153: The Anatomy of Violence

ayoama

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Really interesting article. The only thing that left me a bit perplexed was the psychological conditioning bit... I think videogames have (luckily) still more to do with shooting carboard figures than with combat simulations to produce such an impact on a gamer. If you don't have a "force is the way" mindset by the time you start playing violent games I don't think you'll ever develop it by playing them. If you already do, though, those games could very well become the fetish of your beliefs.
 

SamuraiAndPig

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Girlysprite said:
Samurai, I wasn't saying video games have been a part of crime, but people are drawing conclusions too simply. They accuse others of drawing conclusions too fast, but do the same themselves.

The strange part of games vs modern warfare is that games become more realistic, and warfare becomes less realistic. They become, oh irony, almost like a videogame.
I never said you did, but if it came off that way, apologies. And I agree completely that war has become less realistic. I remember a very creepy scene in Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11, which was this ongoing interview with a young soldier. He basically described being the gunner in a tank as playing a video game: you see these little person-shaped dots moving around, you line them up in the sights, press a button and get a satisfying explosion. It wasn't until weeks later when they moved into Baghdad that they saw rotting bodies, burnt skeletons, and dead kids. And as the enemy grew closer they began to see their machine gun bullets ripping through them; much more difficult than shooting at a dot on the horizion.
 

Lyndraco

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Excellent article, and while not everyone may agree with the statistics, it does a great job getting people to start thinking about the topic.
As a fan of the FPS (specifically Halo and Counterstrike), I can say that I would still run far and fast in a fight or flight situation. But, I can also make the distinction between a game controller and a real gun. So while these games may be slowly desensitizing or conditioning me, I'm not going to be having aggressive tendencies any time soon.
My cousin enjoys the same games that I do, and was at Virginia Tech during the shooting (going to class). She said her first response was to duck and run.
Perhaps us females are less likely to be conditioned. :)
 

Smokescreen

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Well done article, and some great discussion here everyone.

I must admit that it is occasionally worrisome to think about the effect that violent videogames have on our psyches. However, I feel that to just discuss that will always miss the point. The article itself says that the murders at VT and Columbine were planned out, they weren't just spontaneous.

Now, while violent videogames might 'open up' extreme violence as a solution to a problem whereas before taking such acts weren't really on the table, the underlying problem to me is that people were put in non combat situations that somehow led them to believe that the only way out was to commit murder.

Someone who should have been looking out for those people-kids, usually-wasn't, and I think we'd all agree that that's a pretty serious goddamn problem.

As with so many things that have been blamed for the collapse in society (comic books, rock n roll, television) there is an exercise in falsehood being perpetrated here. There are underlying issues with our (and any) society that need to be addressed. When things go terribly wrong, those should be signs that point to what we need to talk about, but instead we get caught up in those 'other' things to blame, instead of looking hard, inwardly, at where things went wrong in the relationships that the person who did the violence had, versus the relationship that person had with Call of Duty 4.

All that said; if we don't seriously look at what kind of effect that videogames have on us, there will never, ever be a way to turn the argument away from videogames, and toward the more difficult issues of say poverty and education.
 

ErinHoffman

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vortexgods said:
No, false, bad science, must I link to this again:


Grossman-ism:
Media Violence and
Mad Social Science
This.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

I'm honestly surprised and dismayed to see this here. What's interesting is that I live about four miles from RMC and have friends and colleagues in the War Studies programme there. This is very disappointing to see ultimately underresearched one-sided pseudo-science being upheld as material that we should "reasonably consider" without even a cursory amount of research into the numerous refutations of Grossman's points.

I deeply understand the desire to represent perspectives from across a spectrum of opinion, but what Grossman is doing, and what this article is doing, is destructive to progress in this discussion because it is so superficial.

Grossman's case is very unfortunate in that he is very well respected (I understand that he visited RMC recently, which I imagine precipitated this piece?) in the field of the effects of combat on soldiers. This does not even come close to making him an expert on the effects of simulated violence in a fantasy context on young people. And if we ask experts in THAT FIELD about this, we receive an answer directly at odds with Grossman's assumptions based on study in an ultimately vastly different field.

I emphasize again that I came at this subject years ago with the same intent in mind: we must seriously consider whether games can have a violence-inducing influence on the psyche. I am a game developer; on a professional level and on an ethical level with my profession I need to know whether I am harming people if I put violent content in the games that I create. I promise you that there is no one, NO ONE more concerned about this subject than game developers who are also parents. With Grossman and Thompson (Jack, how's that disbarring going for you, since you're around?) it is necessary to ask "cui bono?" ("who benefits?") -- and look historically at the degree of profit they are making specifically from raising controversy in defiance of the genuine researchers looking into these subjects. Grossman makes a majority of his living by touring and speaking; there is a marked point in his written material where he took a wild side track into addressing video game and media violence in order to sell more copy. Jack Thompson is quick to make the "cui bono?" accusation toward game developers -- his libelous demonization of the gaming community and developers is legendary, and his behavior is short to earn him the stripping of his license to practice law in Florida -- ignoring the obvious fact that he is trying to make his living off of ambulance-chasing fear- and hate-mongering in defiance of all scientific research. But bottom line, you shouldn't be asking any of us about this; you should be asking the psychologists who don't have a speaking tour and a book deal predicated on controversy.

On this subject there is a very basic point and logical error that anti-game advocates make: They conflate attraction to video games BECAUSE of violent tendencies with INFLUENCE of violent media CAUSING violence. In short: if someone has violent tendencies, they are going to be ATTRACTED to violent media. Sociologists understand this attraction; serial killers typically have an attraction to 1) real-life violence (television/newspaper coverage); 2) violent music (esp. violent lyrics); 3) media violence. That order is deliberate; serial killers, including school shooters, have an interest pyramid with real-life violence at its apex. But someone with a violent mind is naturally going to be attracted to violent media of all kinds, the same way that someone who likes dogs is going to watch a lot of pet shows. It's a natural correlation that has nothing to do with what is causing them to become violent, because obviously millions of people watch (and play) violent media who *don't* become violent. The causation question is very important and very complex, and the EXPERTS who study this are not certain of it with video games. According to Dr. Roger Mannell, Dean of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Waterloo, whose expertise lies in the study of the effects of media on children, and whom I interviewed for this piece [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_140/3007-Enhancing-Humanity] in the Escapist, the question for sociologists studying media and children is NOT whether causation can be found -- he thinks it can't -- but about what it is in a child's environment with *that minority* of children that are pre-disposed to violent behavior that actualizes their predisposition, and how that can be prevented and their behavior patterns modified before they reach actualization level.

*STUDIES* of killers, including the Columbine killings, have been done; Dr. James McGee -- authority on the "classroom avenger" -- studied 16 rampage shootings at schools by adolescents in recent years, involving 18 boys. In all 16 rampage shootings, only Columbine -- *one* instance -- showed a game connection. From Gerard Jones's _Killing Monsters_, which you are going to hear more about in a minute: "Most of the shooters showed no interest in games at all. Other elements were much more common to the eighteen boys: bullying by peers, hostility with or disassociation from parents, suicidal threats, and fascination with news coverage of earlier rampage shootings show up among all of them."

Robert, I understand where you are coming from on this in intent, but I am deeply disappointed in your decision to write on this subject with such a cursory level of research not even touching sociological, psychological, and clinical experts that have studied this field for years. Your intent may have been honorable, but on this very charged subject, rife with disinformation (it is a difficult thing to research; I do appreciate that fully), you are dead wrong, and harmfully wrong. I honestly believe that you need to retract this article, do your research, and apologize to the video game community if you ever want to be taken seriously in this space.

I'm including below some excerpts from Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super-Heroes, and Make Believe Violence to get you started, and some links to material on this site on the subject.

"After a decade of these games being played by millions of kids, Grossman and other critics have provided no evidence of the effects they have predicted. Certainly video games haven't had any significant impact on real-world crime. 'The research on video games and crime is compelling to read,' said Helen Smith, forensic psychologist, youth violence specialist, and author of The Scarred Heart. 'But it just doesn't hold up. Kids have been getting less violent since those games came out. That includes gun violence and every other sort of violence that might be inspired by a video game.'"
-- Gerard Jones, Killing Monsters, p. 167

"The peak of shooter-game play by teenagers was from approximately 1992 to 1995, by which time the games' sales had dropped, and they'd gone from being the fad of the moment to one of many genres in the industry. Violent crime dropped during those years. We've now had time for those millions of game players to reach adulthood, and the generation of 'killer kids' predicted by the games' critics has never materialized."
- Gerard Jones, Killing Monsters, p. 167

"Both her practice and her survey show that extremely angry and violent kids often show an interest in violent music, Web sites, and movies, but rarely in video games. 'I don't discount the influence some media may have on very hostile young people,' she concluded. 'But there just doesn't seem to be any connection with games.' "
-- Gerard Jones, Killing Monsters, p. 168

"Helen Smith's principal objection to theorists who try to link video games to real-life crime is the same as mine: 'They're not listening to the kids.'"
--Gerard Jones, Killing Monsters, p. 170

An Interview with Gerard Jones [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/insidejob/2752-Inside-Job-Voices-of-Sanity-An-Interview-With-Gerard-Jones]
Getting Real about Kids and Games [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/insidejob/2314-Inside-Job-Getting-Real-about-Kids-and-Games]

Fancy talkin' does not a rational or researched argument make, folks.
 

Smokescreen

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ErinHoffman, I fear you've missed the point of the article.

The question is; do violent videogames open up a part of our brain that would make violence more acceptable?

Not; do violent videogames make us (more) violent? And there's a vast difference.
 

ErinHoffman

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Smokescreen, I disagree. That is the deep particular discussed in the article as part of Grossman's greater thesis toward a false connection between video games and real life violence.

A further resource, if what we want to talk about is the intersection of fantasy warfare and war, specifically video games and war: From Sun Tzu to X-Box [http://www.fromsuntzutoxbox.com/], by Ed Halter, whom I have met and who also disagrees with this presentation of the intersection of violent media and real-life violence. From the very first sentence of the article:

"While looking for literature on how human beings react under stress in deadly situations, I found a fascinating book, titled On Combat, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman and Loren W. Christensen. On Combat makes a seemingly reactionary claim, made many times before; namely, that violent videogames are creating a generation of killers. What's startling, however, is that this time, it's true."

This is an utterly false statement that over the past decade has been used to propagate and inflict terror on a generation of parents and gamers. Grossman has been making this prediction repeatedly for the past two decades and has been proved wrong. This is not about "heated rhetoric", as Robert later says; this is about fact, science, documented study, and a concerted agenda of disinformation on the part of the likes of Jack Thompson.

Robert himself touches on this in one of his replies earlier in the thread where he says he had been previously unaware of the criticism levied against Grossman's "science". He further says that he's not a psychologist, but just can't imagine that violence doesn't have an effect on the psyche.

It is this emotional, inductive assumption that has led to a vast amount of misconception and erroneous thinking, fueled by Thompson's rhetoric and that intuitive question in the back of our minds that somehow these images must be bad for us. But the science just does not bear it out, plain and simple. In this article Robert further then asks "is this turning us into killers?" and makes connections to Columbine and Virginia Tech, again flying in the face of all research specifically on those two highly-charged incidents.

The major error here is the assumption that there is no distinction between fantasy violence and perceived real violence, which is the foundation of Gerard Jones's argument, and is the psychological point that Grossman and Thompson willfully ignore research regarding. The implication in the article that target training in the Army can be transferred to the fantasy scenario of Counterstrike implies a drastic separation in context that research has proven to be critical in developing a propensity toward real violence. Fantasy violence, even in games *designed* in conjunction with the military (see Full Spectrum Warrior), are not effective military trainers and are not being used by the US Army today! Simulators *are* used, but for decision-making training -- NOT for the firing of weapons or the use of applied violence, for which there is yet no replacement.
 

Sentios

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Even if this article held true there wouldn't be a problem, the types of situation in which flight or fight takes over are the ones where you'd be safer to fight back anyways. Beyond that there's still no causation, desensitizing someone to killing makes them less squeemish it doesn't mean they could kill someone.
 

Robert B. Marks

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Erin Hoffman: I fear that you're falling into the same trap that you're accusing me of. At the very least, your reading of my article does seem to be cursory at best. I am not Dave Grossman - and while I use some of his research, if you compare my article to the video game section of On Combat, you'll see that I take his evidence and draw a very different conclusion than he does.

A lot of this is based around the evidence presented by S.L.A. Marshall, and that is problematic because Marshall based his book on observations he made about firing rates while he was reconstructing battles as an official historian in World War 2 - but he was not researching firing rates specifically, and therefore he didn't document it much farther than noticing that it was a trend to be concerned about. So, the numbers he gives are around 15-25%, but the actual firing rate could have been 45%, or even 55% - we just have no way of knowing. But, the imprecision does not invalidate the trend - all it does is track it with an estimate rather than exact figures.

Now, these figures are a matter of great debate, but if you look at the criticisms against Marshall, a lot of them aren't terribly convincing themselves, and don't go very far beyond "he wasn't taking down exact figures." So, while we may never know what the exact figures actually were, we do know that he was in a place to be able to spot the trend, that he did talk about the trend while he was doing his research in WW2 (which invalidates the idea that he made it up after), and between WW2 and Vietnam he saw the trend correct itself at the same time that the training changed from shooting at paper targets to silhouettes to mock human beings that fall down when shot.

When you take that and look at how training the mammalian brain actually works, it does become a convincing argument that this did have the effect of training the middle brain. And, I know enough military people to know that this is what training is for - so that when you move into survival mode, you know what to do.

The problem with your comments is that you're ignoring two points I make very specifically - first, you suggest that I said that this makes us more violent. No, it doesn't - in fact, I specifically say it doesn't. This training is so context specific that the only place it could kick in is in a firefight. I made this a bit more clear in my original draft, but some of that got edited out to tighten it up between my proverbial pen and publication (there was also a line that I missed when I did my approval run over it - the question I asked was originally "Is this turning us into MURDERERS"). This conditioning, in whatever degree it exists, is unlikely to ever manifest itself outside of self defense under very extreme circumstances. So, if the violent crime rate is low, the odds of this training ever manifesting itself is also low. You just won't see signs of it in crime rate figures.

Second, you talk about my discussion of Columbine and Virginia Tech as though I'm saying that video games caused them to happen. I didn't - in fact, I brought them up specifically to DEBUNK that idea. I also stated that Cho didn't play anything more violent than minesweeper. When dealing with this issue, the big spectres that haunt us are school shootings, plain and simple. You can't have a balanced article unless you face this issue head on - and I did.

(In retrospect, the line "That doesn't absolve game makers entirely of blame, however.", which was added by the editor in the editing process, I should have asked to be changed. Unfortunately, I was in the middle of a two week intensive course at RMC, and I didn't have time for anything more than a cursory reading of the editor's modifications. Therefore, mea culpa on that one. The paragraph does go on to talk about the ramifications for law enforcement and education when you have a group of people more capable of using deadly force in self defense, so it's still passable.)

Finally, in regards to your statement that the military doesn't use video games for training beyond leadership training, I'm not sure where you got that idea. Most of my reading suggests that the military is using games on several levels, from flight simulators to tactical games. And, there was a documentary that aired on Space that had a simulation where a jeep was surrounded by big computer screens, and the people in the jeep would fire blanks at digital targets. Just do a google search on "video games military training" and you'll get a wealth of information on it.

Best regards,

Robert Marks
 

ErinHoffman

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Robert: not at all. My issue, *again*, is not the specifics of what you are saying -- which I also disagree with but which have been discussed earlier in this thread, and which I think are ultimately immaterial to the video game violence discussion, having to do with combat psychology for which there are a number of theories and explanations -- but the theses that you are tying this specific, *disputed* psychological phenomenon into.

Let's look at your theses:

violent videogames are creating a generation of killers. What's startling, however, is that this time, it's true.
False. And changing "killers" to "murderers" in that sentence only makes your claim more egregious.

But it's a well-documented fact;
Also false, 100%.

Now your sub-theses.

Unintentionally, this training regimen has migrated from the firing range to the living room... this means an entire generation has unwittingly undergone this military conditioning.
Incorrect. You're juxtaposing specific military training with a fantasy-context experience; see my previous statements regarding context.

What stops a normal, unconditioned person from killing another human being in combat is the mammalian brain, which is pure instinct
Arguable; however, besides this, you're bridging here with a key phrase "in combat" (which in two words implies a VAST amount of context, specifically one in which "murder" becomes "legal sanctioned and instructed killing"), and sliding rapidly into your "murder simulator" argument; the two are separate and your bridge between them is illogical. See previous comments.

And again, all of this relies on our assumption that this statement is even scientifically correct ('what stops a person...'), which is highly suspect.

While we haven't been conditioned to be murderers, however, the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings prove that some of us are capable of committing heinous acts of violence under ostensibly mundane conditions.
And here you're bridging what you admit to be an incorrect assumption (because you're disagreeing with Grossman despite using his research, though you never backed up your disagreement with him with other research, which I provided to you in my comments) with another subject entirely, bringing up the issue of school shooters. In your phrase "under ostensibly mundane conditions" you are dismissing an entire world of social dysfunction and specific research done on this precise subject.

widespread military conditioning across our society ... it's impossible to assess its effects without facing the specters of shootings like Columbine and Virginia Tech.
Again, your statement re military conditioning is extremely weak both scientifically and according to your presentation of it in argument form. And now you are directly connecting it to Columbine and Virginia Tech. This is the specific error I refer to in my previous two posts. In this paragraph in general you are taking your weakly founded "middle brain" argument and applying it to a scenario which you have clearly not researched and on which there are a highly significant number of expert testimonies and theories regarding causes and consistent, measurable commonalities in social dysfunction that have nothing to do with 'training' of any kind.

Violent videogames may have made the Columbine killers more capable of carrying out their crime,
Incorrect. I think their months of target practice in their parents' backyard did that. Another common intense misperception.

In a society where more than 90 percent of the people who play violent videogames are capable of using deadly force under life-threatening conditions,
Here you are again jumping from "video games" to "training" and then to "deadly force", and you're also implying that self defense in a life-threatening situation is somehow threatening to society. Under this argument you should be attacking anyone who has ever been in the military; anyone who has ever received firearm training; and anyone who has served on a police force in a capacity involving weapons training and deadly force.

When Grossman described this situation in his book, he called violent games "murder simulators." It may sound extremist, but it makes sense
It absolutely does not. Even, again, assuming that your basic argument is correct, which I do not, you are confusing the term "murder" here with "combat". The vast majority of games (see Gerard Jones) are nonviolent; of those that are violent, the vast majority of THOSE do not involve "murder", unless you consider that a soldier in a war is committing murder, which I think most soldiers would like to disagree with you on. It is a highly select, small group of games that _simulate murder_, and most of those also play contextually with the situations that cause murder to occur (you can research the social statements in the _Grand Theft Auto_ games if you like; there are many, most having to do with poverty and class separation, which have long been studied by sociologists as common roots of violent crime).

The term "murder simulator" is highly charged due to the propaganda and hyperbole that you loosely reference in the opening of your article. I honestly don't think you know what you're touching on when you so casually say "but it makes sense" here. You go on to rationalize Grossman's dilution of the term "murder" without considering that on its face there is a social and clinical definition of "murder" that does not fit the context or the "training" in video games.

So long as we fail to recognize that these games are imparting a killer instinct in the most literal sense,
Incorrect. Here you are bridging, again relying upon the 'middle brain' questionable hypothesis, between target shooting and "killer instinct", a highly charged and hyperbolic term used by the anti-game lobby to convey to the public a confusing and frightening idea. The connection here between games and "killer instinct" is at best highly abstract, theoretical, and precisely the subject of the sociological research I referenced in my previous comments; it is in no way "literal".

The preponderance of violent media - not just videogames - in our culture should encourage us to be more vigilant in what we teach about right and wrong, and force us to be more thoughtful about when violence is necessary.
Again implying that video games and violent media somehow place us at increased risk for actual violence, which is refuted again and again by science.

In the right hands, lethal force is a useful tool that protects the rest of us from harm. That tool has now been placed in everybody's hands.
Again implying that the ability to defend oneself (which combat specialists will tell you cannot be conveyed by a video game) causes one to be a risk to society, in which case you are encompassing the military, the police, and anyone with any kind of self defense training.

.

My reading of your article is in no way superficial. My objection is not to your fine-detail raising of what you now seem to be asserting is a technicality in combat psychology, but to the hyperbolic theses you are attaching this information to. Your mistake is identical to Grossman's, and your theses generally amount to repeating his theses and justifying them on the basis of unfounded and irrational argumentation.

These arguments are common but have been clearly refuted by a number of experts in this field, not combat psychologists who apply their expertise across fields without further research and for clear personal gain. To reiterate and rationalize them without considering the specific applied and scientifically accepted research that refutes them is both amazingly imbalanced and irresponsible. I stand by my previous statements.
 

HardRockSamurai

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I like what you said about violence becoming a universal phobia, I couldn't have put it in better terms myself. Overall, the article was very insightful, and I liked reading it a lot...good job.
 

Robert B. Marks

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Erin Hoffman: As much as I respected you for taking on EA and trying to make the industry a better place, this recent post of yours is disgraceful. And frankly, I'm going to call you out on it.

It is very obvious that you want to disagree with anything even suggesting that violent video games might affect us. But in trying to pick my article apart, your modus operandi has been to take sentences out of context and attach a new context to them. In some cases, you have been outright misleading. Here are some examples:

"Let's look at your theses:

"violent videogames are creating a generation of killers. What's startling, however, is that this time, it's true.

"False. And changing "killers" to "murderers" in that sentence only makes your claim more egregious."

Funny thing, that - not only have you made a value judgement based on a single sentence in my opening paragraph, which the entire next section goes on to explain and support, but you've warped my words in an earlier post to suggest that I began this article claiming that violent video games are creating a society of murders. In fact, the line that I said was changed was on the third paragraph of the second page, and was the introduction to my exploration of why this conditioning couldn't be responsible for violent crime.

"Now your sub-theses.

"Unintentionally, this training regimen has migrated from the firing range to the living room... this means an entire generation has unwittingly undergone this military conditioning.

"Incorrect. You're juxtaposing specific military training with a fantasy-context experience; see my previous statements regarding context."

And you've just cut out most of the paragraph which explains how, leaving only parts that would be alarmist if you don't have the rest of the paragraph. The full paragraph was:

"Unintentionally, this training regimen has migrated from the firing range to the living room. Take Counter-Strike or Crysis, for example. Players fire a weapon at a human target that falls down when it is "killed." It's the same type of training used to raise the firing rate of the army from 15 percent to more than 90 percent. With many tech-savvy kids and adults growing up playing first person shooters, this means an entire generation has unwittingly undergone this military conditioning."

And here is one of the most dishonest things in your post:

"widespread military conditioning across our society ... it's impossible to assess its effects without facing the specters of shootings like Columbine and Virginia Tech.

"Again, your statement re military conditioning is extremely weak both scientifically and according to your presentation of it in argument form. And now you are directly connecting it to Columbine and Virginia Tech. This is the specific error I refer to in my previous two posts."

The big problem here is that I connect both SPECIFICALLY to debunk it. Shortly after that passage, I wrote:

"In both incidents, the murders were premeditated, which means that their planning involved the higher, logical brain - not the mammalian brain. Violent videogames may have made the Columbine killers more capable of carrying out their crime, but they weren't the root cause."

Please note that first off, I specifically state that there is no causation. Let me repeat that. There is NO CAUSATION. Second, I also use the conditional "may" when referring to whether this conditioning had any impact on the Columbine killings at all.

Now, there is a particular writing technique that can be used when making an argument. What you do is that if you know that something is going to be brought up to counter your own argument, you bring that argument up and refute it. That way, the person who was going to bring that up has now lost his ammunition. This is precisely what I have done here. Every time there's a school shooting, somebody brings up video games. Better to refute the link right now than have it mentioned in the comments. You, however, are damning me for even bringing it up, even if I'm doing it just so that I can debunk the idea once and for all.

Frankly, I'm not willing to refute you point by point - it would be a waste of my time. What you've done is take my article, take ideas and sentences from it out of context, and use it to create an argument to refute - one which the article never supported in the first place. I believe that's called a "straw man," more or less. You're trying to paint me as an extremist, and I'm not one. You're misreading implications left and right, and in quite a few places I explicitly state otherwise. And you're throwing research in my face that regards the impact video games have on children in ordinary, every day activities, while I'm talking about how people react in a crisis. The two are not the same, Ms. Hoffman.

If you wish to disagree with my point of view, that is your business, and I welcome the discussion - if we do not question the assumptions we make and the facts around us, we cannot learn. I do not, however, welcome twisting my point of view into a pretzel for your own purposes, and rampant misrepresentation of my words.

Robert Marks
 

ErinHoffman

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Robert, I agree that further discussion here would not be productive for either of us, and I am content to let my prior comments on your article stand. I provided detailed comments on your specific statements in the article in response to your assertion that my reading of your piece was superficial. At no point did I paraphrase or rephrase your words; I responded to them.

I did not read, and I don't read in the comments following the piece here, that what you were doing was 'debunking' at all. It reads instead as a defense of Grossman and a bending of Grossman's work into "reasonable" consideration in the discussion of a connection between violent media and violent behavior that simply is not there. If you intended to debunk what Grossman was saying, the specific thesis-level statements in your article, especially in your introduction and conclusion, were very misleading. Perhaps you used them for dramatic purposes. That you make contradictory statements regarding causation and context and follow them with a "but this is why we should take Grossman's work seriously anyway" is not a good enough excuse for me; maybe it is for others.

Regardless, your article remains and those viewing it and this discussion can and will make their own assessments, and hopefully they will read deeply and widely when considering this very important issue in videogame culture before drawing conclusions.
 

Singing Gremlin

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Fantastic. Really, really well done. It's good to read a well thought out article on how games might actually have such an effect. The concepts make perfect sense, too, to me at least.

As a few people have brought up, the idea you specified murder instead of killing did originally jar with me, but after thinking about it I guess it makes sense that if you spend a lot of time gaming, you get even subconsciously the mindset that in a violent situation, weapon+hostile=attack, as opposed to taking cover or running away, in a civilian situation (as is more likely, not many of us being in the army) the same logic applies, and then it is murder. Although maybe it would have been wise to point out that while it could be training us to be murder-capable, it would be more likely to cause us to use lethal force in self defence (Assuming the majority of people are not the types to be the aggressors in mortal combat), as whether that would be considered murder is debatable.

Sorry to regurgitate your own point at you, it was more an exercise in helping myself comprehend the subject. Thanks for the very interesting read.
 

Robert B. Marks

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Singing Gremlin: I'm glad you enjoyed it. To a degree, it's the result of a lot of critical thought on my end, and getting tired of knee-jerk reactions all the time as one side or the other tried to claim that video games were either responsible for all the violence in the world, and probably went back in time to cause WW2 as well, or that violent video games have no impact on us whatsoever, nor does any type of media, and we are all essentially living in our own little bubbles.

For those who are interested, I'm reposting installments of the original Garwulf's Corner at http://garwulf.livejournal.com/ - back in 2000-2002 I ran one of the very first computer games issues columns on the Internet on Diabloii.net. Unfortunately D2.net has removed their archive, so I've been reposting the installments at a rate of one per week. You can find some of my thoughts on violence from seven years ago in one of them.

(And yes, that's a shameless plug. Why not? :) )

Best to all,

Robert Marks
 

ErinHoffman

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In response very generally to those concerned with this topic and Dave Grossman in particular, I would draw your attention to this essay by Richard Rhodes [http://www.abffe.org/myth1.htm], Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and historian (and an exponentially finer writer than I), titled "The Media Violence Myth":

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, pale, lean and a little goofy in a bad suit, struts the stage of a high school auditorium somewhere in Arkansas, his home state. He's a man on a mission, a smalltown Jimmy Swaggart, swooping and pausing and chopping the air. He's already scared the fresh-faced kids in the audience half to death, and the more scared they look, the wider he grins. "Before children learn to read," he lobs in one of his rhetorical flash grenades, "they can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality. That means everything they see is real for them. When a three year old, a four year old, a five year old sees someone on TV being shot, raped, stabbed, murdered, for them it's real. It's real! You might just as well have your little three year old bring a friend into the house, befriend that friend, and then gut 'em and murder 'em right before their eyes" - some of the kids in the audience wince - "as have them watch the same thing on TV, watch someone being brutally murdered on television. For them it's all real. Television is traumatizing and brutalizing our children at this horrendously young age."

A retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel with an M.Ed. in counseling, formerly an ROTC professor at the University of Arkansas, Grossman left the Army to dedicate himself to saving America from what he calls the "toxic waste" of "media violence" that is "being pumped into our nation and our children," the "electronic crack cocaine" of television and video games that he claims are "truly addictive." He's riding a bandwagon. Columbine turned it into a victory parade.
The essay goes on to cite extensive studies on television violence and concocted statistics regarding the effects of media violence on youth, the congressional-level manipulation of information in order to achieve a specific establishment cause, and deep disregard for studies done that showed that violent media actually had a *positive* and therapeutic effect on young men. From the center of the article:

Rhodes concludes, regarding what he calls "media violence zealots" including Dave Grossman:

But there is no good evidence that taking pleasure from seeing mock violence leads to violent behavior, and there is some evidence, as Jib Fowles found, that it leads away. Bottom line: To become violent, people have to have experience with real violence. Period. No amount of imitation violence can provide that experience. Period. At the same time, mock violence can and does satisfy the considerable need to experience strong emotion that people, including children, build up from hour to hour and day to day while functioning in the complex and frustrating interdependencies of modern civilization. So can comedy; so can serious drama; but young males especially (and even not-so-young males) evidently take special satisfaction in watching mock violence, whether dramatic or athletic. "Whatever the relation of this need may be to other, more elementary needs such as hunger, thirst, and sex," concludes Norbert Elias, ".one may well find that the neglect of paying attention to this need is one of the main gaps in present approaches to problems of mental health."

A New Jersey teenager, Joe Stavitsky, responded to an attack on video games in Harper's magazine after Columbine with an eloquent letter in their defense. "As a 'geek,'" Stavitsky wrote, "I can tell you that none of us play video games to learn how (or why) to shoot people. For us, video games do not cause violence; they prevent it. We see games as a perfectly safe release from a physically violent reaction to the daily abuse leveled at us." Stavitsky, whose family emigrated from Leningrad when he was four to escape a communist dictatorship, concluded his letter with some pointed advice to the moral entrepreneurs. "The so-called experts should put away their pens," he advised, "and spend more time with their children or grandchildren, or better yet, adopt a child who has no home or family. Because there's only one sure way to prevent youth violence, and that is by taking care of youth." We do not take care of youth when we deny them entertainment which allows them to safely challenge the powerlessness they feel at not yet controlling their own lives and then to find symbolic resolution. Entertainment media are therapeutic, not toxic. That's what the evidence shows. Cyber bullets don't kill.
The point here is not regarding apologist concessions made to the causation discussion, but that David Grossman stands at the pinnacle of a thorough campaign to distort the truth and prevent genuine research from being undertaken. His work, his claims, and especially his statistics are all highly suspect and do not belong in any sincere discussion on the effects of media violence.
 

Robert B. Marks

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Erin Hoffman: It is very clear that you hate Dave Grossman. We get it. Now drop it. Seriously. You've become as bad as you're claiming he is.

You talk about spreading misinformation, but you're doing exactly the same thing. Grossman may be outspoken about media violence - personally I think he draws the wrong conclusion from his evidence - but the majority of his work is not campaigning against media violence, as your quoted article states. Most of the time he's training law enforcement and military organizations about the realities of combat. If you ever read On Combat, you'd find that most of the book is dedicated to law enforcement officials and soldiers. Media violence is an aside.

You disagree with how far his conclusion takes the evidence from S.L.A. Marshall, and that's fine. I disagree with it too. But you're then trying to debunk Marshall's evidence on the grounds of Grossman's conclusion, which is not fine at all, and is very faulty technique. When you consider that Marshall's evidence and recommendations led to a change in the way the U.S. Army trained its soldiers, and plugged the holes Marshall had noticed, it becomes very difficult to fault the trend he recorded, even if his own figures were very imprecise.

(And, on a personal note, I made the link between military conditioning and first person shooters in my own head while reading On Combat long before Grossman got to media violence in his book - if you look carefully, there is an convincing argument there, even if Grossman takes it too far later on in the book.)

Furthermore, the idea that because a conclusion is wrong, the evidence leading up to that conclusion must also be wrong is a very serious logical fallacy under any circumstances. I may be no psychologist, but I am a graduate student training to be a historian, and if there's one thing I've found when it comes to any sort of research, it is that the same evidence can be interpreted in many different ways, leading to many different conclusions.

And while you present the question of how media violence affects us as a closed book, it is indeed anything but. Michael A. Mohammed's superb article in this issue of the Escapist demonstrated evidence that video game violence does have a short term impact of making people more aggressive in certain circumstances, and he points out that extending these findings to the long term is a fallacy, and that not enough research has been done on the long term. To this I would add that we simply don't know what the long term effects are, because there hasn't been a long term yet. If we take Wolfenstein 3D to be the first violent first person shooter, the realistic violent video game has only been around for 16 years - less than a generation. In another 20 years or so, we may know what impact a lifetime spent playing these games will have. But for now, the data is incomplete.

You very obviously have strong opinions on this matter, but you are going about expressing them in the wrong way and in the wrong place. My article was about how people react under crisis situations, and how video games may affect their reactions in those situations. Michael A. Mohammed's article was the one about how violent video games affect us on a day-to-day level. You have, in effect, tried to hijack the discussion of my article, twisting my arguments to be the opposite of what I was actually arguing in the process. And you said, very unprofessionally, I might add:

"The point here is not regarding apologist concessions made to the causation discussion, but that David Grossman stands at the pinnacle of a thorough campaign to distort the truth and prevent genuine research from being undertaken. His work, his claims, and especially his statistics are all highly suspect and do not belong in any sincere discussion on the effects of media violence."

You have just said that because Grossman's conclusions are disagreeable, his entire body of evidence should be excluded from the debate. You are advocating ignoring evidence that you don't like without examination of that evidence. And, frankly, considering that Marshall's evidence not only appears to have some merit, but also has been used to frame so much of the debate, it is central to the discussion - it very much belongs in it.

If you really want to take Grossman to task, write your own article. Make it a column installment, if you want. But stop hijacking the discussion of mine. We finally have a long-overdue balanced discussion of the issues raised by Marshall's research, and I would very much like it to continue.

Robert Marks
 

ErinHoffman

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Robert, I am sorry that you felt that either I was addressing you (I was not) or that Richard Rhodes is personally attacking you and you must respond personally to an extremely important analysis and voice on the issues of the disinformation campaign propagated through David Grossman, rather than reading it with diligence. I am puzzled that you see a comprehensively researched essay by a renowned historian dealing with the subject of your article as "thread hijacking". You really should read that essay, and if you don't know who Richard Rhodes is, you should ask your professors, who will.

Not that it's relevant to the discussion, but I don't hate David Grossman. I absolutely think that his expertise should be considered where it is applicable, as I said many comments ago. It is an absolute travesty that someone who has done the good work that he has has found himself held up as a pet poodle for the media violence zealots -- but as he has responded to the media opportunity and the opportunity to speak to children with irresponsible zealotry I have trouble summoning up much sympathy.

You yourself have said that Marshall's work is suspect. Frankly the phenomenon of WW2 and prior soldiers not firing their guns is wholly uninteresting to me *in this space* because, as has been brought up in comments, mine and otherwise, again and again, the notion of applying combat conditions to civilian life is so infinitesimally relevant in context as to be a waste of time. Yet that has been the focus of your article.

But when you bring up the school shooters in connection with Grossman, you open a whole new category of discussion. I did not open it; you did, and it was indeed unfortunate that you did so. I remain convinced on the basis of your replies that you know not what you do, but by now you should know better.

Fear not, though, I did intend to provide Rhodes's article as a resource here for those reading these comments -- and I mean it sincerely that you should read it from beginning to end, because these waters are much deeper than you know -- but I did not intend to interact further with you (see infinitesimally relevant, waste of time, etc) and intend not to reply to you again. The truth clearly discomforts you and it was never my primary intention to cause you discomfort. Rest assured, though, that you have solidly convinced me of the importance of addressing these issues, and that has assisted in a slight priority realignment that will impact my own work, and for that I sincerely thank you.
 

Robert B. Marks

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Erin: I know you weren't talking to me, and I know what you were trying to do. I think everybody else does too.

My mistake was in responding to this as much as I did. Rather than being an informed and intelligent discussion of my article, it has become the Erin Hoffman vs. Robert Marks show, and going any farther with it will only make it worse. So I won't.

To everybody else: I apologize for taking the bait.

Robert Marks
 

ErinHoffman

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You flatter yourself, Robert. If you are ever "versus" me, you will know. If this has at any point been about something other than the issue of media violence, it has been in your mind alone. It is my hope that this lessens your anxiety, because you are clearly discomfited and I would remind you that you were never at any point under personal attack. Just so we're clear on this, and with the hope of putting an end to your personal affront.