SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - Violent video games blamed for Virginia Tech slayings

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1, if your kid spends 12 hours a day playing games (violent or not) then you shouldnt be a parent as your simply not capable. thats not society or the entertainment industry to blame.

But it happens that parents place their little kids at the Tv to get rid of them during the day, or are glad that they are out of sight, or they go to a job, or whatever. If such parents should be parents is unimportant here. It is poor reality in millions of households in western nations, unfortunately, with US households being by far in the lead. I speak as an ex-professional here.

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noone is 'making' a kid sit down and play violent games and i doubt any game could be called a 'pseudo-reality', the graphics and interfaces arent that good yet. 'crysis' may come closest yet to a believable image but in the end your still sat tapping at a keyboard in the realworld. if your grasp on reality is so thin to begin with that you may think triangles and pixels are real then your a threat to the public regardless of trigger or cause.

You have no realistic impression of how attractive such action images are for young people due to their colours, action, sounds. Little kids you can even impress with even less sophisticated graphics. If you have a group of let'S say 14 year olds, and you give them a choice to play the latest action shooter, or a board game like Othello, I hold ever bet that the clear majority will go for the action shooter (especially the boys). That's how kids and juveniles are. they prefer action to alternatives most of the time. Why do you think games like this have become so incredibly popular that they make more money per year than the whole movie business? Because only adults above the age of 35 play them? For game addicts, the pseudo-reality of games can become a replacement for their real life, and as a matter of fact this phenomenon is causing more and more headache for psychotherapists.

You may want to consider some TV-related scientific data as published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

http://archpedi.ama-assn.org

It is payware-texts and not directly linkable, you need to search for it if you are interested:

2005; 159:619-625:

Frederick J. Zimmerman and Dimitri A Christakis of the university of Washington, Seattle, conducted a longtime study with more than 11.000 children. From 1986 until 2000 they conducted regular examinations and interviews. Abilities in reading, writing were compared with TV consuming rates between the ages 3 and 5 years.

Kids of that age sat at least 2 hours at TV per day, most of the program was rated as "pedagogical valuable". Two third of the children under the age of 2 already watched TV for 1.3 hours per day (all data for USA).

Result: at the age of 6 and 7, children consuming TV under the age of 2 perform significantly poorer at school, even when factors like family background, social environment and special training gets considered.The group of 3-5 year old consumming TV showed a slight increase in short time memory performance. Concerning maths and understanding written texts there was no effect to be found.

2005; 159: 614-618:

A study from New Zealand came to the significant result that increased TV consummation between 5 and 15 years decreases the probability of acchieving a successful school-leaving qualification (? Schulabschluss). A TV consummation of 2 hours per day or more leads this effect to become statistically highly significant. There is also a correlation with low social staus of the family and lower IQs. the negative consequences of TV consummation persists even if the latter factors get extracted from the calculation.

There is some indication that computers not being used for playing could help to increase abilities in readiong and calculation. So, it makes a difference if kids passively watch TV, actively use computer for non-gaming, or gaming. however, these results in favour of PC's positive results on mental developement of children are heavily disputed by many experts in the educational field, and accoridng examinations are critised for methodical reasons. I think it will be many years until they reach some kind of consensus - if ever.

I did not search for it again while writing this, but there was some recent scientific results being published, explaining that excitement of the kind you experience during an exciting video game affect your memory performance on biochemical levels. It comes down to that neurochemicals get produced that prevent your memory from storing things you just learned from books , so that your memory and thus learning effort degrades in performance. That'S why learning should not be embedded by periods of hectic and exctiing action before, or afterwards (teachers know that since longer, I assume).

It was also published just days ago that very small kid's brains get ill-"programmed" on a neuronal level if they are allowed to consume monitor pictures and sounds from the speakers, becausue the relation between what they see and what they hear cannot be understood by them yet, so both signals make the brain to build neuronal connections that are working false and thus negartively influence cognitive and intellectual activity later and outside that context. Learning last but not least means reforming of neuronal connections inside the brain, something that the wide public does not know. Learning can be trained, but that ability as well as learning itself gets lost more and more the older we become - that's why we find it increasingly harder to learn new things at higher ages. - It was a German essay that I just flew over some days ago, but I can't find it again, too bad. It was very interestingly written, and easy to understand.

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2, gamings effects on the intellect are far from proven either way, pro-gamers often have well above average IQ's and 'action' gaming in general is good for brain activity, slow pace games that dont stimulate are not so good for you.

You really push it far here. first you say there is no proof, but then you state that gaming effects brain activity. Anyhow, it is layman's psychology to conclude that action games in general train your rflexes and slow games are not stimulative and are not good for you. there were repeatedly attempts to make some scientific evidence for these claims (often made by people having relations to the gaming industry, or want to defend their own gaming), but these so far lacked the needed statisctal substance and so far are not taken serious in the scietific community. I refer to talks and debates I have wsith former colleagues ion these things, occasionally.

Oh, just in case you don't know me, Godalmighty, I have been psychologist myself, but am not working in that field anymore.

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3, jack thompson is a douche, he went on tv saying violent games had been found in the guys room before the police had even identified him. the man is a moronic liar who will shortly be disbarred.

4, very very few games are ultra-violent, the only game i can think of which would fall under that category is manhunt, a 18+ game that shouldnt be in the hands of a minor and features less violence then many movies and books (bible included?? ooohh more controversy ;) )

so far there is no link at all between this nutjob that went on a rampage and games, iam struggling to think of any link to any killing sprees with games in the past.

As I pointed out in my previous posting, the game in question needs to be seen in a higher context - as a symptom of a culture that certainly expresses a great love for explicitly illustrating acts of violance and brutality in all it's medias. the rest of my posting there is a classic vulnerability-theory you often can find in psychologic literature. such theories claim that every individual has an individual threshold concerning for example stress, which is depending on individual variables and factors like biography, living conditions, genetics, and so on. If environmental signals ("input") reaches and exceedes these individual treshold values, the reaciton in question is being shown, or the symptoms will develope (in this case: cognitive safeties fail and the player turns into a murderous maniac). If the external "stress level" does not exceed this treshhold value, the reaction in question will not be shown.