[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...