Okay, long post coming, but I recommend people read it.
The problem here is that we're dealing with two opposed positions which are both wrong as the truth lies somewhere in the middle. It's sort of like talking about terrorism, where you have a left winger in his tie dyed shirt talking about civil liberties and human rights, and how all terrorism is either a lie or only brought on the deserving, yadda yadda, and the right winger in his suit talking about doing sweeps through the streets and what amount to mass executions, and of course moderates like myself being lost in the middle between the two sides that both refuse to accept that there is a middle ground because anything in between interferes with the purity of their own beliefs. I get griped at on sites like this one for being some kind of inhumane monster for the most part, and then get called a naive hippy by some of my more conservative relatives and aquaintences, because the solutions I believe aren't quite heavy handed enough.
I use the above example because of both sides being wrong, but having legitimate points, with the truth being somewhere in the middle.
Let me be blunt, "our" side as gamers is by and large wrong about games desensitizing people to violence or making them more receptive to using force and so on. Sources that support "our" beliefs and objectives and frankly quacks in most cases, we just want to believe what they are selling. What's more most nerds know this, even if they have chosen to not put the pieces together.
We've known that violent images can make people deal with violences easier, and render them more willing to commit violent acts. We've known this for DECADES now as there have been all kinds of studies done by the military on the subject. We all know brainwashing, hypnosis, and mental deprogramming are possible. Simple examples are used as parlour tricks by entertainers, and some of us might have even been influanced by them,
You keep showing people images of something, and reinforcing certain behaviors, you WILL condition people in those directions. If you start bringing other factors into the equasion you can even program people. The military and intelligence services experiemented with this kind of thing going back to like the 1930s, hoping to condition soldiers to be better killers and more able to deal with the evils they would need to perform or deal with in war. In fiction even know we see stylized remnants of these early experiments in brainwashing and mental deprogramming, in scenes where you have some guy tied to a chair and being bombarded with violent images and audio propaganda. Real techniques that actually work are a bit more sophisticated than that, but that's the image that has been burned into people's minds from when this kind of thing was outed, and of couse the bottom line has always been that if you condition someone like that, how do you turn it off?... and really there isn't an easy way to do so without another whole battery of brainwashing.
Violent Video games aren't brainwashing, but at a very basic level they, like any media, are going to get people more used to things like violence, and reinforce aggressive behaviors. While noticible on a purely academic level, it's overall menaingless in any reasonable context, as lots of differant kinds of media can be used to achieve the a similar effect. Sustained contact with nothing but ultra violent horror movies, cop shows, or action adventure is going to have a very similar overall impact.
Basically we as gamers have to concede that yes, violent games DO desensitize people to violence and encourage people to be more aggressive.
HOWEVER, where the academic community is dead wrong is in promoting this as a BAD thing. The problem is that you have your hand wringing left wingers who have been singing "take my hand, share the land" as a dominant force within society, who have been trying to present violence as a bad thing, and something to be overcome, or removed from society. It is not, and that's the actual problem in a nutshell. Rather than denying that games make people more receptive to violent and agressive behavior, it's better to just simple take the correct track which is to say "so what?".
Let me be blunt, humanity has survived and become the dominant life form on the planet for a few reasons. One is of course our raw intelligence and self awareness, another is of course an opposable thumb allowing us to use that intelligence to create and use tools, and the final is simply that we are the craziest, most murderous thing in the jungle. Your tie-dyed, hang wringing, limp wristed Baby Boomer hippie... which is still a substantial political force despite the change in apperance, will sit there and prattle on about how wrong it is that humanity is one of the only species that will seriously attack and exterminate itself, yet it's that same aggressive overdrive that has made us what we are, and gotten us to the dominant position where people can munch granola in the dark, and spend time thinking about garbage like this.
Right now I think the "problem" with video games is that they do a lot to undermine the messages of the baby boomers, and basically wind up giving people more normal impulses, in contridiction to the social engineering we've seen going on. With the boomers getting older and finally about to step down for "Generation Y" I think there is increasing concern that their big "social legacy" is going to go nowhere.
Now don't get me wrong, I am not saying it's a wonderful thing to go shooting each other in the streets, though I'm sure some people on the other side of the equasion would love to claim that. The thing is that violence is something people need to be taught to control, NOT viewed as a trait to overcome. After all violence and aggression are a big part of what it is to be human, we would not be here without them, they are our survival traits. That tenacity is what keeps humans going in the face of aversity. It's important to note that while the craziest, most murderous thing to come crawling out of the primoridial ooze, we're also social animals, and out own social tendencies and desire for order along with the understanding of how it benefits us, helps to keep our baser instincts in line.
It is absolutly ridiculous for anyone to look at today's society and decry how violent and horrible it is. Actually we live at the most peaceful period in human history. There is all kinds of violence throught the second and third world, and tons of crime in the first as well, but compared to the days when we had tribes of barbarians fighting each other every single day? Someone needs to bloody grow up.
If anything, the only reason why things seem more violent right now than they did... oh say 40 years ago, is because we have better information technology. Something happens today and a local town can't just cover it up and consider it a dirty little secret, it goes screaming out accross the information superhighway and we all hear about it. It's not more violence, it's simply increased awareness. What's more improved police techniques mean that things that got filed away get solved, we get from dealing with little mysteries revolving around things thta might have been violent crimes, to situations where we know exatly what happened with far more frequency and everyone hears about it in real time.
I'll also say, that I do not think the non-violent tendencies of the Baby Boomers, and honestly that's who we're dealing with on the "other side" of this... the parents of Generation X, have hardly served us well. some good has come from this, but by and large the lack of violence and warfare has arguably contributed to the current global overpopulation, and prevented us from dealing with the issue of resource depletion. No violence, and free love, means more people. More people means more demand for resources. Even if enough resources can be harvested, the issue of us running out of things like wood, metal, and fuel are present. We're at a point right now where even ZPG (Zero Population Growth) can't stop us, and World War III has become inevitable... and it's going to be a war where eradicating large groups of people is going to be part of the point, because in the end until we obtain more living space, we need to lower our population to the point we can sustain it and embrace ZPG. Nobody wants to be culled, so as a result war is inevitable.
I'm getting pretty far afield here, but I think this is one of the worst times in history for the "peacenink" philsophy to be being prooposed by anyone.
Apologies for my political rant, and hippy comments, I'm tired and could probably have said this better, the basic point here is that while neither side wants to admit it, the truth is in the middle, but nobody wants to see it. Games do a lot of the things being claimed by the opposition, there is nothing magical about them that makes the violent images have any less effect on the human brain that others do. On the other hand, all of those effects are not a big deal. Games do not "brainwash" people, human self control is still intact, if anything the message involved in such games actually channels violent impulses for a reason.
I'll also say the noise blast thing is stupid, one would think the researcher has never heard of Schaetenfreude , or the tendency to take cruel pleasure in the suffering of another. To be honest, humans are actually very receptive to the plight of other humans in serious distress, but a little annoyance here and there is something we can appreciate. Giving someone a shock button, or a noise blast, in what is known to be a controlled situation where nobody is going to get hurt means that nobody is going to hestitate much to mess around. With a competitive game, this is just another form of gambling really, and it hits that button too. Hook the video games up to SAW inspired execution devices and make it so the winner actually brings about the horrible screaming death of the loser... well people are generally going to be a lot less receptive to that even if fairly desensitized and aggressive. Hand me a joy buzzer and I'll shock someone for lulz, hand me a button that slowly crushes someone's head in a vice, and I'm not going to push that button without a bloody good reason and "won the abillity to do so in a video games" is not that reason.
