shame to dwarf all shames and would ignore the work those aforementioned games, and the millions of other games out there providing a service for good. They are more numerous than you'd think with even Twisted Metal Black acknowledging the violence that has twisted it and telling gamers this is not a land to emulate. Like with all new mediums, it is important to experience it before casting ignorant judgment and to pay attention to the statistics that fly in the face of "common wisdom".
A final note in an already too long piece, but an important one as there seems to be an attitude that we kids are merely protecting our sick pastime out of ignorance. When I was still in high school, I was a gamer, in a colony of gamers. Some were even in the supposed profile, troubled, depressives. Some were ADD, some were dumb as posts, some too smart for their own good. I surrounded myself with every strain of loser I could find. Not a single one of them, these gamers or other freaks were violent people. They were ritualistically abused by bullies and treated as expendable freaks by the authority figures who were hopped up on prejudices like that of Evan's. The false belief sold by the media that video game loners (the other) were the source of bad evil violence. There were hired policemen to glare at us as we found corners at lunchtime. Before school, after school, off school, none of these men were more violent in life than a Buddhist monk. In that same time, healthy young men who didn't play video games and instead played sports and had "healthy" interests showed the worst of humanity. They would consistently threaten violence and even death to their fellow man. An out lesbian butch had to glare down these men every day to protect her beloved from her beloved's own bravery. Every day those men made comments and threats of how they couldn't wait to have an advantage, get them alone. These men, these white privileged men, beat up anyone weaker and those same cops and authorities were too busy looking for dangerous loners to step in when they pummeled another weakling senseless. My worst memory was of a group of footballers who smashed a kid's skull repeatedly into a stone pillar across the quad from me. They may have killed him, as all I know is that the kid didn't wake up when I was there and was still unconscious when the ambulance pulled him away. The pillar was stained with his blood in copious amounts for months. Those same boys received no punishment for their actions as the football team that year was "on the way to the championships" for the first time in awhile. The gamers didn't ever do an act like this. They got out their aggressions with their console. Those consoles provided release against something other than a living human being.
So where is the violence coming from, where is it reinforced, where is it being taught that violence is respected and grants you power, where is it sold as the right decision in all cases? It is not video games. It is the constant message of love for bullies. As long as violence is seen as the greatest of male traits and as long as use of it against the "weaker" occurs, people will have the will to use it. As long as there are shooting ranges, people will have the skill to use it. And as long as we let men off the hook for every violent, misogynist (every school shooter (and shooter in general) has been both a male and has exhibited misogynistic attitudes) behavior, people will have the precedent for it.
That's your evolution. Not this use of fantasy that has relied overmuch on disproven studies and media boogeymen.
Thank you and sorry for the long post.
It is the constant message of love for bullies. As long as violence is seen as the greatest of male traits and as long as use of it against the "weaker" occurs, people will have the will to use it.
To use a different metaphor, when you select for something, don't be surprised when that's what you get.
I have said that over and over and over. About this issue and many others. If you want to see why a human system consistently produces bad outcomes, look closely at the selection processes built into it.
But I really don't expect the people who keep replicating the "blame the Other" meme will ever understand this.
[shrugs]
There's a point at which I am not going to press further, because I know ears and the minds behind them are closed.
I'm 57 and with any luck, I'll be dead in another couple of decades. I leave no hostages to fortune behind me.
It's your civilization, people. You are behind the wheel. If you choose to drive it into a ditch, that's your problem.
I am so God damned tired of seeing that stupid Grossman horseshit everywhere I look.
If I told somebody that I got good at basketball from playing NBA 2k8 or good at football from playing Madden, you'd laugh at my ass and you'd be right to do so.
Because it's FUCKING STUPID. So is every God damned thing Grossman said in his stupid little book. Video games-- DOOM, for God's sake-- did not teach Michael Carneal to do a single fucking thing, and you're an idiot if you believe otherwise.
A few comments.
First off, this is a really big question and it's not something easy to resolve with any amount of research.
My understanding of videogames changed dramatically when I started playing online persistent world games (PWs). In these games you can't save and reload, so the level of tension is a lot higher than in a regular game where you can just reload if you screw up. Also, these are pretty sophisticated, D&D-based games, not something like WoW. There are dungeon masters (DMs) who set up plots and stories for the players. So there's a lot of sophistication. There's real verbal communication between players, and between players and creatures controlled by the DM, and the role-playing that people do--figuring out on-the-fly how your character with their distinct personality would respond to different situations in real-time--can be really challenging. Not everybody plays a heroic macho man, people try to play all different kinds of personalities. Basically, it's not (ideally) just shooting at stuff and solving puzzles.
In PWs, one thing that is a huge annoyance for DMs (and players) in persistent worlds is the "click the red thing" mentality/behavior of players. These PWs I played in used Neverwinter Nights, and in NWN hostile creatures glow red if you hold down the tab key. And players are so conditioned to just attack enemies on sight, that in the game they will attack things they shouldn't (or at least that you didn't want them to) because they are technically hostile and glow red for the players.
So badguys that you wanted to have stand around and give a little exposition, not-actual-badguys that look like badguys, badguys that want to negotiate, players will just attack them without thinking. When you're trying to run a plot or set up a story, and players do this to characters you're controlling, you start to realize just how prevalent and how ingrained this behavior is. Of course it's very Skinnerian, players get a nice little reward for shooting and killing badguys in pretty much every game, and you avoid danger by getting them before they get you. It's very common for stories to get interrupted or for things to otherwise get messed up because players attack stuff without thinking too much about it.
When you are in the DM chair and you try and get these badguys to behave like actual creatures (they may not even be human beings, but they might at least talk or do something other than just attack), you realize how players tend to see them not even as anything as complicated as 'creatures', but as a kind of mechanical phenomenon that they respond to in an automatic way.
And this is in games where people are supposed to be thinking and interacting, not just shooting at stuff. It's obviously not as big a difference as that between real life and an FPS, but the "click the red thing" behavior does bleed over into situations where it's not appropriate.
Of course that doesn't mean people who played FPS's who later go on shooting rampages are doing that *because* they went into "click the red thing" mode with their guns instead of a mouse, but I can see how there could be a connection between the two. And I would say if there is any direct behavioral effect from videogames, it's not from pent-up stress or learning to aim. It would be from highly repetitive game-play, where the response of shooting at anything that moves is something you get very used to, something that feels very comfortable and natural. Even if some of the physical details change (like the fact that real guns have recoil), I could see how being that comfortable with just seeing things that move around in your environment as mechanical targets and shooting at them would make somebody more confident and capable of going on a shooting spree like the Carneal case.
Other things you mentioned, like his aim, could just be a statistical outlier, this one case would be meaningless even if he hadn't trained at a shooting range. There are still so many factors involved it's hard to tell how much of an impact this really has on actual shootings, but I agree it's *plausible*.
At any rate, given how tiny the number of these shootings is, how incredibly unlikely it is to be injured or killed in one, I would say we're better off putting our time into other things like car safety, or saving the tens of millions of people who die from easily curable, preventable diseases like malaria and tuberculosis.
In reading through all of the reply threads no one has adddressed one glaring motive behind the problem of these school shootings-the fact that there is no such thing as a "fair fight" anymore.
When I went through junior high and high school, the fights, when they occurred, were mano-a-mano-no one else was to get involved on either side. Failure to enforce that rule usually meant a gang fight would erupt in short order. That bit of fair play went away several years ago. Now the fights too often turn into multiple person beatdowns with doubling and tripling up being the norm instead of the exception...with eventually fatal results. The kid gets tired of getting his ass beat by the bully and all his cronies and gets hold of an equalizer...then everyone has the nerve to be surprised.
I remember watching one of those "teen rap" shows one Sunday morning about eight or nine years ago on one of the Orlando stations (I think it was channel 9) that was attempting to address the situation of why these kids were carrying weapons to school, and the kids they asked the question to replied by saying "the fights aren't one on one anymore; they're two on one, three on one, five on two...and you get tired of getting beat on after awhile."
It's one thing to blame video games and say that this is the "be all and end all" reason behind shootings. I think that analysis, while it may be laudable, is also somewhat lacking in reality. There's almost always more than one reason (see Jesse's posting down the page on the young man being bullied in Arkansas as an example of what's probably a LOT closer to the reality behind school shootings).
"Ultimately, school shootings are meaningful because they are aberrant."
Finding true "meaning" is a low priority to the alarmist and lazy MSM and their low-information target audience.
"They focus our attention on changes in our society that normally remain hidden: the pervasiveness of bullying and abuse, the increase in violent media images, the effectiveness of video games as training devices."
None of these "changes" are particularly new or surprising, so the "foci of our attention" when a shooting occurs are actually brief, sensationalistic bursts that rely on the opinions of ambulance chasers, safety moms, and opportunistic authoritarians (both secular and religious) rather than the sort of facts and data you present. Again, finding real "meaning" is rarely the goal.
"What we choose to do with that attention and the knowledge that comes from it is the hard question. The harder we look at the system the more complex it becomes, and the more complex it is the less likely simplistic solutions (ban video games, demonize Hollywood) are to work."
Agreed there. And yet simplistic solutions that allow us to avoid facing the meaningful issues are what are pushed on society by and through the media. Video games are easy but ultimately bogus targets for demonization, and yet you've spent four posts doing the equivalent of providing livestock mortality statistics to the town fathers of 17th century Salem, Mass. The research may be good, but by drawing a tenuous line to the meaning of the complex issue at hand, you're opening the door for your solid work to be misused by those you yourself have deplored.
"Complex solutions (reduce abuse by reducing poverty and rebuilding the family, reduce bullying by diversity and education, recontextualize violence as inappropriate in more circumstances) are harder to conceive and immeasurably harder to implement, especially when public policy ideas must be sold in six-second sound bites."
Again we return to the MSM. Beginning to see a "meaningful" pattern here?
"Finding a solution begins with understanding the nature of the problem."
Agreed. Coming up, my 4-part series on "Why People Cook" (an in-depth discussion of blenders).
Context is critical when it comes to any sort of design. Beyond conforming to basic physical safety and functional standards, however, self-censorship or state censorship of the design's creative elements is not the answer. The Comics Code stifled the sort of creativity we see in today's graphic novels for decades. The Hays Code drained humor and suppressed frank and open discussions of adult subjects in mainstream films for 35 years. Network television is still a "vast wasteland" compared to what we see on HBO, in large part because the FCC and internal "standards and practices" departments became a vehicle for religious fanatics. Are you really suggesting, even in a lukewarm way, that the video game industry needs to go through the same misguided efforts?
When it comes to those school shooters who happen to use video games to "train" (a subset of an already statistically insignificant group) discussions of context would still be more productively and meaningfully applied to the school culture, to parenting and home life issues, to mental health and medication issues, and to the media's effects on ALL participants in the event. In such cases, quibbling over the minor point of the context provided by a tool's designer (a context that reasonably didn't take into account the aberrant and naive misuse of that tool) misses the point by a wide margin. As does this well sourced but ultimately unconvincing series, I'm afraid.
MBL: there's one reason to dismiss Grossman's stuff, and it's a simple one. His book is from 1999. 9-years old stuff is just completely outdated when it comes to video games, internet and computers. It's another era.
Besides, anyone that commes with a name as silly as "killokogy" doesn't deserve to be listened to.
At the end of the day, people here have pointed to the real issue. The problem isn't video games. The problem is the society at large, and its values. As long as this doesn't change, nothing will work.
And by that I mean several factors, the wide availability of guns, the massive emphasis on violence, and on physical activities as a whole. If anyone was ever bothered to look at, one would find a massive correlation between the average level of violence in a society and the amount of physical activities of its average citizen - which includes not only shooting range but the entire span of sports. There's a reason why the Greeks put so much time in physically exercising. There's an obvious though usually unstated reason for having physical education at school, and it's not a mere question of public health - something most ruling elites couldn't care less. The friggin boyscouts were originally meant to be a paramilitary preparation to the army.
I'd bet my money that any society where people would mostly spend their time watching TV, reading books and playing video games, including MMOs and FPS like Counter Strike, would be far more peaceful than the current USA.
Another video game designer offers a balanced take on why videogames get such a bad rap
wow a multi part topic and not one part on he actual cause of school shootings...this was worthless.
look teen vilence has gone down every year for decades...those years conicide with increasing violence in video games...sure its a nice "those damm kids...in my day" type of rant, but it dosn't hold any water.
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