Video Game Rape Fest

[Halfcentaur]

I don't think video games are responsible in any factor for pushing a person who would normally not have killed another person into taking a life.

I do think media coverage and the public's reaction to Columbine has however created a style of killing that appeals to the kind of people who are prone to this behavior.

Every school in the country freaked out and shoved our faces in it for months in the 90s, causing students to not even be able to go to the bathroom even in small and isolated communities around the nation, expelling children for drawing a machine gun, all over reacting in an effort to avoid a repeat of Columbine, this sort of act was made into a legend of mythical proportions and it spawned a cultural phenomenon in a way of copy cats. The "rampage" has become a mental alternative we all consider now as a possible outcome to life going downhill. Most of us however have a voice in our head that discourages acting on these impulses.

The reaction to Columbine legitimized the rampage and made it into a viable alternative of action to a depraved mind. I think making a connection to video games as a factor contributing to the increase in violence among youth is a mistake. Kids have this stuff shoved in their faces constantly at school now, it's been made into everyone's worst fear outside of a terrorist attack. It's been made into the bogeyman.

 

[gumboot]

I think the hundreds of millions of soldiers who have died in wars over the centuries may disagree with you on that point.

I don't really want to be reprinting an entire body of work you could read for your self, but basically no.

Here's Grossman's introduction on this exact point:

One of my early concerns in writing On Killing was that World War II veterans might take offense at a book demonstrating that the vast majority of combat veterans of their era would not kill. Happily, my concerns were unfounded. Not one individual from among the thousands who have read On Killing has disputed this finding.
Indeed, the reaction from World War II veterans has been one of consistent confirmation. For example, R.C. Anderson, a World War II Canadian artillery forward observer, wrote to say the following:

I can confirm many infantrymen never fired their weapons. I used to kid them that we fired a hell of a lot more 25-pounder [artillery] shells than they did rifle bullets.

Grossman, D. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Paperback Edition, pg. xiv

Historically warfare resulted in very few direct face-to-face combat casualties, with casualties overwhelmingly caused by a select few mechanisms that worked around the resistance to killing (such as crewed-weapons and long-range weapons).

Grossman goes on to point out:

In Marshall's case, every available parallel scholarly study replicates his basic findings. Ardant du Picq's surveys and observations of the ancients, Holmes' and Keegan's numerous accounts of ineffectual firing, Holmes' assessment of Argentine firing rates in the Falklands War, Griffith's data on the extraordinarily low killing rates among Napoleonic and American Civil War regiments, the British Army's laser reenactments of historical battles, the FBI's studies of nonfiring rates among law-enforcement officers in the 1950s and 1960s, and countless other individual and anecdotal observations all confirm Marshall's conclusions that the vast majority of combatants throughout history, at the moment of truth when they could and should kill the enemy, have found themselves to be "conscientious objectors."

...

High firing rates resulting from modern training / conditioning techniques can also be seen in Holmes's observations of British firing rates in the Falklands and in FBI data on law-enforcement firing rates since the introduction of modern training techniques in the late 1960s. And initial reports from researchers using formal and informal surveys to replicate Marshall's and Glenn's findings all indicate universal concurrence.

pg. xv-xvi

Remembering that 'remote killing' is a relatively new concept in warfare as opposed to hand to hand combat.

Not really. Crew-manned artillery has existed for thousands of years, as has massed archery as a weapon.

Some soldiers would be more accurate. And those soldiers would most likely still be fine with playing video game shoot em ups.

Accuracy isn't the issue here.

Nonsense. To say that soldiers wouldn't shoot each other is to make a mockery of all those who died in both WWs and countless millions before that in other wars.

It's not a mockery. It's a fact, supported by a myriad of evidence. During WW2, when presented with the enemy, 80-85% of rifleman would not fire their weapons. That's a fact. During Blackpowder battlefields the death rates and patterns of killing are impossible unless the majority of soldiers were not firing at the enemy when they could. That again, is a fact.

And it's inaccuracies like this

Just because you're ignorant of it doesn't make it untrue.

and the other one that video games desensitise people toward real world violence (unevidenced) that leave people doubting your theory.

Here's just one study from the Journal of Adolescence which found violence in video games desensitised players to violence.

Here's an article in Science Daily which refers to another study.

Research led by a pair of Iowa State University psychologists has proven for the first time that exposure to violent video games can desensitize individuals to real-life violence.

As for "doubting my theory", the evidence thus far I've gathered seems to suggest most people here aren't even actually reading what I'm writing, but are filling in with their own strawman arguments.

The number of times "desensitisation" has been conflated with "conditioning" despite my repeated clear reminders that they're two totally separate issues is just frankly staggering.

Nowhere, have I said that conditioning desensitises people. Nowhere have I said that conditioning causes increased violence. And yet time and time again, that's exactly the counter argument that has been thrown up.

It's almost like people are doing it deliberately.

 

[Aepervius]

"Pro-gamers refuse to even contemplate the notion that violent content might desensitise them to violence"

Gumbot, Grossman, and you IMHO mistake violence in video game and think it desensitise because it remotely resemble military training (shooting a human form). Well fine then do a study and demonstrate it. So far as I can see no study really showed such desentivitasation, all they showed at best is that if you take children , they get very excited while playing violent video game and immediately after but much less if they play a little poney simulator. But none demonstrated long term effect whatsoever (none demonstrated that there weren't any).

Until something is shown to exists, I will give "pro" gamer the nod. After all the freaking argument about violence was given by the same insane family based group on comic book, film, song, game, internet game / porn. Sure they could be right like a broken clock , 1 time a day, but then show us the evidence, and not the "my gut feeling is that it is right because you are shooting a target" type of evidence.

 

[Aepervius]

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother.

Because he has a point. Among the desentivitated person there will be peopol borderline which would maybe not snap if it was not for the desentivitation to violence.

We don't see an increase of "going postal" people.

Why not ?

 

[gumboot]

I am kind of curious where Grossman gets his data, and how accurate it is.

The basic theory is primarily derived from studies about firing behaviour of soldiers in combat from numerous studies from blackpowder era to the modern day, plus parallel law enforcement studies conducted by the FBI.

As was mentioned earlier by someone who had actually been in the military, the system Grossman describes is not used...

Not really. They claimed the system had a different purpose to what Grossman claims. Since Grossman himself was in the military and taught combat psychology to US Army officers and has subsequently devoted time to studying the specific topic, I don't think you can dismiss his theories because one soldier thinks the system serves a different purpose.

As for this list,
1, this I can agree with, it's an evolutionary thing, good for the species, it makes sense.

Yup.

2, this I'm less sure of. You take a reasonably happy person in a normal environment, put them in front of a serial killer and give them a gun, telling them to kill them, then yeah, you are not going to get very many people who would do it, but you will get some.

Well hang on, you're getting into different territory here. The whole dynamic is pretty complex, and the proximity to an authority figure has a big influence on overcoming the resistance, as demonstrated by the Milgram experiment. Marshall's surveys from WW2 indicated that most soldiers would fire when under the direct coercion of an authority figure.

Put those same people into a stressful environment, where their life was in danger, one where killing was necessary to stay alive, and the number of people willing to pull the trigger is going to go up significantly. While true many people still would have a hard time of it, a lot of people would still be able to, which brings us to,

Except the research on people who actually were in stressful environments, whose life was in danger, and where killing was deemed necessary to stay alive (i.e. soldiers and law enforcement) says otherwise.

3. WWII, and Vietnam, were wars filled with draftees. This means you get about the same mix of people who could pull the trigger vs couldn't as you would in the general public, so naturally you are going to get a lot of people who have difficulty killing, especially when most of those soldiers are still practically kids.

Except that this isn't the case. Between WW2 and Vietnam the US Army introduced conditioning techniques and the rates of firing increased dramatically. Both draft armies. Dramatically different firing rates.

This is certainly an issue with a draft based army, however, between WWII and now things have changed. With a volunteer army comes the fact that people who actively decide to join the army are people who have made a conscious decision to be willing to die, and or kill, for their country, thus the number of people in the armed forces who are also willing to pull the trigger is going to be very high.

The FBI found similar rates of non-firing amongst law enforcement officers, who are all volunteers. Similar rates are found in WW2 amongst both volunteer and drafted units.

Further, countries such as Israel and many European countries, which maintain some form of conscription, still see the improved firing rates due to new training techniques. Finally, most nations during WWI only introduced conscription part way through the war, but there was no subsequent change in the lethality of units, again indicating that whether the soldier wants to be there or not has little bearing on their willingness to fire at the enemy.

Depending on when and where Grossman got his numbers to support point 6

From numerous studies of combat firing rates amongst soldiers and law enforcement personnel since new training techniques have been introduced. Including the Vietnam War, FBI studies, studies of the British in the Falklands, etc.

this could have very much skewed the results, regardless of any program the army may have put in place, and given a very large false positive, rendering the claim that the program was highly effective baseless.

Not sure how you think these independent and unrelated studies could have all found the very same very large false positive.

That some games mimic this system is meaningless, as the system may not actually even work

Sure. But the studies conducted on this matter indicate the system does work. So...

and even then, shooting a gun in a game in no way can compare or prepare you to fire a gun in real life.

Why not?

There is no reason to assume that killing in a game and killing in real life is any different.

Huh?

To try another analog, I've probably landed a 747 hundreds of times in flight sim X (with a nice saitec setup too ), but I've never flown anything for real. I can assure you, if we were on a 747, and lost the pilot and co-pilot, we'd be in much better hands with the guy who doesn't have a clue what the cockpit of a 747 looks like, but has been flying Cessnas for years, than we would be with me, who know's what all those buttons do, and how to operate the computer, but have never touched a real control stick in my life.

I'm not sure why you think this is a relevant comparison. We're not talking about technical or mechanical proficiency. We're talking about psychological conditioning.

Are you suggesting that humans have a natural resistance to landing aircraft, and require psychological conditioning before they can do it?


ETA. Incidentally, while it's true you might prefer a Cessna pilot to do it, actual tests and studies conducted in relation to 9/11 (and indeed the event of 9/11 itself) indicates your concerns are probably unfounded, and in fact all pilots, obviously, learn how to land a given commercial aircraft in a flight simulator and not in an actual aircraft. What you'd be crucially missing, as a gamer, is an understanding of aerodynamics theory (and even then not necessarily - I understand it quite well and I've not played a flight simulator game since I was about 12).

In the same way, a gamer won't have learned fire-and-maneuver, radio communication, the general physical fitness, and a host of other vital skill-sets that make a combat soldier what they are (well, they might have picked some of them up, depends on the games they play). But what's really critical to grasp and understand here is that all of that - all of the knowledge and expertise and mechanical proficiency with weapons and fitness and familiarity with the equipment and spacial awareness and all of that, is totally separate from the ability to kill. And I do mean totally separate.

Blackpowder battlefield soldiers were drilled to the point where they could literally perform musket drill blindfolded. Some could produce firing rates at drill as high as six rounds a minute or more, which given the number of actions required, is phenomenally fast. Drilled to perfection. At 75 yards separation, the expected hit rate by soldiers using smooth-bore muskets on a 100ft x 6ft target was 60%. Based on these firing rates, if blackpowder regiments actually fired at the enemy, units would have been annihilated in a matter of minutes. A 200-man regiment at 75 yard should be able to kill or wound almost 500 men per minute. And yet reenactment of blackpowder battlefields consistently fine kill rates of 2 or 3 men per minute. There are endless documented cases of regiments engaging each other at 50yards separation for hours on end, until they exhausted their ammunition. Why? Because the soldiers would not fire. A small percentage of people would fire (about 2% of people don't naturally have this resistance to killing), and everyone else would either a) fire away from the enemy b) go through the entire drill process but skip pulling the trigger or c) engage in support activities such as loading for those who were firing, recovering wounded, etc.

At the Battle of Cold Harbor on 3 June 1864, Union soldiers held their positions (anywhere from 200 yards to as close as 40 yards from the enemy) for eight hours being slowly cut to pieces by Confederate artillery. For eight hours they maintained discipline and displayed phenomenal bravery in holding the line, just as they'd been trained to do, digging makeshift trenches on open ground. For eight hours they went through their musket drill. And for eight hours they failed to kill the enemy. Seven thousand Union soldiers died in those forward positions, almost exclusively from artillery. Confederate casualties were negligible.

Why?

Because there is a resistance to killing that functions independently to combat skill and weapons proficiency and courage and motivation, and justification, and only a very specific system of conditioning can disable it.

 

[gumboot]

"Pro-gamers refuse to even contemplate the notion that violent content might desensitise them to violence"

Who are you quoting?

Gumbot, Grossman, and you IMHO mistake violence in video game and think it desensitise because it remotely resemble military training (shooting a human form).

Wrong. Desensitisation != Conditioning.

Well fine then do a study and demonstrate it.

Prove a strawman argument that you've invented instead of actually addressing the actual argument? Ah, no.

So far as I can see no study really showed such desentivitasation, all they showed at best is that if you take children , they get very excited while playing violent video game and immediately after but much less if they play a little poney simulator. But none demonstrated long term effect whatsoever (none demonstrated that there weren't any).

Feel free to look into the two studies on desensitisation I've referenced. But please stop conflating conditioning and desensitisation.

Until something is shown to exists, I will give "pro" gamer the nod. After all the freaking argument about violence was given by the same insane family based group on comic book, film, song, game, internet game / porn. Sure they could be right like a broken clock , 1 time a day, but then show us the evidence, and not the "my gut feeling is that it is right because you are shooting a target" type of evidence.

Huh?

 

[gumboot]

I think the major problem with the argument that video games teach any kind of skill that would make someone a better soldier , is that the skills are not transferable.

Okay. But no one has made that argument so... your point?

Every time a new version of the game unreal comes out, i am absolutely ecstatic, and within a few weeks i am hanging out in the top 10-30 rankings. I've been playing the game since i was a kid, and have made it a goal to be as proficiant as possible.

Okay.

Within the realm of the game, i can identify a target, aim, and fire with any weaponry available, and connect, with a nearly 100% success rate ( assuming i am using a single shot weapon, weapons designed fire rapidly are obviously not intended to land every single shot. ). But the problem is , i am not doing this using any skills that would translate in real life.

Yup.

The target aquisition is done using the fact that i know the shape, size and color of all character models. Letting me almost instantly recognize friend from foe. In the real world there aren't 32, or so kinds of people. And they arn't as differentiated as the characters in the game. So my target acquisition skills, are practically useless.

I'm not sure what you're saying.

Aiming , also is not a skill that translates at all. I aim by understanding that by moving my thumb X distance will produce movement of about X degrees in a certain direction. A far cry from having to maneuver a real weapon deal with the possibility of hitting a wall, or having the weapon snag on ones clothing or any of the other minutia of weapon handling. Not to mention the recoil factor.

Ah... okay.

Movement is even worse, i am in pretty good shape, but i have no where near the coordination required to jump 5 feet in the air, kick myself off of a wall, all while carrying a weapon and some kind of armor.

Right...? Sorry, what does this have to do with anything at all?

Playing the game has given me some skills, and mostly the likes that can be translated into other games. But what we can show is that in regards to combat, even someone who prides themselves on being within the top percent or so of players, has no real advantage from playing a game in which killing is encouraged and predominant.

If anyone was talking about combat proficiency you might have a point. But no one is, so you don't.

Desensitization is a skill in combat, just like aiming , moving, etc.

No it isn't. Desensitisation is a process by which psychological responses are suppressed.

And we can show that the other skills from a video game do not transfer into similar situations in real life. The evidence weighs heavily against desensitization being the one thing that suddenly transfers from games to the real world.

wow. That just doesn't even make sense. At all.

Just like how i do not have to worry about fumbling my rocket launcher in a game of unreal, i don't have to worry about a character model suddenly begging me for mercy, and even if i did ( which is a feature in a few games.), it is a collection of data. There is no long term effect at all, either to said data, or to my mental state ( thinking about the fact that i ended someone's life.) in regards to killing it. Unfortunately in real life, it is quite a bit different.

Yeah but the computer game isn't being compared to actual combat. It's being compared to training for combat. People being trained for combat don't actually kill people either. They don't even have to deal with fake blood or fake exploding limbs let alone their targets (which often don't even have faces) talking to them. People being trained for actual combat even use computer games.

 

[gumboot]

Because he has a point.

They don't have a point. They have totally misrepresented my argument and then knocked down a strawman that I haven't actually presented.

The common argument against the conditioning theory has consistently been:

"If it were true there should be way more violence and there isn't so it can't be true"

That shows a total lack of understanding about the theory. Maybe I've not been clear enough, but I really don't know how I could make it any simpler. What is so complicated and difficult to grasp about:

Conditioning is different from desensitisation
Conditioning does not cause desensitisation

Do I need to draw a diagram or something?

 

[Irony]

Yes, school shootings are rare, but the rate of school shootings has increased dramatically since the mid 1990s. Last year alone there were eleven school shootings in the USA. Now, granted, that's not many. But that's more than there were in two decades from 1966.

Here's a nice little chart of US school homicides. See if you can spot the "dramatic increase".

http://youthviolence.edschool.virginia.edu/violence-in-schools/school-shootings.html

Note that the "increase from the mid 90's" only lasted until 1998, which was still lower than the early 90's.

And this is not just an American problem. While considerably less common outside the USA, the rate of school shootings is increasing elsewhere as well.

I'm not really aware of the situation outside the US, so I won't comment.

That's not the end of it though. The average age of a murderer in the USA has been continually dropping since the 1970s (from 30 in 1976 to 26 in 1994), despite an increasingly aging population.

Meanwhile the average age of a gamer is over 30.

Today, the largest single age range for murderers is 18-24, with the second and third most common being 14-17 and 25-34. Yet at the same time violent crime rates are dropping. Young people aren't becoming generally more violent. But they're increasingly becoming killers.

Again, misleading. Juveniles commit fewer violent crimes now than in the past few decades. Juveniles commit a larger percentage of crimes only because the number of crimes being committed by adults is declining faster. I wasn't able to find murder specifically (admittedly I didn't look that hard), but here's a chart of violent crimes by age.

http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/offage.cfm (The dip in 2006 is due to missing data, not a miraculous year without crime)

Note, again, the complete lack of evidence for this horrible epidemic of youth violence.

 

[Andrew Wiggin]

Maybe we should look at suicide clusters; the reason that all those homicidal gamers with no control over their urge to kill aren't actually going on rampages is that they're too busy trying to transfer their rocket-jumping skills to the real world.

Seriously, where are the soldiers coming home from war and going on killing sprees? If video games desensitize people a little bit, slightly shutting of the barriers they have about killing, and the training soldiers get is supposedly the uncut freebase of violence training, there certainly is no shortage of soldiers. If video games make kids kill their highschool population, why doesn't the supposed military training, which actual military-trained folks have said doesn't exist, by the way, make soldiers kill everyone in the shopping mall the second a car backfires in the distance? It's not lack of access to weapons; that doesn't stop the hypothetical high school gamer, so it won't stop the adult.

 

[Irony]

Maybe we should look at suicide clusters; the reason that all those homicidal gamers with no control over their urge to kill aren't actually going on rampages is that they're too busy trying to transfer their rocket-jumping skills to the real world.

I think the reason is that none of these game-crazed homicidal maniacs have worked out whether they're supposed to load their guns by pressing the shoulder button, hitting the "R" key, or shooting off screen.

 

[Andrew Wiggin]

I think the reason is that none of these game-crazed homicidal maniacs have worked out whether they're supposed to load their guns by pressing the shoulder button, hitting the "R" key, or shooting off screen.

Me, I'd be looking around for a floating glowy ammobox to run over. That always does the trick. Even if I didn't have an ammo counter floating in my field of vision somewhere I'd know I was all out of ammo when the gun I was holding suddely vanished and my gauntlet somehow appeared on my hand. It's just that tied in with reality. Or not.

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

Violent games desensitize me towards killing computer animated non-living things. I find that I care less and less about these non-living, fictional entities.

Haven't even come close to murdering the first living thing in my 29 years of life, though. I still care towards living things. For some reason, I haven't all of a sudden gone on killing sprees whenever I lose my temper.

Hmm... odd. I wonder what explanation could there possibly be for that.

 

[Corsair 115]

An interesting question might be this: if many American soldiers never fired a shot at enemy soldiers during WWII, as Grossman's book claims (if I'm understanding it correctly), did many American fighter pilots similarly not shoot at enemy fighters or enemy ground personnel? Was there any difference in the rate of willingness to fire upon an enemy between the ground troops and the aerial combatants?

What about more elite units during WWII? Did they exhibit any of these supposed difficulties in firing upon the enemy? Did the 1st Special Service Force or the 101st Airborne have significant numbers of its members not fire their weapons at the enemy? If not, why?

 

[Andrew Wiggin]

Violent games desensitize me towards killing computer animated non-living things. I find that I care less and less about these non-living, fictional entities.

Haven't even come close to murdering the first living thing in my 29 years of life, though. I still care towards living things. For some reason, I haven't all of a sudden gone on killing sprees whenever I lose my temper.

Hmm... odd. I wonder what explanation could there possibly be for that.

The homicidal rages must still be dormant. We all know they're in there; you've been infected by the eeeeeeevil video games.

The closest I've ever come to letting a video game control anything I did in real life was that I briefly flinched once, because I worked in a building at the time that had a section that looked an awful lot like one of the levels in half life. Whatever school of architecture that thinks that exposed utilities are OK if only you paint them bright, cheerful contrasty colors. I remember that I'd spend a good chunk of the night working my way through the level, thinking at the time that it looked awfully familiar, and I was a bit sleep deprived. I was walking down the hallway, looked up at one of the overhead ducts and had a full body twitch. I remember clearly thinking 'there's a head crab on top of that duct', then realizing how silly it was to think that. There was a rather large 'dust bunny' up there though...

 

[Corsair 115]

Hey, you think violent video games distort behaviour, what about Portal? I keep looking around and wanting to shoot a hole in the wall and then fall out of the ceiling!

 

[Andrew Wiggin]

Hey, you think violent video games distort behaviour, what about Portal? I keep looking around and wanting to shoot a hole in the wall and then fall out of the ceiling!

There's rule 34 on portal too. I wouldn't have ever thought there would be, but rule 34 is universal.

 

[fullflavormenthol]

Look, it's cartoonized violence. No matter what they show in Video games, even if its dismemberment, its still a rendered violence that wholly is unreal.

I got into this a lot when dealing with mass communication study. While I have read Grossman I believe he fails to address this, and it presents a problem with his work. Which you will begin to address with the next point...

If a person cannot tell the difference between fake and realism, then they already suffer from social and personal issues that has nothing to do with the video game

This approaches the reason why we do not see a rise in the type of murders seen in movies like Saw, and Hostel. Most people have the ability to play through, read, listen or watch fake scenarios without the desire to act them out. The problem is that some people will engage in such behavior regardless, and will gravitate to such media because of an existing predisposition; no causation has ever been shown. All we know is that if you love the idea of killing people you will love media that deals with killing. It has more to do with the reaction people have to that media. Honestly I have been playing violent mature games for almost a decade and haven't murdered yet. I also watched Terminator, First Blood, etc as a child and haven't murdered; hell I am anti-war so that calls into question ideas of desensitization. Anecdotal as it may be it does make me question such ideas as seeing violence makes one violent.

My biggest concern about television and children has always been the effect on brain development, but that is limited to infants and toddlers...not teens.

Parents in the END have total control over what their children play at home.

Exactly. Parents can make the best choice, and some teens are mature enough to play a certain type of game. I was allowed to watch movies like the Crow and Pulp Fiction when I was a teenager and nothing bad came of it. I would respect the parents decision at that point. Personally I feel that a parent has the responsibility to control what their children see, and not work to change the market in such a way as to prevent adults from accessing content.

Then again I hate children, and feel that I am forced to bow to their whims by parents who feel like I should sacrifice my comfort and free expression so little junior can go out with mom and dad to a sports bar or wander around a store free from my adult conversation.

The Game Console manufacturers have the tools in place for parents to stop their kids from playing objectionable material (and if you didn't buy you kids those games in the first place, YOU wouldn't have to use those controls).

Very true. I should not have to pay for the failure of a parent not reading and learning the material. It is a simple thing to program a game system to reject a M rated game or a cable box or TV to not play certain content. It is an entitlement mindset of lazy parents wanting me to me to give up my freedoms so their children don't have to deal with things because they don't want to take the time to actually care and be a parent.

The ESRB has done all it can do to educate parents about ratings, where to get information, work with the publishers and 1st party to make sure their games are adequately rated.

And don't kid yourself to think that if video games are regulated by the government that movies and music won't be. Once the genie is out of the bottle it will be a pain to find anything beyond the Disney Princess and family movies. Entertainment companies will not make media that is going to face so many legal loopholes. I dare say many of the organizations pushing for video game legislation would love nothing more than to prevent people from access to materials that they consider objectionable.

If parents aren't willing to learn, then what more can be done?

I dare say that they have given up on actually raising their own children and expect the greater society to do it for them. Personally I refuse and hope other adults do so as well.

Not make these types of games anymore because some people just want to remain ignorant?

I think it is more a matter of individuals and organizations simply not wanting this type of media to exist at all. Honestly many I argue with on this subject eventually settle on the idea that no one should play violent video games and "for the children" is just a means to an end.

 

[soylent]

Japan is among the lowest rapes per capita in the world, among other sexual crimes. Among a lot of other factoids related, the relevant one is instead of making prolific games with vague references to sex, they simply make hundreds of games about rape and being a rapist.

I don't think this author/psychologist tried very hard.

This is exactly why I'm tentatively opposed to outlawing of purely fictional depiction of any sex act, include pedophilia and other creepiness.

 

[gumboot]

Here's a nice little chart of US school homicides. See if you can spot the "dramatic increase".

http://youthviolence.edschool.virginia.edu/violence-in-schools/school-shootings.html

Note that the "increase from the mid 90's" only lasted until 1998, which was still lower than the early 90's.

That's not a particularly useful little graph. I note it lists 1 homicide for 2009.

here's a more comprehensive list.

According to this list, in 2009 there were 37 shootings incidents at schools in the USA in 2009. Of those, I've eliminated 19 in which the shooter was not a student, or the shooting was suicide only (although in one instance there's clear evidence the shooter intended to kill others), or in which the shooting was accidental, and one instance in which the firearm was discharged as a "warning shot".

That leaves 18 instances in 2009.

In total, twelve victims were wounded, four people were murdered, two gunmen subsequently killed themselves, one gunman survived their attempted suicide, and one gunman was shot and wounded by police (for a total of six dead and 14 wounded). In all instances except one (the police shooting) the gunman fired at at least one other person in an apparent effort to kill them, and in 13 instances they hit at least one person.

In two instances the age of the shooter was unknown. In three instances the gunmen were adult students (20, 28 and 35), in the remaining 15 instances the mean age of the gunman was 16 and a half and the median age was 16. All shooters were male. The youngest was 14 and the oldest 18.

I'm not really aware of the situation outside the US, so I won't comment.

You don't seem particularly aware of the situation inside the USA either.

Meanwhile the average age of a gamer is over 30.

I'm not sure what the significance of this is.

Again, misleading. Juveniles commit fewer violent crimes now than in the past few decades. Juveniles commit a larger percentage of crimes only because the number of crimes being committed by adults is declining faster. I wasn't able to find murder specifically (admittedly I didn't look that hard), but here's a chart of violent crimes by age.

http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/offage.cfm (The dip in 2006 is due to missing data, not a miraculous year without crime)

Note, again, the complete lack of evidence for this horrible epidemic of youth violence.

I think you missed the point. Grossman's kill conditioning argument makes a clear distinction between the psychology of killing, and the psychology of violence. I know that might be hard to grasp, because killing is an inherently violent act, but the normal response to inter-human conflict is the dominate-submit response in which one seeks to establish themself as the stronger, tougher, superior individual.

That can lead to violence and injury and even accidental death quite easily, but it's distinctly separate from murder where the intention is to kill, which is not a normal inter-human response.

Therefore, in order to assess the validity of Grossman's conditioning argument, you're better off looking at the average age of murderers, not those committing violent crime in general.

(As a side note, Grossman (and most other anti-game types) makes a separate desensitisation argument which is unrelated to the conditioning argument, and which I feel isn't as compelling. General violent crime rates could legitimately be used to assess the validity of that argument)

If youth are less violent in general, yet are simultaneously killing more often, that indicates they're being conditioned to kill, based on Grossman's theory.

Now, it's not a complete picture. I've read quite a few arguments that while the USA's murder rate has levelled out from much higher historic levels, the reason for this is primarily due to improved medical treatment - in other words more victims are surviving. Some have argued the murder rate, based on earlier medical technology.

For example this 2002 study concluded:

In the research he and a team from Massachusetts University and Harvard Medical School found that technological developments had helped to significantly depress today's murder rates, converting homicides into aggravated assaults.

“Without this technology, we estimate there would be no less than 50 000 and as many as 115000 homicides annually instead of an actual 15 000 to 20000,” they say in a report of the study in the journal Homicide Studies (2002;6:128-66).

To illustrate, since 1999 the US homicide rate has sat fairly constant around the 5.5 mark.

If this study's estimates are correct, absent the life-saving medical technology, the US homicide rate in 2002 would have been at least 17 - putting it neatly between Mexico and the Congo. If their higher figure were accurate, the homicide rate in the US would be 34 which would almost put the USA in the top ten.

What that means is to get an accurate picture you'd probably need to do a comprehensive analysis of attempted murder statistics as well. Even that's probably not going to be ideal because a lot of attempted murders would probably end up being put down as non-murder homicides or assaults for various reasons.

Anyway, I haven't been able to go very far with that angle because there doesn't seem to be much in the way of detailed US crime statistics online, and attempted murder seems to get lumped in with assault statistics.

My country has very comprehensive and detailed statistics available online, but it's not particularly helpful because it's such a small sample size (there were only 122 reported homicides of all types in NZ in the last fiscal year - that includes murder, attempted murder, infanticide, conspiracy to commit murder, assisting in suicide, driving causing death, manslaughter and performing an illegal abortion). Further, relevant to the topic at hand, New Zealand has a government censorship system that censors or classifies all published material in New Zealand including media and computer games. The age restrictions they impose are law and come with hefty punishment for violations. As such youth exposure to such violence is likely to be different than in the USA.