Conditioned To Kill?

[Lonewulf]

If you understood, you would agree. That you don't agree indicates you can't, or won't allow yourself to, understand.

Wrong.

So in your fantasy world, do they have unicorns? I'd like to try some unicorn steak.

 

[rocketdodger]

What have you helped develop? Which company do you work for?

I work for Raven Software. I have only been here for just over a year and the games I have worked on so far aren't released yet. They are definitely mature rated, however

Some pretty mature games from Raven would be like quake 4 or soldier of fortune II.

 

[JonnyFive]

I work for Raven Software. I have only been here for just over a year and the games I have worked on so far aren't released yet. They are definitely mature rated, however

Some pretty mature games from Raven would be like quake 4 or soldier of fortune II.

That's a good developer to work for. You a programmer there?

 

[CplFerro]

What also hasn't occured to Ferro is that perhaps if more people had your sentiment and were already conditioned, fuelair, maybe shooting sprees wouldn't be shooting sprees -- bystanders might actively try to stop the shooter instead of cowering and waiting to be shot.

Dear rd,

Murder-sim conditioning has little to do with proper self-defense. The problem is that people are unarmed in these schools and other "gun free zones" that the shooters pick. Let the students, or the teachers, exercise their Second Amendment rights and shooters might think twice.

Your defense of the murder-sim development industry remains on shaky ground until you can admit that you are promoting pleasure-of-murder rather than designing games with abstract shapes being shot at, and from there delve into a proper analysis of how this kind of pleasure-of-murder relates to the human condition as described by Mr. LaRouche.

Cpl Ferro

 

[fuelair]

What also hasn't occured to Ferro is that perhaps if more people had your sentiment and were already conditioned, fuelair, maybe shooting sprees wouldn't be shooting sprees -- bystanders might actively try to stop the shooter instead of cowering and waiting to be shot.

That is pretty much it (I also don't want them to have a chance at suicide if that can be safely done.

 

[BenBurch]

Well, I know porn conditions me to... Well, you know. ;-)

 

[JonnyFive]

Murder-sim conditioning has little to do with proper self-defense. The problem is that people are unarmed in these schools and other "gun free zones" that the shooters pick. Let the students, or the teachers, exercise their Second Amendment rights and shooters might think twice.

Your defense of the murder-sim development industry remains on shaky ground until you can admit that you are promoting pleasure-of-murder rather than designing games with abstract shapes being shot at, and from there delve into a proper analysis of how this kind of pleasure-of-murder relates to the human condition as described by Mr. LaRouche.

Why are you still using rhetoric without evidence of any of your statements? Did I not ask you nicely enough?

 

[CplFerro]

Dear Jonny,

Oy shuludata!*

The fallacy of thinking lies with you, that you accept “statistical causality” in lieu of principled truth. I doubt you actually know anything at all, it’s just a landscape of probabilities within your mind. Useful, but immature.

My position is unassailable. It can be augmented and adjusted, but the principle is sound. A fanatic is one who knows nothing but places his faith in an idol of belief and refuses to relent regardless of principle. I am not a fanatic, I am a zealot. The difference is that zealots can be reasoned with. Begin reasoning properly, then, and you might find some basis for defending a modified version of your position that is compatible with principle, rather than against it.

Socrates in the basket, you know, Aristophanes’ Clouds play?

Until you grasp the ropes of Reason and haul Plato back down to Terra, you are lost in a statistical gambler’s jungle of logic. I ignore your appeals to statistics because they are unprincipled. You ignore my appeals to a broad view on political economy because they are principled. My insults are also true; only the truly immature fling untrue insults. Accept them with my best wishes, outside of all spite.

* Fremen for “He who stands and counts the Great Worm’s teeth”

Cpl Ferro

 

[rocketdodger]

That's a good developer to work for. You a programmer there?

Yes.

 

[JonnyFive]

The fallacy of thinking lies with you, that you accept “statistical causality” in lieu of principled truth.

So, basically, you're right because you say and believe you are right?

You were the one making claims about causality, not me. I'm not especially interested in what your principles are - I'm interested in whether or not what you say is actually, measurably, objectively true.

I doubt you actually know anything at all, it’s just a landscape of probabilities within your mind. Useful, but immature.

Again, if it makes you feel better to say such things, then go right ahead. I would, however, like to note that it doesn't make you any more right, or provide a shred of evidence for what you claim to be true.

My position is unassailable. It can be augmented and adjusted, but the principle is sound.

Your principle position is a falsifiable one (that violent video games, among other things, increase the potential for violence in society), therefore you should be able to collect evidence to support it. Without doing this, you have no ground to claim your position is based on truth.

A fanatic is one who knows nothing but places his faith in an idol of belief and refuses to relent regardless of principle. I am not a fanatic, I am a zealot.

You don't know what that word means, do you?

The difference is that zealots can be reasoned with. Begin reasoning properly, then, and you might find some basis for defending a modified version of your position that is compatible with principle, rather than against it.

Which definition of "zealot" are you using, because one of the main ones is "a fanatic."

You have stated that your position on this is unassailable and that it is based on truth. Ergo, you cannot be reasoned with because you have already made up your mind. That you might be willing to make small adjustments in your position is irrelevant - you have tacitly admitted you won't consider the possibility that you are simply wrong.

To be fair, though, I never called you a fanatic. I called you an ideologue.

ETA: Actually, technically, I said you were using the language of an ideologue. However, your recent statements back my implication up, so I'll upgrade it to "I called you an ideologue" from "I vaguely implied that you were an ideologue."

Socrates in the basket, you know, Aristophanes’ Clouds play?

No, I haven't read that particular play. Does it have some direct relevance to our discussion? (looking up some basic info about it, I'm guessing "no" is the answer)

Until you grasp the ropes of Reason and haul Plato back down to Terra, you are lost in a statistical gambler’s jungle of logic. I ignore your appeals to statistics because they are unprincipled.

I asked you to provide evidence for your statements. As you made claims that would be statistically measurable in crime/violence figures, it would be most direct and expedient for you to simply examine the available data.

If you can thing of a better way to provide objective comparison, go right ahead.

You ignore my appeals to a broad view on political economy because they are principled.

The only appeals you've been making are based on the unsupported statement that the media, primarily violent video games, are responsible for increasing the population's propensity towards violence. As you haven't yet bothered to support this position with anything but empty rhetoric, there really isn't anything to talk about.

You can try to couch this in terms of you being "principled" if you like, but you strike me more as "evasive."

My insults are also true; only the truly immature fling untrue insults. Accept them with my best wishes, outside of all spite.

Whether or not you believe your insults to be somehow true (they aren't, although "truth" is meaningless for most of your throw-out comments about typing cuds and what-not), that doesn't change the fact that you are trying to support your position by resorting to attacking me rather than actually trying to provide evidence to support your arguments directly.

 

[Lonewulf]

<Irrelevent bullspit snipped, and post summarized below>:

I'm right, you're wrong. Also, you're stupid. Listen to me talk randomly and unintelligibly about Plato and Socrates. So there.

CplFerro, your kind is worth nothing more than to be laughed at for all eternity.

 

[rocketdodger]

Your defense of the murder-sim development industry remains on shaky ground until you can admit that you are promoting pleasure-of-murder rather than designing games with abstract shapes being shot at, and from there delve into a proper analysis of how this kind of pleasure-of-murder relates to the human condition as described by Mr. LaRouche.

I will admit no such thing, because we are promoting no such thing.

We promote the pleasure of alternate experiences, not the pleasure of murder.

Only sick people derive pleasure from murder, even virtual murder. Most people are not sick. Therefore, most people do not derive pleasure from virtual murder.

We know this. That is why as an industry you will see very few, if any, examples of virtual murder. You may be confusing the killing of characters that look human with murder, but the two are very different in most cases -- so different, in fact, that many otherwise ethical people (like myself) enjoy it.

You can't murder something that was never alive. That automatically throws out all your examples from single player games. And in multiplayer games, when you kill the enemy, the actual person controlling them simply presses a button and gets to live again in the game world. In fact, every day I kill my coworkers and friends in a variety of games. Afterwards, we joke about it in the break room.

You might try to claim that the purposeful killing of fairly realistic innocent NPCs in many violent games is "virtual murder." I agree. So do most others who make games. That is why we are careful to either 1) penalize the player for doing so, 2) use plot devices that insure most NPCs the player encounters are in fact not innocent, or 3) make sure the A.I. behaves unrealistically enough to preclude any negative emotional response from killing them.

Everyone uses GTA as the black sheep. Fine. Many people enjoy doing nothing but killing civilians in GTA. Fine. How many of the A.I. do you see crying, screaming, pulling themselves along the pavement leaving a trail of blood while trying to escape to safety, begging with the player not to kill them because they have a family, or in general any of the things real people do? None. Why? Because no normal person would enjoy the game if every accidental grenade they threw at the police blew some poor civilians legs off and made them feel bad about it for the rest of the day -- and normal people would feel bad.

 

[Lonewulf]

Rocketdodger, have you ever heard of the game Messiah? In it, you play as an angelic little cherub that can possess people, and goes around killing people like that. It's a... weird deranged game, but oddly fun.

Anyways, in that game, if you possess a person's body and have them fall 50 feet+, you can have them break their legs. Then if you go outside of their body, they do nothing more than crawl around, whining out in agony. It's fairly disturbing after a while, but I have to admit, I took a bit of perverse joy in it after a while.

I'd still say that I know the difference between fantasy and reality.

 

[rocketdodger]

Anyways, in that game, if you possess a person's body and have them fall 50 feet+, you can have them break their legs. Then if you go outside of their body, they do nothing more than crawl around, whining out in agony. It's fairly disturbing after a while, but I have to admit, I took a bit of perverse joy in it after a while.

If you took joy in it, then either 1) it isn't realistic enough to make you emotional or 2) you are sick. Probably the former, although,... aren't you from Germany? You know how the South Park creators feel about Germany...

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

This post is on the topic of conditioning to kill, and whether computer games do this.

"Aha!" I hear some of you cry. "This belong in politics!"

No, indeed it does not. I'm not really interested in discussing whether guns should be banned or whatever, I'm interested in discussing the actual psychological process of killing.

The basis of my interest is the book On Killing by Lt Col Dave Grossman.

Grossman is a former US Army paratrooper and Ranger, and taught Psychology at West Point. He is currently Professor of Military Science at Arkansas State University.

In his book he establishes a number of key points:

1. Human beings have a basic biological resistance to killing other human beings, sort of like a safeguard.

2. Overcoming this safeguard requires enormous psychological stress, and killing another human results in serious psychological trauma.

3. Various factors influence the effectiveness of the safeguard such as proximity of the victim to the killer (physically, emotionally, and also in terms of the killing methodology), and proximity of authority to the killer (se: Milgram Experiment).

4. Evidence indicates that historically in warfare few combatants actively killed the enemy. In WW2, for example, an estimated 90% of soldiers in a given engagement would not fire at the enemy unless under direct supervision of an authority figure (officer).

5. Post WW2, Samuel Marshall, a chief US Army Official Historian, wrote the book Men Against Fire in which he claimed that humans naturally resisted killing others, and that otherwise healthy, alert, and courageous soldiers consistently failed to directly engage enemy forces in WW2 - often instead choosing to undertake other far more dangerous tasks such as rescuing wounded. He concluded that the US army needed to devote significant time to developing a training method to overcome this resistance.

6. As a result of this work the US Army developed new training methods. Key elements were:
A) - Human shaped targets
B) - Immediate feedback on a successful "kill" in the form of the target falling down
C) - Target behaviour characteristics such as moving targets, targets that appear suddenly, etc.
D) - High rates of repetition, with soldiers spending hours shooting at targets.

7. The result of these new training methods was that rates of fire amongst US forces rose to 98% by the Vietnam War.

8. The key elements of these conditioning methods are mimicked by the First Person Shooter genre of computer games.

Therefore, FPS computer games disable the biological resistance against killing.

Anyone else familiar with the book?

Thoughts?

-Gumboot

Hey man, that's so weird! I remember reading that same article on the internet. And I also remember that for some reason I had to leave and I promised to myself to go back to the article and I never found it again. Do you have the link? (I know it's a book but there seems to be a short version of it on the internet).

My opinion echoes much of what has been said here:

First of all, the human being is naturally agressive. We also have the ability to kill others and have done so for the entire course of history, with and without media. With and without video games.

On the other hand, there are the individual aspects: some people are more prone to kill than others. I, for example, am not a violent person at all. I have never even picked a fight. I reject confrontation. What I believe the Army does is try to standarize a reaction so that everyone is conditioned equally. The Army acknowledges that some of their soldiers are more prone to kill than others and that's precisely why, as any all of their forms of training, they aim toward the standarization of each and every individual so that everyone is equally capable of killing.

The video game issue is another delicate subject. You can't really claim that video games make people violent just because they're simulating the first-person-shoot mode. Again, my case: I have played these games since my early teenagehood. I've never been capable of even hitting someone, though. Let alone shooting at someone. I don't even know how to handle a gun and I'm kind of freaked out by the idea of how much noise it will make and how it might jump of my hand when I pull the trigger. In other words: I couldn't be more resistant to the idea of shooting at someone.

If anything, video games and agressive movies work as an outlet for the inner lower passions that we usually don't want us to take over in social life.

 

[jimbob]

A couple of other asides:

Has anyone else read "Chimpanzee Politics" by Frans de Waal? In this and later books, he details how (male) chimps "hunt" individual chimps from neighbouring bands, and kill them, and also how they do also kill each other within their troop. He said one was a proto-war, and the other proro-murder, anddescribed distinguishing features of both types of killing.

Regarding the earler poster who said that sniper trainers preferred peple to be hunters, John Keegan pointed out that many of the most successful "warrior" culturse" were pastoralists, compared to agrarian farmers or hunter-gatherers. His contention was that rounding up and caring for animals, and also killing them provided good training in the techniques of killing, and also the emotional toughness, if one could regard the enemy as almost cattle. He specifically mantioned the Mongols.

The Spartans provided an effective conditioning regime, not pleasent and undoubtedly effective at producing killers, as the training involved killing any helots that even seemed to pose a potential threat. I read (in Tom Holland's book "Persian Fire" that other Greek states thought that the Spartans weren't quite "playing cricket" as they approached war "professionally".

Closer to the present, the "Lord's Resistance Army" in Uganda uses similar techniques, by forcing its (captured) child soldiers to take part in atrocoties, which is again reducing the barrier to killing.

 

[Lonewulf]

If you took joy in it, then either 1) it isn't realistic enough to make you emotional or 2) you are sick.

Or 3) Your theory is flawed.

I'm glad you have me all figured out, though. Can you please join Psychiatry with your incredible expertise, plz? If you can make an accurate diagnosis with so little information, then you'd obviously be the Sherlock Holmes of psychiatry!

Probably the former, although,... aren't you from Germany?

No, I'm from the U.S. I live in Germany currently, but I am a U.S. citizen. I was born in Germany while my mom was visiting, and I currently live here because my mom's visiting again, thanks to the U.S. Government.

 

[rocketdodger]

Or 3) Your theory is flawed.

I'm glad you have me all figured out, though. Can you please join Psychiatry with your incredible expertise, plz? If you can make an accurate diagnosis with so little information, then you'd obviously be the Sherlock Holmes of psychiatry!

Umm, no, because those two options cover everything...

Suppose that I am wrong and you do get an emotional response from killing the A.I. characters. Then either it is a positive or negative response. If it is positive, then you are sick for getting a positive response to suffering. If it is negative, then you are sick for putting yourself through that over and over when all you have to do is avoid it.

Therefore, if you get a response, then you are sick for continuing the behavior. Therefore, either you do not get a response or you are sick.

You can dispute my definition of "sick" (although I don't think many normal people would), but I don't think you can successfully challenge my logic.

 

[Lonewulf]

Uh huh, I see.

Glad you're the master, then.

I'll just log off and let you sane people get back to talking, m'kay? 'Bye.