Tonight We Riot. Hoooo boy...
- Thread starter Smithnikov
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20192553
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-18129-004
https://www.uni-trier.de/fileadmin/fb1/prof/PSY/WIP/Happ_Cyberpsychology_2013.pdf
https://www.dhi.ac.uk/san/waysofbeing/data/data-crone-hasan-2013.pdf
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.26.021304.144640
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19016226
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25363697
I can keep posting these all day.
Wrong link.
I found the real link and I agree with everything in it. But I don't think it's saying what you think it's saying. Of course there are ideological biases in scientific communities, and dissenting voices should (where possible) be given opportunities to present evidence. But whatever ideological issues exist in within the research on violent media, it completely pales in comparison to the outright fallacy of "gamers" asserting that games cannot possibly be a problem because they play them and because they can do nothing wrong (obviously), video games themselves must be blameless.
There is another side to Jack Thompson which I didn't mention in my previous post, which is that he coerced children accused of very serious crimes into testifying that video games had caused them to commit those crimes. He was an awful, awful person who was clearly motivated by his personal feelings and views towards media. But the fact remains, a person can be all that and still be right. The weird consensus "gamers" have reached that any media effects, no matter how well observed, rigorously demonstrated or limited in scope must be wrong because video games are the perfect special art form which can do no wrong, is bullshit.
So can I, which is why I said that there's no scientific consensus on the subject.
Using your first link as an example, it links to two other studies in the "comment in" section which disagree with it:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20192554 titled "Much ado about nothing: the misestimation and overinterpretation of violent video game effects in eastern and western nations: comment on Anderson et al. (2010)."
and
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28639810 titled "Overstated evidence for short-term effects of violent games on affect and behavior: A reanalysis of Anderson et al. (2010)."
There is a scientific consensus. The fact that a significant number of researchers think that the consensus is due to various forms of bias does not change the fact that there is a scientific consensus.
Secondly, many of the articles you are referencing do not disagree with the consensus. They are arguing that the effects have been overstated, use inconsistent metrics or are being used to form policy conclusions which are not based in hard evidence. Again, these are things I personally agree with, but they do not accord with the ideologically driven gamer narrative that video games can do no wrong and have only positive effects.
"Are you the Judean People's Front?"
"Fuck off! We're the People's Front of Judea!"
No, I really don't think that there is.
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-018-0031-7#Sec8
Unless you're saying that "Consensus" means "What the APA decides", then yes, in that sense, there is a consensus. But If consensus means "most everyone agrees", then no.
You're right, not everyone agrees. However, the debate in this case is not what "gamers" think it is. It is a debate about whether the effects of violent video games are pronounced enough to be a problem, not about whether those effects exist.
Conservatives, religious groups and "concerned parent" lobbies since the 1980s have popularized a narrative that violent media "brainwashes" people (particularly teenagers and children) into committing acts of real violence against their own will. Jack Thompson himself was a big proponent of this view, to the point of arguing that underaged criminals who had been exposed to violent media could not be held responsible for their own actions. There is a clear scientific consensus against this position. It has research supporting it, but they are outliers within a broad consensus which finds no evidence for such a direct connection.
But because this position is wrong, it does not mean some absolute opposite position, that media has absolutely no influence on people, is magically correct. In fact, there is an equally strong scientific consensus against that position. Even if the effects are only noticeable in children, or even if they are short lived, there is a huge weight of evidence to suggest they exist. Simply put, "gamers" are wrong about this. A bad, unevidenced argument does not become acceptable because another bad argument is wrong. Even Jack Thompson did not particularly care about adults playing video games, he didn't believe (as is often assumed) that adults who played violent video games would carry out acts of violence, he believed that only children could be influenced to that degree.
I mean, let's be real. Jack Thompson got death threats. He got a lot of death threats. Anita Sarkeesian made some mild criticisms of representational practices in video games, and she got mountains of death threats, rape threats and all kinds of horrible stuff. These are video games, they're not important, they're a dumb toy made by a very unscrupulous industry. They do frequently cater to silly, infantile fantasies which are kind of embarassing to those not immersed in the culture, and yet these people who insist they are not violent and have not been influenced in any way will literally threaten violence on anyone who points this out. The fact that extreme violence is so normal within video games that pointing this out warrants an extreme reaction, that it's so normal we're not even allowed to question why it happens, is already a media effect.
I'm not focusing on, nor do I care, about whether or not "gamers" think it is. I'm talking about scientists, or more specifically, academic studies that disagree with each-other. Since we can both find studies that disagree, there must not be a consensus (assuming I'm using the word 'consensus' correctly). That sounds reasonable, right?
If anything, as with the section I quoted from the study above, they are in agreement that the effects last "a few minutes". Is that the consensus you're referring to?
Until an academic paper comes out linking violent video games to death threats, it's just a bunch of anecdotes. I'm sure Beyonce gets death threats too, but we're not saying that pop music about girl power makes people violent, or maybe we are.
The point is, the plural of anecdotes is not data. Speaking of these two specifically (Thomson and Sarkeesian), it would be beneficial for their arguments if they were to fabricate, exaggerate or signal-boost their hate mail in order to garner sympathy and prove their point.
I don't think that's a problem particular to games and new media, though. I've found references to hate mail and death threats through the post from since the early 1900's, and in the modern day from obscure fandoms, like stamp collecting and model trains. One can argue that there is a greater trend in gaming to have such behavior than other fandoms, but I think the root of the issue is ugly personalities and anonymity, and that you're gonna have a hard time separating whether games media feeds into these things, or whether the nature of new media of the Information Age trains its practicioners with enough tech-savvy to use new tools to magnify old problems (example being: if the Romans had Twitter yet no games or whatever social ill of the week is being blamed, would it still be a cesspit? Looking at the graffiti in Pompei which mirrors bathroom stalls and shitposting today, I would bet on yes, it would).
That said, I do think that gaming is able to influence brain patterns, because all experiences influence brain patterns. Games in particular play with psychology deliberately for their core feedback loops, the same as the fields of marketing and gambling, which have been shown to influence behavior and decision-making. More study should be done on the mind and brain in general to quantify the effects as best we can, and their results should be shared in such a manner as to be accessible and informative to the public and game developers.
Yeah, that's what I said. "If anything, as with the section I quoted from the study above, they are in agreement that the effects last "a few minutes". Is that the consensus you're referring to?"
Thanks for confirming it.
I don't follow. What's the issue with this game?
Isn't it carrying the same message something beloved like the Outer Worlds is?
Anyhow, the game (the actual important part here, screw the politics) looks a lot like Twisted Metal which has a soft spot in my heart. Might end up playing this if it makes it to ps4.
Isn't it carrying the same message something beloved like the Outer Worlds is?
Anyhow, the game (the actual important part here, screw the politics) looks a lot like Twisted Metal which has a soft spot in my heart. Might end up playing this if it makes it to ps4.
If I may be so bold...
When people say they don't want politics in games, I find that 90% of the time it's less "I don't want politics in games" and more "I don't want THESE politics in games." TWR is undoubtedly political, and it's pro-left politics are going to piss off a lot of people who are already incensed are perceived pro-left politics in games.
That said, there's a world of difference between Outer Worlds and this, least with the trailers. Outer Worlds is clearly sattire. TWR is very much a pro-communist piece. One's being subtle in its critique of capitalism, the other is explicitly pro-communism.
Nah, completely disagree. if anything the outer worlds shows us a world so defeated they couldn't even begin to think about revolting. That's WAY more effective at an anti-capitalist message than just having pixelated anarchists throwing freedom bombs at cartoonishly evil cops and robots. Also, you do have some revolutionaries there too, they just get crushed super easily.
Satire and absurdity are the first thing the nazis banned, because laughter is an involuntary reaction. The first guy they killed in Poland was a clown. There's a reason for that.
And see, I'm fine with communists or socialist politcs in my games, what I don't like is identity or gender politics. So it's really not a left or right wing thing. It's a BS vs real issues thing.
I don't think you've posted a single study that I actually disagree with the findings of.
Which suggests that either you think that these studies are saying more than they actually are, or that you haven't understood my point.
The funny thing about that statement is that it's a misquote. It comes from political scientist Raymond Wolfinger, who, while teaching a class was quoted as having said “the plural of anecdote is data."
For anyone studying or working in the human sciences, I think that's actually an obvious point. Even raw statistics are not abstract numbers we pull from the void, those numbers are gathered by human beings from human beings, they are based on countless individual experiences and stories which are collected and organised. Ultimately, data is merely a collection of organised anecdotes. It does not appear magically. It is not conjured into this reality via math wizardry. It consists of individual stories which together contain enough observational truth to be useful.
There can be all kinds of problems with anecdotes, but the fact that they come from a human source isn't one.
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The main difference is that, in Outer Worlds, you fight cartoonishly evil Corporate Cops with their wacky corporate speak and so on. It's a caricature.
In Tonight We Riot, they're just Cops. Regular ol' SWAT team in riot gear. Government and Corporation working together instead of one subsuming the other. It's not saying "this hyper capitalist corporation is bad", it's sayin "the whole damn capitalist system is fucked"
Heck, in the trailer all the good guys are either diverse groups of men and women or individual PoC and all the assholes are either cops or mostly white dudes and a single white lady. That alone would make the weirder nerds mad
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