I stopped playing first person shooters back in the mid-90s when I noted:
a) I was spending a LOT of time doing so,
b) my daughters were lining up to watch me play and asking when we could play more,
c) my world was turning into the shooter's world; I was looking for face-eaters behind things, and automatically clearing every room, every doorway, every high space;
d) I started reverting back to my teen years in terms of how to solve problems;
e) Medic nightmares drastically picked up.
Took about six to eight weeks for all this to be so.
Stopped playing cold turkey, haven't picked up one since.
Took another month or so to go away.
Great stuff, Evan.
Desensitization to violence was noted as far back as Rome, when one author/philosoph wrote that when he returned from the day's games at the arena he was more prone to anger, coarser in his manners and less inclined to feel well of his fellow human beings.
There may also be a correlation between the violence seen in media and mental illness; studies have indicated that the brain is still making neural connections and is not fully developed until the early to mid 20s. Now couple that with early-onset schizophrenia, and you have the makings for some very bad events.
Good stuff.
I think the more interesting statistic would be to compare the death rate for in-school shootings to the death rate for out-of-school shootings for the same age cohorts. I have no idea how many children and young adults die from firearms in the US annually but I suspect the number is several orders of magnitude higher outside of school than in school.
I teach HS science at a large somewhat upscale suburban HS in Texas. There are no metal detectors but there are two armed city cops permanently assigned to the school. Mostly they are out directing traffic before and after school. But we do go through violence incidence training...something I don't remember from years ago. And all teachers are instructed to keep their doors locked at all times except between classes.
By the way, not to nit-pick but your map of school shootings seems to be missing at least two nationally-famous incidents. The Red Lake MN Indian reservation school shooting in 2005:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Red...School_massacre
And the 2006 Amish schoolhouse shooting in Lancaster PA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Ami...school_shooting
By the way, I think what frightens so many parents about these incidents is the utter randomness of it. In most of the famous cases the victims are mostly or entirely random bystanders.
When non-random shootings occur they barely make the local news, much less national news. Kids are always being shot by other kids in cities around the country. But when it's gang drive-by stuff no one really cares because the victims are non-random. Even when innocent bystanders are hit by gang shootings it still isn't perceived as random because the locations are predictable.
Anyone familiar with the field of risk assessment knows that random risks are much more terrifying than non-random risks. For example, people are generally more frightened by flying than driving when statistically flying is many many times safer. That's because people perceive they can control their driving risks by being careful drivers whereas they have no control over the plane when flying.
I have always wondered how 2 articles of faith get reconciled--1, the video game/TV/film industry's article of faith that violence on screen does not lead to violent behavior, and 2, the advertising industry's article of faith that exposure influences behavior ("gotta hav that, saw it on TV").
I certainly don't claim to have any answer, but I'm interested in people's thoughts on the matter.
Kent,
you're absolutely correct about the map. The map I used stopped being updated in 2001, I believe. I got it at http://
www.keystosaferschools.co...l_Shootings.htm, where they gave up trying to update it.
Regarding randomness: we'll look a bit later at how the actions of some of these shooters point directly to video game use.
CapD,
you're right that those points are mostly irreconcilable, but the real killer (excuse the pun) is that the military uses video games, some of them very primitive (one a modified version of Duck Hunt!) to condition soldiers. We'll talk about that in the next installment.
Thanks for reading,
I understand why you want to present col. Grossman's work. But I believe his views were too simplistic and presented little persuasive data within psychology. I would like to suggest to look at works done by other psychologists as well, such as Dr.Brad Bushman, Craig Anderson, Douglas Gentile, Karen Dill and Ute Ritterfeld.
This is an excerpt from a longer article at "Damn Interesting" that brings in an environmental perspective:
"The specific harms done by environmental lead are difficult to quantify. It is known that children are much more apt to absorb the neurotoxic metal than adults, and it is suspected to have stricken many children with behavior problems, learning difficulties, hyperactivity, and breathing complications. Even more troubling, a number of recent studies have shown a strong correlation between atmospheric lead levels and crime rates. A study published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research, which used data spanning more than fifty years, reported a "very strong association" between the exposure of young children to lead, and crime rates twenty years later when they became young adults. This correlation holds true for a wide variety of locales, social conditions, and models of government. The sharp decline in US crime rates which began in the early 1990s dovetails perfectly with the reduction of leaded gasoline in the early 1970s; and other countries which followed suit saw similar declines, also delayed by twenty years. It seems that the lawmakers who claim credit for crime-reducing legislation during that time are probably misplacing their congratulations. In another study, Pittsburgh University researchers found that juvenile delinquents had lead levels four times higher on average than law-abiding adolescents."
Full article:
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=932
There's also one other thing that really seems to be in common in all these mass shootings.
Isolation.
Hopefully this series will take that into account along side everything else, the effect that exclusionary pressures/groups have on all of us, and how that is truly desensitizing.
The problem with that, is that in discussing that there truly is a little bit of the "blame the victim" type thing. And in most cases, I hate that. I hate blaming the victim. In this? I see the shooters as victims as well. Other types of victims, to be sure, but mostly victims of communities and societies that have more than failed them, they've exploited them.
I wonder how the family dynamics can be quantified. The family of a school shooter, whether mentally ill or not, in comparison with another similar personality who doesn't act out.
I guess what I am wondering is how the two Columbine shooters interacted with their families versus others within their disaffected group. My assumption would be that an involved parent could control the end result more than an uninvolved parent... of course no info or idea if that makes sense. Does the family dynamic indicate a potential behavior?
In NZ, we are starting to see an increase in youth violence. There have been claims made that with increase of employment (unemployment rate below 5%) we get upticks in youth violence. The argument is the kids are working class to middle class and both parents tend to work long hours at relatively low paying jobs, service activities and are employed in jobs without benefits.
The kids see thier parents working hard and not succeeding and are dissolusioned with there future prospects. They only see a future of working poverty and drudgery and see crime and gang culture as being something different and exciting.
When we see unemployment rates rise we see a drop in violent crime.
Seems counter intuitive, but some times us humans just are....
Evan Robinson,
I have a tangential connection to one of the kids wounded in the NIU massacre(he is the brother of a high school friend), so when the random gets more personal, its hard to see the statistical forest for the trees. However, your point is well taken.
What people take away from these events is that they have a mass terror ripple effect across the country. Imagine if this crime had been committed by a brown guy with an Arabic sounding name instead of a skinny white kid. The terror ripple would be even more pronounced and everyone and their grandma would be clamoring for the government to come save them. I hope this analogizes well to those media exposure to violence studies, because I think that both of these cases are a matter of perception rather than hard statistical data. It is extremely hard to discretely observe one particular behavior and assign a base singular cause to it(as you stated in the post).
I play a lot of first person shooters. A lot of them are great games with great stories. There are too many out there with the homogenization of video game genres(something I am sure you know about), but the net effect on my personality is not perceptible. I consider myself an attempting pacifist, namely someone who has given up all forms of coercion as a means of influence or intimidation. I can still blast away combine as Gordon Freeman, but I do that because of the visceral thrill and not because I intend to do it in real life.
I would not presume that what holds true for me is true for all though, and I am interested in other points of view. But I am always aware of the hyperbole injected into this arena by people with agendas like Jack Thompson.
I am looking forward to reading Part 2.
Well, as some obscure bard once said, if advertising doesn't work, there wouldn't be adverts.
Violent video games/violence......... see above.
Now, I've played a few over the years, but (a) I was well over 30 when I tried my first and (b) they are incredibly boring after......... well after just a few missions/episodes.
Different for small people, which is why we watch very little TV and 'gaming' is basically me testing out my naval models for the outfit I work for.
American culture, like many others, offers entitlement to violence. Our culture is devoted to the righteous acting out of violence for any number of reasons. Deadly weapon ownership is in the constitution, and those who support that interpretation claim to defend it to the death. These mass murderers who go to schools probably think they are righting some wrong done to them. It is delusional, but righteous revenge is a part of the human condition that America has institutionalized and celebrates.
Andy, this has an interesting correlation to something we saw in Silicon Valley (where both my brother and I raised our kids).
A surprising (or perhaps not so surprising) number of the late Boomer/early Gen X engineers were the sons and daughters of engineers who worked in California's huge postwar defense industry. (For me, it was Grandpa, who came to California in 1955 to be a rocket scientist at China Lake Naval Weapons Center.) For many of us, we were the second, third, and even fourth generation to go into whatever was the cutting-edge tech of the time. (Among my grandfather's eight surviving grandchildren, there are six engineers. I was one of the two left out -- but I married engineers, three times.)
Which is why it's shocking that our children are staying away from tech careers in droves. They've been too close to it for too long, seen us do the 70-hour weeks on end, get screwed over at bonus time, have our careers dead-end at 40 and end, period, at 45. And they want NONE of it.
Among Grandpa's 15 great-grandchildren, I'm going to be surprised if we get three engineers out of the bunch. The rest don't think tech offers a rewarding future; they're looking for other options.
I tend to view this as another national asset wasted. Our engineering schools have fewer and fewer home-grown engineers; but even the foreign students have to be paid to come here in a age of zealous homeland security. We spent two generations (at least) channelling the talent pool that congealed into Silicon Valley; but the way things are going, all of that is going to be dissipated in another decade, along with our hopes of future tech dominance.
And all because our kids took the lessons of their parents' lives all too much to heart. Stupid. Just stupid.
The only FPS's that I find engaging (even worth re-playing) are the Metroid Prime series, followed close by the Elder Scrolls series. I got very bored very quickly by the others.
Austan Goolsbee, Obama adviser and UChicago prof, is on record that TV is OK for kids. http://www.slate.com/id/2136372/
The Goolsbee article is specifically about whether TV effects children's test scores, and I think we can infer that we're talking about standard scholastic tests of some kind.
Not aggression scores.
Goolsbee’s article is based on a 2006 study by some of his UChicago Biz School colleagues who used 1960s data to track outcomes of the US high school class of 1965. (A lot of sex, mayhem, and consumerism has crossed our airwaves since then.)
Goolsbee’s discussion is primarily about scholastic achievement, but his opening and closing framing are much broader:
‘Various studies have linked greater amounts of television viewing to all sorts of problems, among them attention deficit disorder, violent behavior, obesity, and poor performance in school and on standardized tests.’
(snip)
‘After controlling for socioeconomic status, there were no significant test-score differences between kids who lived in cities that got TV earlier as opposed to later, or between kids of pre- and post-TV-age cohorts. Nor did the kids differ significantly in the amount of homework they did, dropout rates, or the wages they eventually made. … Watching TV has taught them many horrible songs, and for that you will suffer. But maybe you don't need to feel too guilty about it.’
I’m not trying to go off on a tangent. I voted for Obama. Goolsbee is Obama's long-time economic advisor. UChicago Biz School is Milton Friedman country. Academics there twist the data to serve the establishment. I think it’s fair to say that Goolsbee has done the same in this article. My point in raising this is that those of us who support Obama must be mindful that he can’t be expected to stray very far from current economic orthodoxy without a lot of popular pressure.
Then we'll have to give him that large amount of popular pressure!
Correlation does not equal causation.
And all of you that haven't been playing FPS's lately are missing out on some good ones
For those who don
’t know Jack Thompson is a rabidly anti game American lawyer who has been repeatedly discredited.
After the tragic Virginia Tech shootings he went on Fox News (no surprise there) and blamed the killings on video games. With no facts or evidence to support his claims. The game site Kotaku totally debunked his claims. And when the board of enquiry totally absolved video games from any blame did we get Jack Thompson and Fox News apologising? Obviously not.
Now he is at it again. And (huge surprise) it is on Fox News once more. Now they describe him as a “School Shooting Expert” as he firmly lays the cause of the Northern Illinois University shootings on video games. With absolutely no proof or evidence of any kind.
What is wrong with Fox News that they repeatedly allow such abysmal levels of untruthful journalism? What is wrong with America that such a tragedy can be used as a vehicle for a rabid self publicist?
Just now there seems to be a queue of ignorant and misinformed journalists and politicians attacking video gaming without the possession of any facts to support their diatribes. The journalists, obviously, are doing this out of a sense of self importance and the search for fame and glory. The politicians, obviously, are doing it to transfer blame away from their own incompetence and for fame and glory. They make me sick.
So it is refreshing that two practicing child psychologists have got together and written an article that totally repudiates what these ignorant politicians and journalists are saying. This is important because the authors of this article actually know what they are talking about. They deal with children, and specifically the psychological problems that children have, on a daily basis. They are the experts.
Firstly they look at a similar episode of political stupidity from the past: “In 1955, the U.S. Senate blasted comic books, deploring their depiction of every horrible thing from murder to cannibalism. The lawmakers heard from a prominent psychiatrist who singled out the Superman comic books as especially “injurious to the ethical development of children” because they “arouse phantasies [sic] of sadistic joy” in our youth. Another witness testified that children had been jumping off high places in attempts to fly like their hero. Shame on that Superman. He ruined the lives of so many children!” This tone of derision is absolutely spot on.
They then pour scorn on the hysteria and the made up facts of the anti gamers. And explain just how flawed correlation studies are: “We could say that during the season when ice cream sales increase, shark attacks also increase. But we could not say the more ice cream you sell, the more you cause shark attacks.”
After that they explain their motives for writing the article: “Some legislative initiatives and public opinions across the country are based on fallacious assumptions, personal biases, political posturing and weak science.” The whole games industry realises this, it is nice to have some support. Someone should tell Hillary Clinton and Gordon Brown.
And they finish with some practicality, obviously based on their expertise and experience: “Common sense tells you that if 90 percent of households have owned or rented a video game every year - while the juvenile crime rate has been going down for more than a decade - then a little Halo 3 never hurt anybody…”
The authors of this article are: Frank Gaskill works with children, adolescents and teens. He also serves as a member of the private schools admissions testing team (CAIS). Dr Gaskill provides a variety of services including trainings, therapy, and assessments and provides a practical, solution-focused approach. David Verhaagen works primarily with high school and college-age students. His specialties include: adoption issues, anger problems, anxiety behavior problems, depression, drug and alcohol problems, school and learning-related problems (including ADHD), and trauma (accidents, abuse, violence, etc.)
two MAJOR issues with your analyisis
first the guy was in his mid 20's NOT A KID.
second there have been shooting by kids and adults for as long as there has been guns...and killings for as long as there have been kids and adults, I seriously doubt that the rate has gone up (raw number yes, but not rate) In fact if you look precivilization to civlization(tirbila vs modern societies) the murder rate has gone WAY down (war before civilization is a book that covers this topic very well). I don't think prehistoric tribesman had videogames.
we have a nation of millions of people, a few will just be broken, it happens.
Now as for the spacific shooting, well i think that was a bad choice of examples for you. we are dealing with a guy who stoped takeing his behavior meds and had a history of issues with women (that still has yet to hit the mida, i work with a guy who TAed with the shooter...he was notsuprised at all)
nice on the blame the video games though, almost as good as blamethe guns. There has allways been and will allways be broken people that do things like this.
Even assuming that video games cause rises in aggression, there's two real important things to keep in mind with this.
#1. They're not the only things that logically cause rises in aggression. Sports come to mind as something that has a similar effect. Although in these cases, the studied effects are temporary, and probably can be linked to natural hormonal changes.
#2. The problem isn't desensitization to violence. You get that enough on the nightly news, to be honest. What desensitization to violence gets you is that when you see something violent you don't flinch or look away. Theoretically this could actually be a good thing in certain situations. (Think of being a victim of a crime where you can still think logically and made the right decisions). But that alone doesn't make one violent. It might make it easier to be violent, but that's not the same thing.
The problem that allows people to hurt other people, is the desensitization to the worth of the other. In pretty much all these cases, they were taught that they had no value as human beings, thusly they learned that others had no value.
This lesson is so far away from the violent pop culture that we're talking about that it's not funny. (More and more FPS games, in particular feature co-op modes where teamwork is imperative...hardly something dismissing the value of the other).
Desensitization to the value of the other has its roots firmly in main street, in our offices, in our churches and in our clubs.
Efforts to blame video games and other pop culture are strictly an effort to avoid putting the blame on the exclusionary, emotionally violent main street culture that's the real problem.
If kids can learn their ABCs and 123s from teevee and video(or at least be helped to learn using them),then why is it not even considered remotely possible(as part of the public discussion)that violent content would also have an effect?
Of course it's a combination of things at work here,not just one. There's isolation and a lack of connection,perhaps abuse in childhood of some kind,the way our schools are designed(IMO,the school system is too warehoused,it's not an acedemic community like many smaller colleges are),parents who are unequipped to be parents,a culture that doesn't value life,what we view as"entertainment",and alot more.
We as a country have so much and are so miserable. Why? Priorities are fucked up somewhere.
And all because our kids took the lessons of their parents' lives all too much to heart. Stupid. Just stupid.
And let's not forget "outsourcing" (AKA shipping American jobs overseas). I've heard that this practice is absolutely murdering the domestic engineering field in cold blood. I can't imagine anything that would engender a worse feeling of existential betrayal than putting all that effort and study into becoming a good engineer, and then having to take a survival job at Starbuck's or MacDonald's!
We really have become the fucking Ferengi, haven't we?
Whether violent TV and video games cause increased interpersonal aggression, they may also serve another function.
As Karmakin said above: ‘What desensitization to violence gets you is that when you see something violent you don't flinch or look away. … The problem that allows people to hurt other people, is the desensitization to the worth of the other. In pretty much all these cases, they were taught that they had no value as human beings, thusly they learned that others had no value.’
(snip)
'Desensitization to the value of the other has its roots firmly in main street, in our offices, in our churches and in our clubs.’ Karmakin also mentions sports and the nightly news as contributors.
For our globalized economy to function, we must believe that the ‘competition’ is fair, and we must be desensitized to the fate of the 'losers'.
Chicago Business School is the high temple of the globalized ‘free market’.
Which brings us back to Goolsbee and Obama. I agree with Kim C. We'll have to keep up the popular pressure.
There are so many other factors that contribute to the fucked up condition of the students at the school where I toil that the effect of video games on their behavior is rarely considered.
I was a survivor of a school yard shooting 19 years ago that was heavily covered by the press worldwide. None of what I saw or heard in print or on the air could describe the fucking horror of seeing five dead children on a schoolyard. Can you imagine the horror of a little kid when he sees his tether ball partner's head explode? The mentally ill freak who killed these kids did not grow up with video games. He grew up untreated and ignored.
What makes these shootings heavily widely discussed and dissected is that most Americans know that the instant the first shot is fired every person there loses something within themselves that may never be recovered. That creates a tremendous amount of sympathy and reflection. I also believe that the shooter is usually somebody that never felt normal or had their own normalcy stolen. Does video game playing fuel the motivation to strikeout at other as a result of disillusionment and mental illness? I am not smart enough to know.
I wish I had more time this morning to respond.
Overall, I think you folks are taking the FPS comments too much to heart. We will be talking about violent video games specifically later, but in the meantime, violent video games are just part of the overall violent media exposure.
wengler,
"correlation does not impute causation" is an important thing to know, but it's an important thing to avoid being blinded by it as well. In complex issues, especially issues of public health, it's hard to establish clear lines of causation. In complex organisms like humans, it's hard to establish clear lines of causation. The evidence for correlation between violent media and increased aggression is (according to a source I've read in the last couple of days but can't cite right now because I'm packing for a trip) about as good as that of smoking and lung cancer. That's good enough for me. It's FAR more than there is between serum cholesterol and obesity, or the amount of any fat you eat and serum cholesterol, both subjects that public health officials have a lot to say about.
Bruceongames,
Jack Thompson is an ambulance chasing whackjob, I agree.
Can you give me a link to that study, please?
Remember that I'm not specifically indicting games here, but violent media in general. There are excellent studies on violent media correlating with increased aggression, often done when TV reached an otherwise isolated community.
moonglum,
I haven't said anything about the NIU shooter, I'm just using the event as a springboard. However, a 27 year old who's spent almost his entire life in school and who's taking psychoactive meds (or not taking them, as the case may be) is almost certainly emotionally juvenile with respect to his calendar age. Just like Ted Kacinsky (sp? -- the Unabomber) was due to his long isolation. Oh, and at the age of 46, 27 is a kid to me 
As for blaming guns or video games or even the victim, I'm not -- at least not yet. I'm working up to how these things become enablers, but this is not a "violent video games make killers" or "guns kill people" argument, and if you're reading it as such, I'd like to gently suggest that you are reading things which I did not write.
Karmakin,
Can you please quote where I ever said that violent media, or violent video games, were the only things that increased aggression?
Desensitization is a big part of the problem, as I'll show in the next installment.
anangryoldbroad,
You are just about right on, I think. We are talking about changes in possibilities, not certainties. Other factors certainly are involved.
I doubt I'll have connectivity again until tonight, but I'll check in when I can. Thanks for commenting, and thanks for reading,
Evan I don't even think that your claim that they are an enabler holds water. i think the raw number has gone up because the population ahs gone up...the rate of broken people hasn't risin signafigantly, how we deal with those people in recent years has.
Watson, of course Obama won't stray far from economic orthodoxy. If he did, his Secret Service protection would fail mysteriously, and a "lone racist nut" would kill him, and then the nut would be "shot trying to escape"--or maybe the owners of the country would go for the "tragic plane crash" scenario instead.
If that be the case, I don't blame Obama--or HRC or Bill C. for that matter--for remaining faithful to the economic orthodoxy. I would not choose martyrdom, either.
“If kids can learn their ABCs and 123s from teevee and video(or at least be helped to learn using them),then why is it not even considered remotely possible (as part of the public discussion) that violent content would also have an effect?
Of course it's a combination of things at work here,not just one.”
I cannot agree with this MORE. It's not to say that there should be any sort of outlawing of so-called violent content, be it movies, television or video games, but rather that there should be an acknowledgment of the reality of how people—particularly young people absorb information, imagery and behaviors.
And in that acknowledgment, we should DO WHAT WE CAN to manage those influences. I have seen it myself—in households where the parents do not read or where reading is denigrated, often the children do not read. In homes where there is a lot of cursing and few boundaries of propriety, the children almost invariably act out and speak coarsely. You cannot shield kids from these things entirely, as the world intrudes in ways it never could before—through cell phones, in videos in the back seats of cabs, even the person next to you on the bus' video iPod. But we cannot simply throw up our hands and say “the hell with it” and not install any filter at all.
We cannot be afraid in our homes to talk to our children about right and wrong—what is okay and what is not. We cannot be timid about indicating disgust with that which is disgusting. I'm having a running battle with my stepson about his sexist behavior. He will routinely pop off to his mom, but NEVER to me or his father. He denigrates female athletes as goofy lessers when he himself is point-blank, a horrific athlete himself, out of shape and poorly coordinated. He is absorbing the unfortunate 'round the way machismo native to too many young men in rough and tough ass Brooklyn. He constantly goofs on why things are named after women—hurricanes, supercars and the like. He'll say “It's not a girl...it's a dude”. I ask him why. He'll reply “What's the big deal about girls? Nobody I know who's important is a girl.”
Well...what about your mom?”, I'll ask.
“That's different. She's a mom.”
“So why do you talk back to her and NEVER YOUR DAD?”
“I dunno.”
“It's 'cause you respect the fact that he'll knock your ass out. You think your mom won't knock you out.”
“She's not as strong as him.”
“Fuck around and find out how strong she is the hard way. You'll be in the hospital thinkin' “Wow, she is pretty strong. Know why you'll be thinkin' it?”
Silence from him.
“Because you won't be able to say it through your broke-ass jaw.”
I have to fight this battle with him every couple of months or so when he steps out of pocket. We don't keep a sexist house. His dad does, which is the problem, with him trucking interchangeable chickies in and out of there like they were deposit bottles or something. That and the thuggy, misogynist world he enters every day once he's gone for school.
We have to be willing to fight against the ugly and call it out for what it is. It's NOT the ultimate solution, but I don't see how standing strong in the face of things that we know can be detrimental without a counterbalance can be a bad thing. Pointing out the evil of unfettered violence—being quick with the hands, and teaching about one's responsibility to “first, do no harm” to one's fellow man isn't a “chill” on expression. It's a level of care and responsibility to the society we live in.
Too many parents have abdicated responsibility—for selfish or simple pragmatic reasons (time being short with jobs et.al.)—insofar as being vigilant about what is consumed by their children, benignly and directly. To say that's NOT a factor in the de-sensitizing of our kids is to live a lie.
It's not THE factor, but it's the easiest to dismiss by folks looking to escape culpability or ascribe blame. It's the ONE thing you can control. Bullying, socialization problems, mental illness, chemical imbalances are semi-beyond the realm of parental influence.
Keeping a close eye and a hand on the reins as well as a hand on the “gate” can only help.
It’s hard to deny that TV/video has a substantial impact on us, and especially on our children. (Otherwise, as CapD and Bollox Ref noted above, corporations have wasted trillions of shareholder dollars on advertising.)
It seems that something should be done, but any remedy invariably treads on the hallowed ground of free expression. The 1981 US Supreme Court case Schad v. Mount Ephraim*, involving a NJ adult bookstore, approved restrictions, not as to the content of the expression, but as to ‘reasonable time, place and manner’ in which the content can be expressed. It’s not a bright line, but it often provides a useful analytical tool for case-by-case resolutions.
* http://www.law.cornell.edu/
supct...52_0061_ZO.html
Evan and LM:Sorry for my cynicism, but I've been down this road far too many times. The problem is that the promised "AND", far too often never comes. It's always forgotten, or a small little aside instead of what it deserves, which is to be the main course.
Sexism, of course, is one of those desensitization things that I'm talking about. I'll wait and see, of course. I'm not taking my ball and going home. But for me, even bring up graphic violence in media is nothing more than a distraction from the real issues at play. It's taking your eye off the ball. Just my opinion 'tho.
LMH has pretty much described the majority of the boys I work with everyday. Fronting a load of machismo earned vicariously from consuming the stories they hear from music, tv, movies and their friends.
Also, could these school shooters be our culture's version of the suicide bomber?
My all-time remedy for war and violence is to remember when we listened to my Great-Uncle Ernie tell of when he went over the top at Passchendaele/3rd Ypres in 1917. When you see an 80+-year-old bloke fall silent and begin to weep................ that's when you know that violence really, really, really does suck..........!!!
And writing this, remembering my Great-Uncle, makes me tear up.
......... so my point is, that with TV and games there are never any real consequences............ it's all a great laugh, blast away! But in real life, real people disintegrate as a shell explodes, drown in sodden mud, have their head shot off as they run forward, to the horror of their friends.
And the funny thing is America is more disturbed by sex. Remember the rumpus about Grand Theft Auto. Loadsa shootings, etc., no problem........ sex............aarrrgghh!!
That’s very sad, bumpster. You must be referring to the ‘Stockton Massacre’ - five dead, thirty wounded. Part of the mix in that shooter’s madness may have been racism, another means of de-valuing other human beings. We have a lot of pathologies to work on.
LM, you've described the moment that I don't know how single mothers get through -- though, obviously, they do, because I know enough well-mannered men (starting with my own dad) who were raised through their teens by single working moms.
But, right now, I can't feature it. My son will be 15 in another month, and we've started around this same barn this past year. He's tested this "Mom doesn't count" meme half a dozen ways from Sunday: not coming when called, not responding when talked to, ignoring direct requests, blowing off direct orders, dragging out daily chores for days and weeks at a time. We've always been close, so this is pretty damned new. And it infuriates me.
And, as far as I know, the only real antidote for this is having an alpha male in the house -- and a few more in the family orb, for good measure -- who draw the firm line that Disrespecting Your Mother Will Not Be Tolerated. K's within an inch of my height now, and in a fight, we'd be dead even (I suspect I'd still win, but it would take everything I have). This fact impresses him, as it impresses your son. He's feeling pretty damned cocky about it.
But that smugness evaporates into sheer awe-filled terror when Evan -- all six feet and 250+ pounds of him -- comes on to the scene and gets wind of what's going on. When he gets in the kid's face, K knows God Has Spoken. He's the Ultimate Power in my kid's little universe, the ultimate Setter of Boundaries; the Keeper of the Keys to his eventual manhood.
There's love and fear and respect all bound up in that relationship; the two of them are in the process of going off somewhere together that I can't follow. But, damn, am I grateful that that bond is there, because there are days that it's the only thing that keeps the kid rolling between the rails. He can try to defy teachers, clocks, the laws of physics, and his own mother -- but at the end of the free run, there's a solid wall that will stop him every time. Sooner or later, he's going to have to answer to Evan for it.
And the weird thing is: my son worships Evan for this.
I don't know what becomes of young men who don't have an older man to take them in hand that way, and teach them that the standards a man lives by are what makes him a man at all. I do think we let the media do too much of that finishing-school stuff on our boys -- and the result is that they stay boys, because nobody's ever shown them a better, stronger, more effective way to be in the world.
“My son will be 15 in another month, and we've started around this same barn this past year. He's tested this "Mom doesn't count" meme half a dozen ways from Sunday: not coming when called, not responding when talked to, ignoring direct requests, blowing off direct orders, dragging out daily chores for days and weeks at a time. We've always been close, so this is pretty damned new. And it infuriates me.“
And my stepson will be 16 later this year. His voice changed, he got a little taller—a quarter-inch taller than his mom and swears—as my mom used to say, “that his shit don't stink“ when it comes to his mom telling him to do things, or just generally respecting her. As he's I think a bit of a dweeb in school around “real girls”, he's bringing the macho home to act out with on his mom.
He's pushing the same buttons you cite—ignoring, slow to respond, openly dismissive towards her. And I do NOT let that shit slide. I “check” him. He loves to pit them—his mom and dad against each other and it works, too often sadly. But he doesn't dare do it with me and her.
“Dude. It ain't gonna work. I've got HER back. I'm her enforcer. And if you keep it up, I'll call your dad, tell him what you're doin' and he and I will tag-team your ass. I know you don't want THAT.”
Homeboy was cool for a month after that card got pulled.
He's not a bad kid. He's just feelin' a little grown as his hormones are raging and his body and mind are changing. But he ain't gonna set the boundaries in our house. 'Cause then we're lost. He's lost. It's a battle we're gonna fight as parents and we're going to the wall on it.
That (sexism), coarseness, empathy for one's fellow man, and an understanding of the damage of violence. Tooth and nail we're fighting—because that's what our job as parents is.
Anyone remember that Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange was originally given an "X" rating, when it was released in 1971? (I remember sneaking into the theater to see it, when I was 16.) But it's really quite tame by modern standards.
There's been an undeniable coarsening of our culture, which really began to pick up speed in the Reagan era.
Of course, it has to be remembered that the 60s and early 70s included assassinations, riots, Richard Speck, Albert DeSalvo, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock. Not to mention the deaths of an estimated 3 million Indochinese at the hands of our military, as our politicians tried to out-hawk each other with a modernized version of the Yellow Peril.
Anyway, I believe that with entertainment, it's been a feedback effect. To keep their audiences they have to keep upping the ante. More blood, more gruesomely explicit violence, more and bigger explosions.
Saw I, II, and III, anyone?
"All hail the new flesh!"
damm i guess im the only one that watches precode filmes...the crassness was allways there...just hidden below hte surface for a while....we where never a more gentille society there was just athin vaneer...through out history that is all that has ever been. a very thin vaneer of civality.
Lm hits on the hart. its not TV, or video games, or rock music, or jazz, or whatever that causes us to be crass and violent. its us. your parents have a lot to do with how you are. and unless you want ot run around telling people that they cna or can't have kids there is not much you can do.
and don't give me that, we use to be more civil crap, or there is more violence now crap...people use ot watch hannings for a fun saterday afternoon...im guseeing watching actual killings is a little more desensatising then watching virtual ones...damm before that things like hte intestianl rack was considered family entertainment.
hell even shakesphere made sure he had sex and violence in every play...nothing brings out the groundlings like bloody murder.
whats my point....
this is not a new thing, we have allways been violent creatures and blameing the latest fad will not correct the issue. cutting down the violence in vidow games will depress vido game sales, but wont make ven the smallest dent in the rate of violence.
Behind the mask of every teenage boy trying to front the image of power, control, and toughness is a sad, infantile little boy. The more sad and weak they perceive themselves to be the more infantile their response to rejection or loss. Except the infantile behavior is being carried out by a baby in big ass dangerous body. I had to arm bar and dip a kid the other day because I would not let him steal out of the fridge in the Student Store. He swung at me after he and a peer persuaded him to put the shit back. Crazy and stressful.
Before I will take any alleged link between video games and real world violence seriously, the claimant must satisfactorily explain the fact that real world violence has declined every year that first-person shooter games have been on the market. No study, no book, and no claim that I have seen to date even begins to tackle that hill.
As for Grossman, he's a close associate of Jack Thompson, and that should give any person doubts about his judgment at the very least.
It's certainly true that Shakespeare put plenty of blood and gore in his plays. No argument that was done at least partly as a crowd-pleaser.
But his historicals and tragedies were hardly a celebration of violence as a redemptive force, a la Dirty Harry and Rambo and their innumerable clones, or pretty much anything in the current governor of California's filmography.
(Before anyone brings up "Henry V", remember, as Shakespeare and his audience knew, Henry's great victory at Agincourt would almost immediately get pissed away in dynastic squabbles and decades of pointless war. The play itself is so ambiguous in tone that critics still argue whether it was meant as rah-rah patriotism or an indictment of war. Just look at the very different interpretations Branaugh and Olivier gave it.)
If Will were trying to sell his work in today's market, though, the studios would be demanding the script for Titus Andronicus IV: This time, it's personal!
What's missing from so much of our "entertainment" is the notion that violence inevitably corrupts the righteous, too. Our mass entertainment heroes slaughter hordes of completely interchangeable, utterly soulless Bad Guys, in between the sex scenes and whatever dabs of dialog are necessary to set up the next sequence of "Bang!"s and "Boom!"s.
It really harks back to a more Medieval than modern style of storytelling.
Don't get me wrong: I have my guilty pleasures, too, when it comes to mindless entertainment. We mortals will always be fascinated with death and violence. FPS games aren't my bag, but I've chewed up tons of hours in combat flight sims.
What's unique to our era is the all-pervasive nature of our ultraviolent amusements, and the fierce, billions-at-stake competition for a finite audience between the huge multinational entertainment conglomerates that provide them. It virtually guarantees LCD plots and a race to the bottom for shocking imagery.
I think what Evan's getting at is not that FPS video games or torture porn are going to turn people into mass murderers. A society saturated with violent imagery doesn't necessarily mean it's one in which people are actually killing each other left and right. But it can certainly have serious implications for how that society treats its own, how its citizens relate to each other, and how it conducts itself abroad.
For instance, it's very instructive to go back and read how American public opinion of the 1930s regarded the use of aerial bombing against civilian targets with near-universal abhorrence. Not quite so much, now, huh?
prof fate |old will didn' have to dish out too much blood...for jsut mindless violenjce yo could go to the public execution or public tourcher..hours of fun.
you want to start to understand why kids kill....dismiss media and entertainment its irrelivant. look at bullyign, look at how we handle mental health. I am willign to bet that in every spre shootign (school or otherwise) the shooter had a history of mental health issues (depresion or bipolar most likely) and was bullied. Its got nothing to do with viedio games, or rock music, or jaza, or that devil music that kid motzart is puttign out....that is all jsut straw men to keep our eyes off the real issues.
I was a geek in school...i could realy understand where the columbine kids where comeign from, had i not had outlets for my agression, had my brain been wired a little different I could have walked that same path. and yet here we go again with another round of "experts" tryign to take one of those outlets away from the next generation.
prof fate:Seeing the anonymous, soulless bad guy is one thing, it's a completely different thing when that anonymous, soulless, bad guy sits next to you every day, and the reason he's like that is because he might not dress hipply or he goes to the wrong church (or none at all), or plays D&D on the weekend. Truthfully, it's apples and oranges. These bullied kids are taught from ALL levels usually that they have no value. And if they have no value, then neither does anybody else.
THAT'S the part that needs to be changed. All levels? That's the other thing that's commonly misconstrued about this. Bullies are not always like Nelson Muntz. Infact, in my experience, that's the exception to the rule. The rule is that bullies are people on top of the food chain, usually athletically, academically and socially, and it's this power that they get addicted to and use to bully kids. But because they're at the top of the food chain...the models, so to speak, school administrators often take their side in things, as they don't want to tear down their stars.
Thus, what starts as a small issue becomes something truly unbearable. When the entire structure of your existence tell you that you're a worthless maggot. How do you ignore that message?
Back when these sort of mass youth shootings really started to become common, back in the late 90's, I looked into them. And moonglum is right. In EVERY case, there was severe bullying and/or severe mental health issues going on.
Please note. Of late, these events have changed, away from bullying and towards a more pure mental illness type problem. There was a point where we thought there would be 2-3 events a MONTH, it was speeding up. And then it just slowed down. What happened?
I'll be blunt. A lot of these troubled youth were able to "self-medicate" and form their own communities online.
So as of right now, mental illness is the problem. And yes, violent media in the hands of the mentally ill is a bad idea. But instead of attacking a symptom...isn't it worth it to go for the cause? And to actually improve the state of mental health care for youth? And maybe remove some of the pressure in our society that youth are feeling before they are really emotionally equipped to handle it.
Whoa, hold on there, people!
Where did I say anything about banning games or censoring? Sure, that's one possible "solution", but I believe that particular cure would probably be worse than the disease.
Of course people need to be able to blow off steam. Jesu Christo, did you not bother to notice that I clearly stated I enjoy playing aerial combat sims? And I prefer the pre-Vietnam scenarios, where you have to get up close to your enemy and shoot them down. So I'm not trying to say my preferred video games are somehow morally superior to yours, ok?
I guess you didn't notice, moonglum, that in my first comment in this thread I took pains to point out that the same era that assigned an "X" rating to a Clockwork Orange also gave us plenty of mass murderers, both free-lance and government-approved.
As for public executions, though, I'm not sure how seeing a complete stranger die from a distance was necessarily more "real" to a child of a previous century than seeing an actor bite the dust on the tv or movie screen is for a child of the video age.
After all, the input comes from the same primary sense. There's only the intellectual awareness that one involves the actual taking of a human life to differentiate between the two. But if what we see doesn't affect us on deeper levels than our conscious mind, then not only have you just thrown out over a hundred years of psychiatric and marketing research, but you've also destroyed the entire rationale for most forms of visual art.
And a child of our era sees, what is it, something on the order of tens of thousands of simulated deaths by the time they've hit early adolescence?
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like arguing that there can be no effect (or if there is, it's not detrimental) from this state of affairs is the weaker proposition.
You're focusing on the question of whether all the simulated violence makes humans more violent, while I'm saying that high levels of exposure to simulated violence may -- I repeat, may -- affect a very few people directly. But it mostly expresses itself in attitudes and non-lethal patterns of behavior, a growing lack of empathy or even respect for human dignity, not to mention a fearful, isolated existence in a Social Darwinian nightmare.
I'm not advocating we make people into angels by banning everything more violent than the Teletubbies. Death and aggression are inescapable parts of our heritage. But looking at where we are, it seems plain as day we need to stop trivializing the one, and learn to channel the other more constructively.
prof fate, I don't think you can argue that the change in American attitudes towards aerial bombardment since the 1930s has anything to do with violent entertainment, at least not with a straight face.
I'm pleased that the conversation has gone on without me.
Pierce, I'll ask that you re-read my comment of 2.17 10:57 -- I'm not claiming that video games are different from any other media. This hysterical "he's talking about how awful violent video games are!" thing is really interesting. I'm wondering if the over-reaction is some sort of acknowledgment that there's something extra scary about the participative nature of video games?
However, to be clear once more: I'm talking about violent media in general, not violent video games specifically. So far. .
Bollox Ref has an excellent point, and one I'll be talking about: the lack of consequence for violent actions in media. That's part of the lack of proper contextualization that contributes largely to the desensitization of watchers/participants. If violence is seen to be acceptable, to lack consequences or censure, if the perpetrators of violence lack remorse or receive praise for their actions, then the viewers (especially children) learn that aggressive behavior or even violent behavior is acceptable in our society. TV is an authority figure, and encouragement by an authority figure is a critical element in overcoming the innate resistant to same-species killing.
prof fate,
you're perceptive to discern the "upping the ante", and I'll discuss why when we talk about arousal.
moonglum,
the fact that people watched executions has everything to do with desensitization. Hangings were consequences and carried out with the authority of the state (generally) and thus have a less desensitizing effect than consequence-free violent imagery. The reality decreases distance and thus increases the effect, but the presence of consequence and authority diminish it.
thanks for commenting,
Evan: the focus of your original post was pretty clearly on video games; you bring up your professional history as a game designer; games are mentioned twice in the tags, while other media isn't mentioned at all; and you quote Col. Grossman, whose primary focus is on video game violence. You also called out first-person shooters as particularly problematic in your closing paragraph. Given the larger social context that criticism of media violence focuses primarily on video games, and not violent media in general, it is very hard to draw any other impression from your posting than that you meant to implicate video games in general, and first person shooter games specifically in school violence.
Plus, again, Grossman? Seriously?
From my post:
"Research on violent television and films, video games, and music reveals unequivocal evidence that media violence"
"Media violence produces short-term increases"
"meta-analysis of media violence was conducted by"
"indicates clearly that brief exposure to violent dramatic presentations on television or in films causes short-term increases"
"suggested that media violence has a delayed effect on aggression"
"correlation between childhood television viewing and a composite"
"playing a violent video game once or watching an episode of your favorite cop show"
"exposure to violent images might increase"
"Grossman's discipline of "killology" and models of how training and authority break down the innate resistance to killing will help explain how media violence and especially first person shooter video games condition watchers and players similar to the way boot camp indoctrinates soldiers. Finally, we'll talk about how and why media has changed over the last half-century to increase levels of conditioning, and what changes we can make to reduce the effects."
I may have missed one or two, but I think I count 13 references to non-video game (or composite aka "media violence") imagery as opposed to 3 references to video games.
How exactly is 13 to 3 prominently indicting video games?
As for the final paragraph, it specifically says how video games condition people like boot camp does, and I will back that up.
As for your dislike of Grossman, who's only major published work about media violence is a book about overall media violence which specifically mentions video games as training or enabling devices similar to military training (both subject which he is definitely qualified to judge and comment on), when you have content to judge him by rather than association I'd be happy to listen.
I've downloaded and read six or seven of the more prominent studies he cites in "Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill", and they say what he says they say (at least so far). I haven't checked them all. If you have information I don't about his reliability, feel free to present it.
Grossman is a former Ranger: he knows what military training looks like both from the outside and the inside. He has a degree in psychology and taught psychology at West Point. In other words, he is a qualified expert on the subject of military training and conditioning and the psychological state of soldiers. His research on psychological models of killing does not vary greatly from others I have read. He is a qualified source, in other words, and the fact that you don't like him doesn't change that.
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