[yazboo]

I have noticed that many social science articles posted on Hacker News bring out critical comments about study design, doubts about the strength of the study's conclusions, that kind of thing.

This submission, on the other hand, is a link to some kind of gaming news website, which links to an abstract for an article in a Cyberpsychology (?) journal which costs $60 to access, and there is widespread and uncritical agreement with its supposed conclusion.

[umvi]

It's probably confirmation bias.

Same reason a study with positive outcomes about coffee/alcohol/gay parenthood/gender reassignment/<insert issue> are not criticized as much as a study on the same topic that had negative outcomes. We want certain things to be true so we (consciously or not) avoid criticizing studies bolstering what we want to be true and harshly criticize studies we want to be false.

I like to think science always prevails in the end (like with tobacco), but it can take half a century or more to converge on the truth.

[mywittyname]

I mean, part of this is probably also some degree of us intuitively knowing the answer.

If you have a friend group of 10 people, 4 of which regularly work out. You will probably notice that those 4 friends have less body fat and are more toned than the other 6. At that point, if a study came out saying that working out had no impact on body physique, you'd reflexively question the results.

That might sound ridiculous, but lots of people here grew up playing "violent" video games through the 90s-00s, and had large friend groups who did the same. And it's pretty likely that, for most of us, none of our friends ended up with violent or aggressive tendencies.

Anecdotes are not scientifically rigorous, but they aren't completely useless either. If violent video games caused measurable increases in aggressive behavior, people who were around a large cohort of people playing these games would notice this fact in action. Just like they'd notice that friends who eat a lot of cake tend to be larger than the one who don't.

[umvi]

There's some truth here, but it's important not to use anecdotes too much to guide intuition because the sample size is often too small and too biased.

For example, I have a group of 10 friends. All 10 of them (including myself) got covid, and we all agree it is no worse than the flu. I mean, yeah, we couldn't smell or taste for a few days, but we all recovered within a week. Therefore... I should reflexively question covid studies saying how dangerous it is because in my own experience it's not even worth making a fuss over?

Maybe to some degree, but the fallacy I committed by relying on my anecdote to guide my intuition is that me and all my friends are young, fit, healthy people. My group of friends didn't include the elderly or immunocompromised or morbidly obese, etc.

[aidenn0]

To put it a different way, the people who grew up to be violent individuals are probably not posting on HN, nor working at companies with people who post on HN, so the fact that everybody on HN isn't violent, despite playing violent video games is only weak evidence against there being a correlation.

In fact, I would be surprised for there to be zero correlation (even assuming there is no causation), as it is a reasonable assumption that naturally violent people are more likely to play violent video games.

[ajuc]

How about the fact that gaming grew by every metric by orders of magnitude between 80s and now and violent crime dropped by half of more everywhere in the world.

If the effect was even 0.01 with growth by 10000% we would have noticed.

[troupe]

I'm not sure that provides the statistical proof it appears to. Assume there were 1,000,000 violent incidents in 1980 and they were all caused by lead in the water. Violent video games caused no violence at a level that would even show up. If today we had 500,000 violent incidents and none of them were caused by lead but all 500k were caused by the prevalence of violent video games.

(I'm not trying to say that violent video games cause real life violence, but the numbers you describe don't offer any type of compelling evidence without other data being considered as well. )

[zadokshi]

> How about the fact that gaming grew by every metric by orders of magnitude between 80s and now and violent crime dropped by half of more everywhere in the world. If the effect was even 0.01 with growth by 10000% we would have noticed.

Have shootings not gone up? Has no one noticed it.

It’s counter intuitive to think that games that simulate practicing shooting people would have zero influence on people this inclined.

[aidenn0]

That's actually great evidence! Much better than "I and many of my friends who are currently successful played violent games and we are just fine." The latter is about as convincing as "My grandfather lived to be 90 and he smoked like a chimney."

[adamsea]

I mean it’s either good science or it isn’t.

[tomp]

> as it is a reasonable assumption that naturally violent people are more likely to play violent video games.

It's also a reasonable assumption that people who naturally want to avoid actual violence play violent video games instead.

This paranoia against violent video games was obviously fake from the start, and such a typically American thing - in line with the American puritan view that blowing up people in films or broadcasting police car chases is a-OK but (female) nipples or saying "fuck" is a big NO NO.

[aidenn0]

- The paranoia was not uniquely American; as a minor, I could walk into a store in the US and buy e.g. Duke Nukem 3D, while my friend in Germany could not do so.

- I'm not making the claim that video games lead to violence, I'm just saying that we should apply the same level of analysis to studies supporting views we already have that we do to supporting views we do not already have. If this study was well done, great! If it was poorly done, then it is appropriate to call it out. If the study truly wasn't able to find any correlation (positive, per my hypothesis, negative per yours), then either there really isn't any correlation (meaning all of the potential forces that would cause a correlation happen to be perfectly balanced (which would be surprising to me), or there is something wrong with the study.

- To be clear, I don't think there is a causal relationship between violent video games and violent behaviors.

- There are likely correlations between video-games and ADHD, as well as single-player video games (actually any solitary activity) and depression. There are links between both of those and violent behavior, particularly self-harm.

[skrebbel]

> a typically American thing

Not only. Eg in Germany there's long been an enormous stigma against violent video games. I haven't talked with German gamedevs for some years so maybe this loosened up since. But basically, if you worked in gamedev you preferred to tell your neighbours and acquaintances that you work "in IT". If they would find out you work on video games they'd pretty much fully cut you out of their lives.

(Note, to my anecdotal experience this is a purely German thing. I don't know other European countries where the same stigma exists)

[Aerroon]

>In fact, I would be surprised for there to be zero correlation (even assuming there is no causation), as it is a reasonable assumption that naturally violent people are more likely to play violent video games.

There's a lot of violence in society. There's even more violent media available. From news broadcasts to internet forum posts to books. Perhaps violent video games aren't particularly worse at that than all of the other media that portray violence? The news tends to have stories that are more gruesome than the things that happen in video games. The violence in video games is usually toned down or limited.

[gregmac]

> There's some truth here, but it's important not to use anecdotes too much to guide intuition because the sample size is often too small and too biased.

In a community like HN there's also kind of a "meta-anecdote" that emerges. If there was a link, you'd expect to see at least someone posting an ancedote about how their friend got into violent games and then became violent themselves; instead it's mainly the opposite.

I'm still not arguing this observation is scientifically rigorous in any way whatsoever, merely that multiple ancedotes can be more useful than a single one. There could be other reasons such as those that are violent or hang out with those that are don't post on HN - but that also hints there is something more to it then just or even the violent games themselves.

[throwaway0a5e]

>In a community like HN there's also kind of a "meta-anecdote" that emerges

>multiple ancedotes can be more useful than a single one

Sure. But that meta-anecdote based narrative can be highly biased based on the community that forms it.

A forum with an large respresentation of hospital doctors and a forum with a large representation of convenience store owners are going to have completely different meta-anecdote based narratives on whether packing heat is good or bad.

[ABCLAW]

I think there's a fetish for this "don't trust your anecdotes" reply, when the reality is more nuanced.

People will trust their anecdotes because in general they are right to. They don't need a double blind study to figure out that placing their hand on a heated element is a bad idea.

The question is whether the Bayesian confidence an individual places on their anecdotal knowledge is appropriate or not. In this case, plenty of people have a ton of personal experience with the subject matter, a ton of friends and colleagues with experience, and little to no evidence to suggest the contra factual is true.

Does that mean they're certainly right? No. But it certainly lowers the bar to evaluating yet further evidence of the position already held; why waste the time? If a study was released that was solid evidence that games did cause a significant uptick in violence, then examination would be warranted.

I know a bunch of people are going to take a contrarian position, but we operate in the real world with the same time complexity restrictions as the machines we work on. You don't need a double blind study to determine how to position your head while tying your shoelaces in the morning.

[SkyBelow]

The issue is there is entire areas of psychology studying when we get things wrong. If it works until it doesn't, is it really something you should be trusted? Let us not forget that confirmation bias would also apply to how we judge the accuracy of our anecdotes. Is it that we don't really have that many cases where relying on personal anecdotes betrays us, or is it that we just diminish those incidents and pay more attention to when it does go well for us?

[ABCLAW]

>If it works until it doesn't, is it really something you should be trusted?

Depends on why you need to trust something. If the failure state is multiple nukes going off, sure throw money and time at it until your systems are bullet proof. If you've purchased new shoes and need to design a study to figure out which foot you should start with when lacing up, maybe you're going too hard. What about something more chemical in nature; say you have a family recipe you and your family love. You might tinker around with it, but do you stop making it because you are upset by the intellectual sloth of not running double blind studies on Grandma's Famous Cumin Chili? No. Unless something slaps your Bayesian priors in the face, like a news report that says Chili recipes using Cumin might cause cancer.

Again, the idea is that we all come into this with Bayesian priors. You don't need (and will never get) 100% certainty to operate in the real world. I don't need to spend a few hours and $60 to go from 99.5% to 99.7% on this issue and I'm betting you don't either.

We will be, and largely are wrong about a ton of things. And in the majority of cases it doesn't matter one tiny bit. Like here. This is a study about a political flogging point that is 15 years past the point it conceivably could have been made into legislation. The study will be dated by the time there's a political push for the issue to be re-examined.

This is shoelace study v.2.0. We have more pertinent, more complicated and more impactful problems to study both on an institution and personal level, so why devote our limited mental processing time to this? Because you want to be "right"?

Have you ever read a recipe you've done before and thought to yourself "I really shouldn't make this, because I haven't presented this foo

[kbenson]

> Therefore... I should reflexively question covid studies saying how dangerous it is because in my own experience it's not even worth making a fuss over?

Should you question them? Yes.

Should you let your own experience and that of a few people around you override what you see to be a rigorous statistical study because you questioned it and looked into it? No. If you look into it and have serious questions about the rigor of the study? Maybe. Is that the case in the Covid studies? Probably not.

Whether this is about Covid or anything else, the important thing is to be able to asses information as it comes in and reassess your position based on the data available to you. Anecdotal data is invaluable and used by everyone every day to make decisions prior to receiving good outside rigorous data, because for many things we don't have good outside rigorous data.

[ehsankia]

To be fair we have well defined equations to decide if a sample size is large enough and to calculate the error in our errors.

In the case your examples, we already know that the CFR is lower than 10%, so a sample of 10 definitely is nowhere near enough to tell us anything useful. Now if the CFR was 50% and you had 0/10, maybe it'd be worth looking into it.

I'm curious though, have any of your friends had longer term effects? longer term smell/taste loss, brain fog, heart issues, memory issues, breathing issues, etc? The early reports on long term impact are at ~10-20%, so you may have 1 or 2 in your sample, but again your sample is small enough that you very easily could've had 0 too. Again, it depends heavily on what you're trying to disprove and what the rate of it is.

[Quarrelsome]

well to put it another way; in the time that I have lived violent video games have exploded in popularity and violent crime has apparently decreased substantially. That's not to say there's causality between the two but it would definitely support the premise that violent video games at least don't encourage violent crime.

[Natanael_L]

I also don't think there's a strong correlation / causation, but this isn't solid proof.

If there was a causation then the reduction in violent crime could be muted by a small factor due to games, while the net decrease is (as before) caused by an even larger independent factor. In other words, the net decrease could have been larger without the presence of games.

What it does instead show is a maximum plausible effect size, and that it likely isn't worse than the activities which it is replacing.

[WD-42]

What the hell? Were you all practicing CPR on each other or something?

[kiliancs]

Intuitively, it's hard to believe that witnessing and using violence doesn't have any negative effect on a person, even if in videogames.

I think that rather than asking ourselves "does this have a negative impact?" we should ask "what can I do that has a positive impact?".

Personally, I would never work on a game with significant violence. From my point of view, there are so many other things a human being can contribute towards the well-being and progress of humanity, and I would not feel happy with myself if I limited my contribution and my creativity to making another shooter.

[techlaw]

I work with a nonprofit group that does this. We produce prosocial video games intentionally designed to encourage prosocial outcomes.

The published studies (two so far) support their effectiveness. It's not easy to get the word out though without the funds for a publicist, advertising, etc.

[longdefeat]

-we should ask "what can I do that has a positive impact?"-

That's part of the point of this essay that was on HN last year: "Fortnite and the Good Life," which seems relevant here.

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-convivial-soc...

[diarmuid]

headshot === positive impact

they are just games and most (non crazy) people understand that

like hansel and gretel when they push the witch in the oven - its fiction and not intended to be a guide to life

[kiliancs]

I think you might be underestimating the fragility of the human being in so many aspects (2020 might be trying to teach us something in that regard). Consider how alcohol has a very negative (often disastrous) effect in so many lives, even though most people start drinking thinking they understand how alcohol is going to affect them and that they can keep it under control.

[troupe]

> its fiction and not intended to be a guide to life

You might read the actual tale of Little Red Riding Hood. It is very much meant as a guide for young girls in what to expect and watch out for in life.

[dmix]

That's an excellent article, thank you.

[furyofantares]

This comment got my interest but I don't see anything linked here that's written by Yuval Harari. I can't tell if I've missed something, or if you're referring to another book called Sapiens other than Yuval's, or something else.

[GTP]

I rarely play videogames, but when I do, I usually play FPSs. I think that a small dose of virtual violence could help in discharging your stress/anger.

[adamredwoods]

The Columbine murderers played a bit of FPS, I wish it had reduced their anger.

[hellotomyrars]

And yet the millions who buy Call of Duty every year somehow keep it in check and don’t commit mass murder.

[scpedicini]

I'm not sure I agree with your comment. While I would be willing to concede that witnessing the visualization of violence might have some kind of affect towards increased desensitization, that's not necessarily a negative.

In some situations being able to keep a cool head in a crisis or in an area where something like this might occur could actually prove to be a benefit, as you are less likely to enter a panicked state (such as working in an environment where you may witness excessive amounts of blood/gore, eg paramedic)

I think that the vast majority of people (teenagers included) are more robust than we give them credit for, and can distinguish fantasy from reality.

[seangrogg]

To take this even further, with the increasing popularity of games, if violent video games were linked to violence itself we should theoretically see pronounced numbers of streaming personalities (at least those involved in competitive games, which trend towards violence as a win condition) engaged in violent acts. Gaming communities such as Twitch, competitive game conferences such as Evo, events such as Riot's world finals, and establishments such as gaming bars should all have an outsized number of people ready to throw down moreso than their non-gaming cohorts.

And yet gamers remain relatively docile on the whole. And while they may get heated their debates about PlayStation vs XBox are about as likely to result in fatalities as the programming community's vim vs emacs or tabs vs spaces debates.

[Thorrez]

> And while they may get heated their debates about PlayStation vs XBox are about as likely to result in fatalities as the programming community's vim vs emacs or tabs vs spaces debates.

I can think of 2 incidents in the gaming community off the top of my head which led to fatalities. The SWATing of Andrew Finch, and the Jacksonville Landing shooting (that was an NFL game convention though, so it's debatable whether the game was violent). I certainly haven't heard anything like that about text editors or coding styles, but then maybe the number of gamers is higher than the number of programmers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Wichita_swatting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacksonville_Landing_shooting

[seangrogg]

I want to preface this with the fact that I do think that the Wichita swatting incident was a heinous crime and that those involved (both the hoaxers and the intended victim) were truly despicable people each in their own way.

That said, at the end of the day, the life was lost not because gamers were being violent due to a violent video game. None of the gamers involved so much as ever saw one another. Instead, an entirely innocent third party individual got erroneously targeted by a known type of hoax and, upon moving his hands wrong, was shot by a law enforcement official.

This was intended to be a case of gamer-on-gamer harassment over something that likely was spurred on by events in a violent video game (which is woefully common, though rarely to this degree). But the only violent act committed was by a police officer. And that's an important distinction.

(I assume we can elide the Jacksonville event as that happened during a Madden tournament; unless we want to make the case that football is more like Grand Theft Auto than it is baseball...)

[HeckFeck]

There will always be unhinged people in the world, with a tendency to violence. Video games or not, these people will kill and harm others. It's a dark truth.

Otherwise, we have to wonder how much Doom was played by Jack the Ripper or Ian Brady.

[adamredwoods]

There is evidence of gaming personalities committing suicide.

There is evidence of gamers doxxing, and even worse, swatting.

[mkr-hn]

There is evidence of astronauts who've walked on the moon punching people. Does walking on the moon make people violent?

[CM30]

There's also evidence of sports fans and music fans and film fans doing all those things, and people involved in all those committing suicide.

Does that make those other things toxic? On a purely comparative level, gaming is probably less 'toxic' if you go just by the worst things done by its fans.

[mamon]

But is gaming at fault here? Or maybe "gaming personalities" are simply people for which real life sucks, so they try to alleviate their pain by gaming a lot? Maybe gaming was the thing that delayed their suicide by months/years?

[seangrogg]

There's evidence of academic stress leading to suicide. Does that infer a causal link between academia and violence?

[adamredwoods]

It could, any studies?

Going back to streamers and video games, Twitch has definitely had its share of toxicity:

https://gamecrate.com/how-twitch-now-holding-streamers-respo...

[yters]

I read a story in the recent past about a 30 some year old constant gamer who lived in his parents' house who shot and killed his mother for messing with his gaming console. There is some anecdata for you.

[Blikkentrekker]

H.N. is also a place where one will simply be downvoted for criticizing the methodology, even if the post reveal nothing about whether one support the conclusion or not.

But any place with “votes” has such effects.

[andrewla]

Yes, I think that confirmation bias is very strong here.

My rule for analyzing social science articles is pretty simple: If the study contradicts your intuition or understanding of human behavior, it is likely that it does not support the conclusion because of extensive methodological errors or statistical skullduggery.

If, on the other hand, the study confirms your intuition or understanding of human behavior, it is likely that it does not support the conclusion because of extensive methodological errors or statistical skullduggery.

[dolni]

More important than that is the result of the Grievance Studies affair.

When there is such heavily biased review of social science papers, it calls the legitimacy of all of them into question.

[Blikkentrekker]

My rule for analyzing social science is: “it's bullshit till proven otherwise.”.

The simple fact is that I cannot ever think of any solid methodology to investigate a “link” between these two things and that the man who devises it would deliver a rather groundbreaking idea.

How would a study such as this even work?; it's all Quatsch.

[andrewla]

The only difference between your view and mine is this:

> till proven otherwise

It's still bullshit even if proven otherwise. If I roll my magic dice and determine that it's going to rain tomorrow, and it ends up raining, this in no way validates my methodology.

[belorn]

There has historically been fairly consistent and repeated claims that teens and young adults are influenced by fictional media into anti-social behavior, despite the lack of strong evidence. There has also been consistently a strong need to explain divergent and deviant behavior, and a desire to stamp it down.

So since we have learned that violent song lyrics does not cause anti-social behavior in teens, nor that of violent movies, it seems as a good default stance that neither does violent video games. I would also default the same stance to porn consumption, based on the same logic.

I would prefer if we got a final study that gave a definitive answer if consumption of fiction causes anti-social behavior. It seems to me that fiction is simply an medium for which people can safely explore cultural norms, but in terms of causing anti-social behavior we would need to look at social environment and biochemical triggers for social behavior.

[ajuc]

It's hard to avoid confirmation bias when it comes to things everybody experience in their everyday lives. Almost everybody games at some point in their lives. Everybody know people who play video games for significant percent of their free time. If the link was significant we would've noticed by now.

It's very hard to argue video games and crime are linked when the curves are:

https://i.imgur.com/hSHDyoH.png

https://cdn.statcdn.com/Statistic/190000/191219-blank-355.pn...

Of course it's possible that the link is small and other factors overpower it. But it's unlikely, and given the everyday experience with people who play games and people who are violent - there's very little evidence of any link.

So indeed we fail to the confirmation bias. Or, said in other words: "ordinary claims require very little evidence".

[claudiawerner]

It's entirely confirmation bias; try posting a study or meta-analysis showing the inverse, or - and I think this will fare even worse - a meta-analysis of the effects of pornography on attitudes or sexual aggression.

The literature on pornography is more mixed and contentious, though. On violent video games and "gaming addiction", there seems to be less and less going for the hypothesis that they cause violence or aggression.

However, from what reading I've done, you will find that longitudinal results in porn and video games are dissonant with experimental results in lab settings. This suggests that while there are effects, they do not persist to the level thought. More complex models (such as the confluence model in porn effects research) which try and explain apparent hidden variables are also gaining steam. There are actually only four or five major contemporary figures in porn effects research; Wright and Tokunaga finding that porn has negative effects on everyone; Hald and Malamuth finding that the main or only worry only lies in those low in agreeableness and predisposed to aggressive behaviour.

To a bunch of gamers and porn-users (including myself in both of those categories), these things are either things we spend a lot of time doing (for a portion of HN, I suspect their entire leisure time is taken up by video games), or they are very personal and private. Nothing is more personal than what we get off to, so any analysis of porn tends to be taken as an assault on sexuality itself (though interestingly, much as with advertising or propaganda, the very same sexuality cultivated by porn consumption).

I've tried discussing the literature on video games, porn, violence, aggression, and morality before on both HN and Reddit, and the discussion is either ignored or shot down with downvotes because any discussion at all feels like a personal attack.

I'd recommend for anyone interested in the topic of video games and aggression or behaviour, and indeed the hot topic of "video game addiction" to check out the papers by CJ Ferguson, who has a positive view on video games. At the same time, check out the people he replies to and the people replying to him. It's ridiculous to draw any conclusion from a study that happens to reach the top of HN.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

We're all bayesians in some sense. If you show me weak evidence for what I alreaddy believe, I'll just believe it even more strongly. I'll argue for it, but mostly based off my prior belief. If you show me weak evidence for what I don't believe, I'll adjust my disbelief of it just a little downwards. I'll argue against it, but mostly based off my prior belief.

I think you're seeing an important difference between acceptance of a conclusion versus agreement with it. I doubt this study is changing anyone's minds.

[eivarv]

You're very right; it's probably a combination of confirmation bias and the fact that this has been result has been shown by just about every serious study on the subject so far.

Besides: claims of a link between violent video games and aggressive behavior was never backed by anything other than assumptive moral arguments, much less studies (or even coherent reasoning and valid logic).

[IfOnlyYouKnew]

The biases of the tech crowd, and HN specifically, wouldn't be half as bad if they occasionally showed a willingness to investigate them, instead of continually insisting their reasoning is uniquely based on "logic" and "science".

[blululu]

There is certainly bias, however it is worth pointing out that the cited research is not rejecting the null hypothesis. Issues around sample size, methodology and study design are much more serious when a study claims to reject the null hypothesis where the burden of proof is considerably high. Furthermore, it was an almost universally accepted truth in the 90's that violent video games would lead to the total collapse of civil society (a claim that was asserted with no real evidence). The fact that a large number of people grew up with violent video games as children and now lead totally peaceful lives means that the result of this study is really not that shocking in light of people's priors.

[FeepingCreature]

Free on sci-hub.

[vlz]

https://sci-hub.st/10.1089/cyber.2020.0049

[ineedasername]

Probably because it's a 10 year longitudinal study, which is significantly better than the endless stream of small sample limited observational studies. Also without the full contents and methodology, we can't acty evaluate the study very well.

Thise leaves bias from confirmation of existing beliefs along with more anecdotal evidence not directly connected to videogames, such as decreasing crime rates over the period of time that videogames have become more violent. However relying on that correlation alone is a post hoc ergo proper hoc fallacy.

In short, we simply don't know enough about the study to overcome comment with substance, at the same time that the study corresponds to conclusions based on similar research. I'm hesitant to declare "confirmation bias" though when it does ostensibly confirm other research, though it's not really a replication, so I'd withhold final judgement.

[SkyBelow]

No surprise. Even among scientists there is an issue where the level of critical review a paper gets is largely dependent upon how agreeable the findings are to the person reviewing it. This is a reason that even science isn't fully trustable in areas where personal beliefs are very strongly held.

For one fun field, look at the level of criticism papers in parapsychology (the study of the paranormal) and compare it to if they get more criticism or not than the average paper in psychology. There is a particularly fun study (which I do not recall the name of) where two scientists teamed up, one who thought parapsychology was a true field and one who thought it was fake. They worked together on the same experiment and each produced results that agreed with them, but neither could find a flaw in the other's methodology or results (other than they disagree with their own results).

[lr4444lr]

You are not wrong generally about potential HN bias, but to be fair, the onus is on the people who believe video games are causative factors of violent behavior to first show correlation. If they can't even do that, then we are under no obligation to throw away the null hypothesis.

[mc32]

Here’s a test:

Design this game with negative stereotypes and see how many people suddenly flip on how they think about the influence of the in-game social and anti-social aspects.

[friendlybus]

Hatred came out in 2015, and was effectively banned in some regions. A true test on this topic will never happen in the public, Adults Only rated-games only get so far.

"Mike Splechta of GameZone questioned the game's timing and how it could become the "next scapegoat" in a climate that already held video games responsible for school shootings and other violence."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatred_(video_game)#Reception

[dleslie]

The thing with Hatred is that it isn't all that good of a game; so it doesn't make for compelling critical analysis of social response. It has detractors but lacks many supporters, and so it was easily swept aside.

Presently we are seeing significant alarm raised by media over the content, not bugs, within Cyberpunk 2077; accusations have been raised by major outlets that it includes bias in support of law enforcement, a transphobic setting, and bog standard sexism.

But despite its severe bugs and missing features, it's enjoyed three solid weeks as a top seller on Steam and easily made back its expenses through PC pre-orders. For all the flak it gets, the game has an enormous and happy fanbase.

What I see happening is a bifurcation in game players: those who reject the gamer label and reject moral terpitudes, and those who embrace the gamer label and tolerate or enjoy moral terpitude.

I expect that in ten years we'll see an industry with healthy diversity in players and content; divided into their separate groups and with stores that have adapted to cater to specific groups.

A hundred years ago there was the Bay and Sears, and now those have been superseded by a large variety of clothing vendors. I don't expect to buy a cardigan and leather bdsm mask in the same store, right?

[rriepe]

Hacker News users aren't smart, we just type good

[iso8859-1]

Wouldn't it be better to use an adverb here?

[rriepe]

My bad. Message should read:

Hacker News users aren't smartly, we just type good

[lordCarbonFiber]

Link to the paper for anyone that wants to look more critically at the study. https://sci-hub.do/https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.10...

[mattmaroon]

Even though I think there’s probably no causal link between video game violence and real violence, I feel I can safely condemn this study to the trash heap without reading it. There’s no chance it is at all scientific or ever had any chance of changing the minds of the people who ran it.

[CodeGlitch]

Perhaps it's because it's confirming something that we all knew anyway? I'm sure most of the HN crowd have played all sorts of video games, and we lead pretty non violent lives (I have to assume).

[Bodell]

I think maybe there is some discussion to be had about the difference between personal violence, such as a particular person carrying out a violent crime, and the general acceptance of violence as a viable solution to a myriad of problems.

I both do not know any violent criminals personally, and have witnessed a rather staggering amount of acceptance of violence in our culture.

I’m reminded here of when the director of communications at Lockheed Martin responded with the following when asked about a possible connection between Columbine and the manufacturing of Triton missiles just down the street (Lockheed being a major employer of many parents in the area):

“I guess I don't see that specific connection because the missiles that you're talking about were built and designed to defend us from somebody else who would be aggressors against us.”

We also accept violence in the criminal justice system even to stop non-violent crimes. We also support wars, see it’s approval rating of post 9-11. I’ve had many a person tell me the solution to some Perceived racial problem was to “wipe them out” and only one of them physically assaulted me.

So it seems to me that we are okay with violence but often do not like carrying it out ourselves in personal disputes. Yet this may only be detoured but the treat of violence being carried out on us if we were to. Unless of course we are in the military and have been told/trained to carry out violent activities with impunity. All in all I am not convinced we are a peaceful nonviolent civilization, quite the opposite. Nor am I convinced that seeing accepted violence everyday on your T.V. Screen, be it video game or otherwise, does not affect this pervasive psychological mindset, agin the opposite.

[908B64B197]

It's funny how some folks have been trying to prove there's a link for 30 years now? And every step of the way there's really nothing to show for.

Reminds me of the Dungeons and Dragons moral panic of the 80's [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/us/when-dungeons-dragons-...

[XorNot]

Also because it's been shown time and time again in study after study.

[IfOnlyYouKnew]

Relevant comparison: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25575971

[damla]

I observed this phenomenon in a few other subjects too, like articles about benefits of certain supplements or substances, that praise some parenting styles, etc.

[nathias]

I don't need a study to know that's true.

[AtlasBarfed]

Didn't we just have a HN about a depressing amount of food studies being sponsored by food conglomerates?

[nelsonenzo]

no one outside of the video game industry would waste their time with this study because they already know the outcome from having passively observed several hundred million children not become violent from video games.

Video games do not make people violent - and based on my observation of at least several thousand peers - it actually has the opposite effect. The truth is video games are a healthy outlet, as well as self train an individual to deal with defeat over and over and over again.

I bet if you took groups of individuals whom played sports for X hours a week, and compared them to an equivalent number of individuals whom played video games for X hours a week, the sports group would have more violent tendencies. This isn't just hyperbola, after observing as many humans as we have in both these activities, it's practically self evident.

[boomboomsubban]

>This isn't just hyperbola, after observing as many humans as we have in both these activities, it's practically self evident.

*hyperbole, though my autocorrect also tried to screw me.

I'm not sure about this comparison though, as there seems to be a connection between concussions and violent behavior. Comparing track members to video game players would be somewhat interesting.

[eeZah7Ux]

It's pretty dishonest to put all kinds of video games in the same bucket and then make sweeping generalizations about their health impact.

[hombre_fatal]

I don't understand what you're implying except that you think that there are violent video games that can affect behavior, something that the paper set out to test by comparing 789 games ranging from Boggle to Gears of War.

When I was a kid in the 90s, Oprah claims that Dungeons and Dragons caused Satanic worship and Grand Theft Auto groomed children for larceny. That's where our culture is coming from.

[AtlasBarfed]

Here on the HackerNews, we have a lot of fretting about facebook manipulating the moods of people, the control of people by targeted social networking ads, and many other mind manipulations as a result of our media and (mis)information firehose society.

Yet we get to the effect of ultraviolent gun-worship games, and the reaction is swift to absolve them of any role in our society.

Still smells like "the preciousssss" undercurrent on pot legalization. Which I'm in favor of only because of the failures of the drug war, especially in destabilizing Mexico and Central America into narco mafia states.

America has radicalized around guns and gun violence, to the point they are religions. Sure, go ahead and say there are no effects from violent gun games, then go talk to your kids about the school shooting drills. Sure we can argue that gun manufacturers and partisan wedge politics have elevated gun worship and not 25 years of shooter games.

I get there aren't smoking gun game studies. But we are way far from the days of cartoon Doom.

[jchw]

The assertion that violent video games cause violence is pretty non-sensical to begin with given that violent media already existed before video games. It’s just another way to push censorship. You see a lot less criticism when the same thing is done for pornography and eroticism, even though there is no real hypothesis for why it would be any different.

[nindalf]

While I don't think violent video games cause violence, it's not a completely ridiculous premise. Interactive video games require you to take and execute the decision yourself, putting yourself in the shoes of the player character.

If you've played the Last of Us 1 or 2, you know what I'm talking about. If you saw it, it would affect you deeply. But actually doing those things hits so much harder. Is it possible that has a deeper effect on us compared to a movie? I don't know, but it's not a ridiculous proposition.

[jchw]

Film was scary too at one point. And before that, books. The media became more sophisticated over time, and the moral panics always followed. Yes, this “new” media is interactive and immersive, but there has never been that much compelling evidence that increased immersion actually changes matters that much.

I think VR may be an interesting test case in the near future as it is immersive enough to potentially be more traumatic and more unsettling... but that still doesn’t mean playing GTA or Doom increases your odds of going on a shooting spree.

The fact that you can make potentially more impactful stories using more modern media seems neutral to me. But to be frank, you really desperately do not need modern technology and fancy graphics to make an incredibly emotional, impactful game. Just look at indie games like Undertale and Celeste.

[TedDoesntTalk]

> Film was scary too at one point.

And there have been many film-inspired murders. the mass shooting inspired by the Dark Night. John Hinckley’s assassination attempt on Reagan ( inspired by Taxi Driver ).

John Lennon’s murder was inspired by The Catcher in the Rye!

Here’s a link to some:

https://www.newsweek.com/nine-horrible-real-life-crimes-were...

And remember, not all such incidents are famous. So doubtless there are more.

There are sick people in the world who are indeed influenced by all sorts of media.

this was the key idea behind A Clockwork Orange.

Whether such media influences “healthy” people is another question.

[jchw]

Here’s my stance: if we can’t show a meaningful and strong correlation, it doesn’t matter. People have a personal responsibility to follow the law. Consumption of such material needs to be so dangerous that it justifies compromising speech rights, and as of now, decades past the original video game violence debates, we’re still not even sure it does anything.

People can be “inspired” by a film or a game to do something illegal, but it’s impossible for us to tell if they were simply likely to do it anyway, so individual cases don’t say very much.

[TedDoesntTalk]

It also depends on the person. We are all individuals with millions of different variables contributing to our behavior, some genetic and some environmental.

Some of us may be driven to violence by video games. And maybe those people aren’t included in these studies.

[Miner49er]

Well violent media and violent video games can both cause violence? Just cause violent media already existed doesn't mean violent video games don't still cause violence.

[jchw]

Why would we be concerned about video games and not cinema? All of the sudden, violent media is concerning when it happens to align with a generational gap?

[SkyBelow]

One thing I don't quite get is the extent that people who are against the idea that (violent) videos games cause violence seem seem to have a very significant about face in opinion when the topic switches away from strictly physical violence to those that would fall more under the topics you raised, yet the logic is pretty much the same either way.

[TedDoesntTalk]

Violent media is not interactive. It is one-way.