LawMaker Blames Call of Duty for Mass Murders

[Shinzai]

After Jack Thompson went away, I thought I'd heard the last of the majority of this type of silliness.

[Vargas]

I'll make politicians a deal; I will admit that games MIGHT cause people be behave more aggressively if they admit that politicians are the reason the U.S.'s economy is in the shitter and that they are doing a piss poor job of fixing it.

Not that one has to do with the other, but these people spend so much time trying to apportion blame on something or someone that I want to hear them, just once, TAKE responsibility for their own personal failures.

[Rennadrel]

Republican's are a bunch of idiots trying to find any excuse to not have guns banned. Too bad no matter what happens, there is going to be some form of gun legislation.

[FusedMass]

Here is a related article on it.

Concerns about video game violence have been twinned to concerns about gun violence from as far back as the Columbine shooting, when pundits fussed and fretted over how Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold enjoyed yesteryear's most popular first-person shooter, "Doom." (Also, they were vaguely "goth," according to observers, which for a time made life hard for Bauhaus fans who just wanted to be alone and sad and misunderstood.) I was never too convinced by the argument: Video games, unlike the act of shooting up an entire school of children, were and remain popular, with hundreds of thousands millions of people partaking in the escape. That some mass-murderers occasionally participated in that culture seems to be incidental at best -- a tiny bit of statistical effluvia that should be written off as insignificant at the outset.

"Video games affect people," of course, is not actually an argument. Monet paintings affect people. Long waits at the DMV affect people. If there's anything that diminishes my worry about whether or not Alexander will seriously consider the prospect of beefing up background checks, it would be the way that this thought sort of floated out of him like flatulence, unattached to anything serious. If I could assure Alexander of anything, however, I would point out that we have spared no expense in trying to ascertain the ways in which video games affect people, up to and including whether they can be connected to violent tendencies in real life.

Historically, it's been a hard case to make. I can point you immediately to this article from the Washington Post's Max Fischer, in which he runs down the statistics on the 10 largest global markets for video games and finds "no evident, statistical correlation between video game consumption and gun-related killings."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_2584837.html

[Adam Jensen]

See the thing these old idiots don't understand is that we video gamers can differentiate fact and fiction. When I kill someone in a game, I am killing an entity who's sole purpose is to be killed, an entity that has no loved ones and in many cases will simply respawn with full health somewhere or some time else. No matter how immersed in the game I am, I still know that I am not killing real people. That's why I can massacre entire villages in Skyrim (except the damn kids!) without any guilt. They aren't real people.

That doesn't mean I can do the same to living, breathing human beings, all of which have a right to live, a right that can only be taken away in the extremest of cases (such as threatening someone else's life.)

[Nirawen]

I agree that games can slowly cause desensitization in the same way that any form of media can but jumping from that to 'it made them do it', besides the fact that it sounds like they're stripping the killer of their responsibility, is such an obtuse statment.

I'll make them a deal, they have ten mentally unstable people who like guns go live with them for a week and I'll have 10 mentally unstable pokemon fans come live with me .

[unholytestament]

After Jack Thompson went away, I thought I'd heard the last of the majority of this type of silliness.

I miss Jack Thompson. At least he went about things in a more amusing way.

[OrcsRLame]

I agree that games can slowly cause desensitization in the same way that any form of media can but jumping from that to 'it made them do it', besides the fact that it sounds like they're stripping the killer of their responsibility, is such an obtuse statment.

I'll make them a deal, they have ten mentally unstable people who like guns go live with them for a week and I'll have 10 mentally unstable pokemon fans come live with me .

I don't think games cause desensitization. I've been playing games actively since I was like 5 years old. My favorite game series is God of War. I still get squeamish when I see a decent amount of blood in real life. I don't give a rat's ass how much blood I see in a game, but real life? Forget about it.

[unholytestament]

I'll make them a deal, they have ten mentally unstable people who like guns go live with them for a week and I'll have 10 mentally unstable pokemon fans come live with me .

I don't know... If the topic of which generation is best comes up there could be casualties...

[Etherius]

Video games as far as I'm concerned have about as much impact on our violent levels as TV, movies & music does - it's little. Sure, it provokes a few of us to hit a friend sometimes after we get killed by them or they steal our stars (thank you Mario Party), but the only way I could see this being in any form threatening to anyone is if they take it to heart.. in other words this isn't just a game anymore, it's life.. and who honestly puts games before their own physical and mental well being? ...*ahem* okay games can be a time sink, and I have procrastinated on a few matters, but that's my fault. Who lets it drive into their brain to the point of insanity? My guess is almost nobody.

Being dedicated is fine, being competitive is okay, but once in a while take a look at the screen and remember: it's just a game. It's a time sink, a hobby at best. What happens there won't and shouldn't necessarily reflect you and your abilities. I certainly can't hold a gun and fire it as well and proper as a character could, nor can I perform back flips jumping across platform to platform or cast lightning out of my hands. I play games for some competition, challenge, fun and a little social interaction, though usually enjoy it around others, kind of like back in the N64 days and having your friends over.. good times =D. They're a form of entertainment, and while it might bring out some emotions at the end of the day it's nothing to hold a grudge about.

Simply put, we are having fun, so bugger off.

[Deleted]

Blame the parents for buying their kids the games.

Besides, if a person can't distinguish fantasy from reality then they're fucked in the head anyway and anything could flick the switch.

[Nirawen]

I don't think games cause desensitization. I've been playing games actively since I was like 5 years old. My favorite game series is God of War. I still get squeamish when I see a decent amount of blood in real life. I don't give a rat's ass how much blood I see in a game, but real life? Forget about it.

One person a sample does not make . There's plenty of research and evidence on desensitization with the use of media in general as well as with games as a focus, that said with it being psychology it's easily argued as conjecture and a subject for a more specific thread .

[Solidito]

Funny how it's always old people who have no clue about these 'video games' that sprout out this nonsence.

Also, i didn't realise playing video games made you mentally ill..

[Pendulous]

People killing people? Blame the guy working behind the counter at a Gamestop.

I want to add something here, but that sentence alone is so stupid, I have to go take a nap.

[unholytestament]

As far as my own opinion goes, I do think video games can be desensitizing. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, and in my line of work my desensitization has actually been very helpful. People say that no matter how many violent movie scenes or video game scenes you see, you don't get used to seeing real blood, gore and dismemberment. In my case, I'd have to disagree.

My parents actually controlled what movies and video games I was exposed to for a long period of my life. They took Duke Nukem and Mortal Kombat away when I was around 10 years old or so, and didn't allow me to play M games or watch R movies until I was 15. I noticed that once I could experience that violent content more frequently and without their interference, stuff began to shock me less and less, until it got to the point where nothing shocked me or grossed me out at all. Fast forward to my college years, and when viewing horrific crime scene photos I was one of the few people in my classes that could actually focus on what was going on in the photo (direction of blood, entry/exit point, etc.) rather than the horror of the scene.

As has been stated in earlier in the thread, one person does not a survey sample make.

I have been engrossed in violent media my entire life. When I was little I could alternatively sit down and watch a copy of Aliens as readily as I would watch The Land Before Time. I got into PC gaming on the dawn of the CD-ROM, which brought untold amounts of violence before the ESRB was a twinkle in anyones' eye. I played Doom and Doom 2 years before the public media found out about it and made such a big deal, and the same happened again when Mortal Kombat was the scape goat of choice and again with Grand Theft Auto. I played Manhunt and disliked it not for its over the top violence but because it was a shit game.
All of this was under the supervision of my parents, of course. Many of the games I played my parents would either play with me or they would play them before allowing me access to them.

And yet I still cringe when I am shown real genuine violence. My time spent on sites like 4chan has exposed me to videos and images of real people really killing themsselves and it turns my stomach just thinking about it.

While I do believe violent media can desensitize people to some degree, I think it really has more to do with the way a person's mind works. It might just be that a person who thinks and functions the way you do can tolerate real violence due to what you've been exposed to, but people who think differently while being exposed to the same media might not ever reach your level of tolerance.

[Kanadei]

One person a sample does not make . There's plenty of research and evidence on desensitization with the use of media in general as well as with games as a focus, that said with it being psychology it's easily argued as conjecture and a subject for a more specific thread .

And yet no evidence has ever been proven connecting video games to violence, despite millions of dollars of research and decades of study, so I don't really see why it matters.

[zealo]

Its not the video game alone, people that commits mass murders are already mentally unstable before they play the game, I'd wish there was fewer kids on CoD though from some of the voices on the voice chat on Xbox Live.

[Powerogue]

And I just got back from a game where I hacked innocent scientists to tiny giblets with a bloody crowbar. I'm still a completely average, non-murdering citizen because I wasn't raised by sociopaths.

[Clockwork Pinkie]

Nothing new, media targeted movies for a long time, now it's something else's turn. Nothing will happen, world will still continue to turn as they make even more violent games for us to enjoy.