[_delirium]

It's interesting that "violent games" and "violent music" often get blamed (often by the same people), but "violent films" or "violent novels" less often. I would guess demographics are a big part of it: lots of people who don't think of themselves as potential killers like horror films, but they think of video games, or black metal, as something only weird obsessives are into, because people in their circles aren't into them.

I'm personally rather more disturbed that people actually enjoy watching the Saw series of films, than I am by people playing Call of Duty or buying Dimmu Borgir albums, but ymmv.

edit: That isn't to say that I think violent films should be banned, either. But I'm more weirded out by the fact that some really gory stuff is really popular, than I am by anything that comes out of the game or music industries.

[Osmium]

> I'm personally rather more disturbed that people actually enjoy watching the Saw series of films

Isn't that the truth. I appreciate this is largely preaching to the choir, but it seems increasingly bizarre that sexual content (including simple nudity) is so often censored, while graphic violent acts are everywhere in mainstream entertainment. What are people afraid of?

[Swizec]

And by people you mean Americans. Here in Europe the world is a little different.

A few years ago a large advertising festival ran jumbo ads across Slovenia. They were everywhere. The only thing on them was a pair of naked soaped up boobs.

Nobody even batted an eye.

[TwistedWeasel]

It's always amazed me that we seem to try harder to protect children from seeing a nipple than we do to prevent them from seeing depictions of people being killed.

[btilly]

There was some fascinating research on this in the 90s. Apparently most Americans were more concerned about violence in movies than sex. But thought their neighbors were more concerned about sex than violence.

Our beliefs about other people's beliefs affect what issues we'll complain about in public. With the result that there is more care taken in our ratings to prevent children seeing sex than violence.

[balsam]

Isn't there a name for this kind of fallacy? It's on the tip of my tongue. There was an anecdote (an example, rather) where each member of a family wants to go outdoors while assuming that everybody else will choose to remain indoors, and, out of being "considerate", everybody chooses to remain indoors. Comedy or tragedy ensues.

Edit: Found it: Pluralistic Ignorance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance. Uncited, but interesting statement: "...Pluralistic Ignorance can be caused by the structure of the underlying social network, not cognitive dissonance."

[randomx89]

I thought the name for this situation was groupthinking : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

"Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people, in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an incorrect or deviant decision-making outcome"

[storf45]

Also, Google, "Abilene Paradox" - sounds eerily similar...

[TwistedWeasel]

I had never thought about it that way. We've found ourselves in a situation where we're more embarrassed to be caught watching something with nudity than violence because we made assumptions about other people that may be incorrect.

[cookiecaper]

It's about the typical reaction to each image. A normal person will repulse from depictions of gore and violence because most people are not naturally inclined to that kind of imagery, so it's less important to regulate because its effect on the vast majority of the viewership is not dangerous, though contributing to the desensitization toward violence and crime is obviously counterproductive and individuals should take care to control their personal intake.

Pornographic or erotic imagery is different. It taps into a natural impulse that almost every person has and most likely doesn't promote particularly virtuous deployments of that inclination. Sex, and by extension sexual imagery, has a very powerful pull on most people and the use of sexual impulses must be tightly controlled if reasonable social cohesion is to be maintained.

Will and Ariel Durant, prominent historians from the mid-1900s: "No man, however brilliant or well-informed, can dismiss the wisdom of the laboratory of history. A youth boiling with hormones will wonder why he should not give full freedom to his sexual desires; if he is unchecked by custom, morals, or laws, he may ruin his life before he understand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group."

I find that description extremely apt. Sexual imagery provokes a more fervent reaction because it has a much more dangerous effect on a much wider segment of the populace than violent imagery.

[rosser]

And not just being killed, but being dismembered while still alive...

[6thSigma]

I haven't heard of "violent music" getting blame in a long time. I think video games kind of took over that rhetoric just because people, mostly children, are immersed in the game in which they are shooting and killing things. Whereas with a movie and even lesser with music they are just watching/listening someone else's story.

Video games haven't broken into the art barrier just yet.

[aqme28]

How about this: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2013/01/...

"The results showed that early fans of different types of rock (eg, rock, heavy metal, gothic, punk), African American music (rhythm and blues, hip-hop), and electronic dance music (trance, techno/hardhouse) showed elevated minor delinquency concurrently and longitudinally. Preferring conventional pop (chart pop) or highbrow music (classic music, jazz), in contrast, was not related to or was negatively related to minor delinquency."

Though the study isn't so great at the whole causation-correlation thing.

[6thSigma]

I was speaking more about a "Marilyn Manson caused Columbine" type of thing.

[mgarfias]

I thought it was KMFDM?

[_delirium]

I'm skeptical people have really changed their views due to a considered reasoning that, well, we were wrong about music, but the real culprit is games, because they're more immersive, etc. I think they're just serving the same cultural scapegoat position as music did. In the 1990s, people reflexively blamed KMFDM or Marilyn Manson, and today they reflexively blame videogames. I don't see much evidence that the people blaming the latter have thought it through more—and some of them are the same people. In particular, I think politicians like Lamar Alexander are just desperately grasping about for something unpopular to deflect the pressure away from guns.

[6thSigma]

Oh I completely agree. I'm just saying that right now video games serve as a "better scapegoat." I'm sure if virtual reality becomes popular in the next decade we will have a new "better scapegoat."

[DanBC]

I said it before (and other people made useful rebuttals) but I find it interesting that people are quick to condemn pro-anna and thinsperation type imagery, but they'll also defend violent video games.

If someone really wanted to get a law on the books they'd take an existing game, re-skin it to be full of children, "Jews" and "blacks", and build some levels in schools and shopping malls, release it anonymously, and then tip-off the most vocal press.

And I find it a bit confusing that people spend billions on influencing others, but that we never refer to the research when discussing this.

[_delirium]

I think people could make some pretty hateful games, yes, and some people probably do (but they aren't that popular, as far as I know). But isn't that true of any uncensored medium? People publish white-power books, and books about how Hitler was great, and we're not (at least in the U.S.) pushing for laws about those. Heck, Stormfront is on the net with no age-related access controls. It's just sort of a fact of uncensored media that you'll have to live with some pretty unpleasant stuff. What I don't see is games being uniquely dangerous, or having the unpleasant stuff in unusually high concentrations.

[JoeAltmaier]

Really? Its pretty well understood that women come off badly in video games. Either super-sexualized, or just props to be beaten and killed.

And now somebody will point to 1 or two games that don't. That's called 'the exception that proves the rule'.

[_delirium]

I agree there's a ton of sexism in games, yes. I don't see them as so outrageously different from our general culture as to be the source of a unique problem, though. Certainly not as the explanation for why the U.S. has such unusually high levels of violence for a developed country.

I mean, American culture and media are full of sexism, some of it pretty absurd. Beer ads are super-sexist, for example, and those are allowed to be shown at prime-time to children, despite peddling both sexism and alcohol. And the treatment of women in Hollywood is extremely problematic as well. I'm willing to believe that games are even more sexist than the already pretty low bar for media in general, and that's something worth criticizing game developers for, but it seems strange for a Senator to single them out. I would be really surprised if Lamar Alexander is the one to lead a general charge against sexism in the American media.

[JoeAltmaier]

Other media is temporary entertainment of an escapist sort. Viewed/read and forgotton.

Video games are immersive environments. Roleplaying continues for scores of hours. You might spend longer in one game than watching all of Star Wars put together.

And you are the protagonist in a video game! You are PERSONALLY doing all that misogynistic violence. Its fun! You get points!

I think video games are fundamentally different than all other 'media', to the point that video games aren't media at all. They are closer to a club, or a school, or a gang experience than they are to a book.

And I've played hundreds of games. I have a room at home dedicated to the playing of games, with machines arrayed around a large round table with power strips mounted below, built for the purpose. So no I'm not here to slam games through ignorance.

But we do our cause a huge disservice when we pretend not to 'get it', when we paper over the real differences between our hobby and other entertainments.

[_delirium]

I guess that part I just don't agree with. I feel much more immersed in novels than in games, myself. Games are just escapist entertainment, whereas novels have changed my worldview, stuck with me for years, and made me feel I was there. I can't think of a game that has been more than entertainment for me, and I've played quite a few also. Heck, even in sci-fi situations, Ender's Game felt much more immersive than Doom. All that stuff about "demons from hell" and "being on Mars" in Doom I just saw as sort of silly skin on top of what's fundamentally some abstract gameplay. And it's hard to take the skins of Counterstrike or CoD any more seriously than that.

More to the point, though, the scientific evidence that games change behavior more than other media just isn't very compelling, despite lots of money spent trying to prove it (some of it in the positive direction, as people with "serious games" grants try to prove that games are uniquely positioned to enact positive behavior change).

[colmvp]

People make that argument yet men are almost always victims of the most brutal deaths in cinema, specifically without the camera looking away.

[mistercow]

>I said it before (and other people made useful rebuttals) but I find it interesting that people are quick to condemn pro-anna and thinsperation type imagery, but they'll also defend violent video games.

You're sort of right about that being interesting, and the fact is that condemnation and censorship of pro-ana and thinspo material is generally misguided.

But it's sort of different. Pro-ana and thinspo imagery are generally promoted by people with the very mental illness that those movements are blamed for, and should be viewed as a symptom, not a cause.

[duaneb]

> And I find it a bit confusing that people spend billions on influencing others, but that we never refer to the research when discussing this.

I don't. Demagoguery can always support people's agendas; research not so much.

[jff]

People did this quite a bit back when Doom was big, and it caused some controversy, but I don't know of any laws that arose from it.

[duaneb]

Well I do think violent films are called out, though definitely less often because games are relatively new. IIRC there were many people attempting to link the Columbine shooting and the Matrix, which had just been released.

I must say I can't watch films like Se7en, American Psycho, Requiem for a Dream, Clockwork Orange without being thoroughly disturbed; this is true to a lesser extent with novels, but I can control virtually everything about the experience. I guess what I'm trying to say is it wouldn't surprise me at all if any number of these media encouraged past people to commit crimes, but that doesn't imply they wouldn't have done anything had they not seen/read/played whatever inspired them.

[freejoe76]

Yeah -- this idea that it's this "other" group of people who are the problem is real prevalent pretty much everywhere, on all sides, in this gun debate. I know it's an easy, captivating argument, but that "other-group" argument seems to be part of the problem itself.