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Do videogames cause violence?

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Rightwing86

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Hello all. I recently got into a debate on whether violent videogames cause violence? Any input would be appreciated. I am a gamer myself, but am not a violent person. Sure I had the occasional scrap in highschool and early childhood for being picked on, but that's about it.
 
i dont think they do, if anything, they can provide a readily available outlet for frustration, and in that sense can help prevent violence
 
Violent video games don't kill people.
They kill virtual characters.
 
Only if you can get hold of the rat bastard who just killed you.

The internet gaming generation has lost much of the joys of console gaming of the past: beating the hell out of your friends when the match doesn't go your way. :mrgreen:
 

I think our high stress jobs and our standard of living that requires most Americans to perform highly skilled work for a minimum of pay combined with a culture that has puritanical views on sex and drugs is more of an influence on violence than video games ever could be.
 
I completely agree with you posters. The reason I bring this up is because yesterday in my Criminal Justice class we had a OPD (Oxford Police Department) officer come in. He was talking about school shootings, and he than in my opinion ignorantly assumed that violent videogames were the cause of these attacks because he suggested that every one of these shooters was "addicted to violent videogames." For one, he presented no proof of this, and two it is just such a tired debate that has no proof to back it up. For every study that suggests there might be violence I can find one from Harvard Medical etc that suggests otherwise.

NOw I am not suggesting that having a young child sit in front of a violent videogame for prolonged periods of time, without having been taught from parents what is wrong or right could no doubt become violent. Of course you could argue they might become violent anyway. But this is where parenting comes into play. I played violent video games from a young age, but I also knew that hurting people and causing pain to innocent people was wrong. Did this stop me from shooting people and running over people in GTA when I was 16? Heck no, it was fun. Am I still highly upset and disturbed when someone gets hurt in real life? Hell yes. I havn't been desensitized either. That is another argument. I don't like seeing reporters getting shot by Apache Helicopters I found that video hard to watch. Yet, I play an apache gunner in Call of Duty MW 2, and don't bat an eye. It's not the same, it never will be, there is a seperation from fantasy and reality that most people have. Yes there may be that one person out there who cannot tell the difference between the two, that is not a reason to blame the game, it is a flaw in his human nature and he will either need treatment or punishment depending on his actions.

"steps off his soapbox"
 
No, actually the reverse is true.


A very easy way to blow this stupid claim out of the water is to attack the attempt at causation that this moron attempts to make. Simply say "well if they shot people because they played violent video games then what about all the other people that play them? Why don't they shoot up schools, too?"
 
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The answer is no. Usually when someone blames an external source like books, pornography, violent shows, violent video games, drugs, the devil, mob mentality and other things for their wrong doing they are trying to get off the hook and remove any responsibility they might have for their actions. Some of those things might give the individual some ideas but they certainly do not cause anything.
 
No. /end thread

hehe


but seriously. No, they don't. A videogame isn't going to make an otherwise non-violent kid a killer. Just not gonna happen.
 
Video games and violent music are just that. games and music. I don't think video games cause a person to be violent. HOWEVER, having said that...I do believe that if a person is unstable already..immersing themselves in violence, only leads to more depression and violence. All these parents that say hey...this video game or this group caused my kid to go to school with a gun and shoot up his classmates...are just trying to pass the buck. They just don't want to admit that they didn't pay enough attention to their kids to notice that their kids needed help, so they blame what they can.
 

I'm sure that people can become desensitized to death, and danger due to video games. I also believe I've heard of children attempting things they've seen on tv in real life (ie doing a choke hold on their younger siblings, who inadvertently die), and I heard once of a man who physically assaulted a cop, hopped on his bike, and tried to evade them by crossing into the opposite lanes. He was caught, and he said later that it had always worked in Grand Theft Auto.

Like anything, i suppose it depends on just how stupid people can be, so video games can cause violence. Especially if you've just been lag-killed for the thousandth time in COD4, and you're right pissed (and psychotic).
 

We had a drug adled moron go on a GTA 4 like ramage a couple of years ago.

I believe that he may have done it after being on meth playing GTA4 for a couple of days straight
 
No, they don't cause violence. Violence is independent of some damn video game. People are either violent or not on their own accord.
 
Now here's a question I have: Why does our nation allow violence in our video games, tv shows, and movies, even if it's controversial, but not sex? That is we seem to have more of a hang up on sex, even "romantic" sex, in our media than we do about violence.
 
I think there's obviously a lot more to it than just games causing violence.

Repeter touched on one problem with the desensitization of gore. That stuff may be fine for someone mature and stable enough to recognize reality and fantasy. But when someone's brain is very young and still forming, yeah I think it glamorizes violence (and I say this as my 10 year old is in the next room "shooting" cute little mice while playing a Tom & Jerry game :lol.

When someone spends all of their free time on a computer alone shooting things, I think they probably have issues to begin with. The same could be said for anyone who avoids reality and just messes around online all the time whether they're participating in violent games, porn or anything for that matter.

While video games in and of themselves don't exactly cause violence, the entire package is worth looking at.
 

irresponsible breeding and parenting is far more the cause

now it is true that the military uses similar "games" to desensitize people who have never killed. Of course 100 years ago more people were hunters and farmers so that hurdle was not as common

it is also true that some school yard (gun free zone) killers had no firearms training but had rather high hit to shots fired ratios due to video game training

but the bottom line is that leftwing policies over the last 50 years has encouraged irresponsible people to breed a far higher rates than t hey should and we get lots of children who are not properly raised
 
Rightwing86 said:
Hello all. I recently got into a debate on whether violent videogames cause violence?.
Click to expand...


I think the rise in violence has little to do with videogames, but more to do with a lack of morals being taught at home and elsewhere, compared to previous generations.

The first arcade video games came out when I was a teenager, but my generation grew up watching westerns like Gunsmoke, war movies like Sands of Iwo Jima, other violent movies like Chuck Norris martial arts flicks, and violent crime dramas like Mike Hammer and Chinatown. Now, we were in fistfights constantly, but the use of weapons was rare; deliberate murder was even more rare, and mass murder was all but unheard of among teenagers.

I don't think the difference was video games; I think it is a failure of the preceeding generation to teach a solid moral foundation to the newer generation.

Now... if you take a teenager who:
1. Has not been taught much if any morality.
2. Is unpopular among his peers, harassed/bullied/etc, and resents it.
3. Is unsocialized and to some degree isolated.
4. Already has violent revenge fantasies...

And THEN you let him spend endless hours playing GTA and other games where the violence has no moral context at all; which also contributes to him remaining more isolated and unsocialized... well yeah, that could contribute to helping him make that decision to go off and do something crazy.

Normal kids are able to seperate fantasy(games) from reality. Kids who have gone around the bend without anyone noticing somehow, not so much.
 
We have to keep something in mind.

GTA 4 sold about 3 million copies in the US on release day. Assuming that one person bought one copy that's about three million people playing the game after opening day.

Actually it'd be more because of friends and subsequent copies sold on subsequent days but we'll stick with 3 million for now.

I know of about five or six crime incidents where people claimed to be emulating GTA after the release of GTA 4. Now, just for funsies lets say there were 100 of these crimes, we just didn't detect them all.

That means that 0.0033333333333333335% of the people that played GTA went out committed GTA-style crimes.

NOT STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT
 
Of course not. If video games "caused violence" then there would be millions of violent psychopaths in the US.
 
I believe President Bush and SECDEF Rumsfeld were fond of Pac Man and Space Invaders. Coincidence? I think not.
 
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I don't know that I'd reference Pac Man as an example of how video games don't impact our youth.

Lots of kids sit around in the dark, eating magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music. :lol:
 
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