On Realism and Virtual Murder 473
Gamasutra has an interesting article about how the push toward realistic graphics and extremely lifelike characters in modern games is making the term "murder simulator" — once laughed off for referring to pixelated dying Nazis — a concept to take more seriously. The author is careful to simply explore the issue, and not come to a specific conclusion; he doesn't say that we should or shouldn't prevent it from happening, only that it's worth consideration. (One section is even titled "Forget the kids," saying that decisions for what children play fall under parental responsibility.) Quoting:
"We should start rethinking these issues now before we all slide down the slope together and can't pull ourselves back up again. Or, even worse, before governments step in and dictate what can and can't be depicted or simulated in video games via legislation. ... Obviously, what makes an acceptable game play experience for each player is a personal choice that should be judged on a person-by-person basis (or on a parent to child basis), and I believe it should stay that way. As for me, I'm already drawing the line at BioShock — I can barely stomach the game as it is. Sure, I could play it more and desensitize myself, but I don't want to. And that's just me. It's up to you and a million other adult gamers to decide what's best for yourselves and to draw the line on virtual violence where you feel most comfortable."
It's just evolutionary. (Score:5, Interesting)
Which brings us back to the initial point: Why would you WANT to kill that alien? The first games, killing enemies was the moral equivalent of stomping on ants. Sure, they die, but how much actual life experience have they lost? Now the games are increasingly realistic, it's no longer ants we're killing. Sure, there are scenarios (like war games) which people want to re-enact virtually, but games like Manhunt are explicitly designed around killing defenseless strangers. Maybe it's time to put games like that on the same level as rape simulators?
Re:Ban how to host a murder while you're at it. (Score:3, Interesting)
You decided to have an 'IRL' dinner party, and thinking nothing of it you invite your friend.
Halfway through dinner your friend heads to the bathroom, and before they come back the power is cut.
How sure are you that your friend has equally strong injunctions now against killing that guy he doesn't like / his ex's new partner / you because you beat him in Virtual Poker? He's been doing it in a photo-real environment for the last month, it's exactly the same to him apart from that little voice in the back of his head saying "there's no reset button on this one". How strong will that voice be?
Re:Ban how to host a murder while you're at it. (Score:3, Interesting)
(PS Please do not respond to this post with anecdotal evidence, or telling me I am wrong, without having some kind of study to back it up, or SOMETHING)
Unpopular but interesting. (Score:5, Interesting)
Read this by Dave Grossman http://www.killology.com/print/print_teachkid.htm [killology.com]
It's about teaching kids to kill. I'm sure there are many anecdotes out there about how "I played games for years and I haven't killed anyone" but the man has a point...
Some quotes from the text:
"Healthy members of most species have a powerful, natural resistance to killing their own kind. Animals with antlers and horns fight one another by butting heads. Against other species they go to the side to gut and gore. Piranha turn their fangs on everything, but they fight one another with flicks of the tail. Rattlesnakes bite anything, but they wrestle one another.
When we human beings are overwhelmed with anger and fear our thought processes become very primitive, and we slam head on into that hardwired resistance against killing. During World War II, we discovered that only 15-20 percent of the individual riflemen would fire at an exposed enemy soldier (Marshall, 1998). [...]
That's the reality of the battlefield. Only a small percentage of soldiers are willing and able to kill. When the military became aware of this, they systematically went about the process of âoefixingâ this âoeproblem.â And fix it they did. By Vietnam the firing rate rose to over 90 percent (Grossman, 1999a).
[...]
The training methods the military uses are brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and role modeling. Let us explain these and then observe how the media does the same thing to our children, but without the safeguards.
Brutalization, or âoevalues inculcation,â is what happens at boot camp. Your head is shaved, you are herded together naked, and dressed alike, losing all vestiges of individuality. You are trained relentlessly in a total immersion environment. In the end you embrace violence and discipline and accept it as a normal and essential survival skill in your brutal new world.
Something very similar is happening to our children through violence in the media. [...]
Classical conditioning is like Pavlov's dog in Psych 101. Remember the ringing bell, the food, and the dog could not hear the bell without salivating?
In World War II, the Japanese would make some of their young, unblooded soldiers bayonet innocent prisoners to death. Their friends would cheer them on. Afterwards, all these soldiers were treated to the best meal they've had in months, sake, and to so-called "comfort girls." The result? They learned to associate violence with pleasure.
This technique is so morally reprehensible that there are very few examples of it in modern U.S. military training, but the media is doing it to our children. Kids watch vivid images of human death and suffering and they learn to associate it with: laughter, cheers, popcorn, soda, and their girlfriend's perfume (Grossman & DeGaetano, 1999).
[...]
The third method the military uses is operant conditioning, a powerful procedure of stimulus-response training. We see this with pilots in flight simulators, or children in fire drills. When the fire alarm is set off, the children learn to file out in orderly fashion. One day there's a real fire and they're frightened out of their little wits, but they do exactly what they've been conditioned to do (Grossman & DeGaetano, 1999).
In World War II we taught our soldiers to fire at bullseye targets, but that training failed miserably because we have no known instances of any soldiers being attacked by bullseyes. Now soldiers learn to fire at realistic, man-shaped silhouettes that pop up in their field of view. That's the stimulus. The conditioned response is to shoot the target and then it drops. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, repeated hundreds of times."
Re:Violence and murder (Score:3, Interesting)
I think in most people there is a side that actually would want to do that to a real person, sick as it sounds. You probably have that side, even if you haven't recognized it yet.
There IS a side like that, and not just in 'most' people. We're killers, that's why we're here and not the descendants of the Neanderthals that we wiped out.
However, we're also social animals and we've covered our killer side over with social responsibility and ethics and laws. The problem is that every time we kill, we reinforce the killer side and we weaken the restraints on it. If we're only killing pixellated mushrooms then the effect is minimal. If we're beating some virtual unfortunate's head in with a claw hammer, the effect is much stronger. Just think of the first time you played an FPS or fighting game - unless you were already acclimatised to violence via movies and TV, you probably felt a little queasy at all the killing. Then you got used to it and payed it no mind. The first time a quest asked me to kill a female human NPC in WoW, I felt distinctly uncomfortable - now, I'm used to it and don't even notice. When games go from stylised combat to full body virtual reality, it's going to be even more challenging for people to commit this virtual slaughter... at first. When what we're practising (and becoming acclimated to) is indistinguishable from what our conditioning is preventing us from doing, then the practice must necessarily weaken that conditioning.
Re:Virtual murder isn't and cannot be murder. (Score:3, Interesting)
Representations mean something. If you know someone that is always playing "Virtual KKK," running around lynching black men and burning crosses in a virtual setting, are you going to say, "oh, he's not a racist, those aren't real people?" No, you're going to make a connection between the representation of a thing and the thing itself.
While the re-enactment of a murder isn't the same as a murder, no one is saying that it is. What they are saying is that indulgence in the first desensitizes us from our horror about the second. I think it's generally true (and by no means limited to games, either.) Games and media affect the emotions: they can teach, they can inspire, they can create fear and suspense, they can produce empathy. Why do you think they are incapable of also reducing empathy?
Virtual reality as a moral imperative? (Score:2, Interesting)
The closer games get to simulating reality, the less reasons & excuses there are to do bad things in reality. With full immersive VR, the collective id of humanity can be contained in the sandbox "Matrix" where it belongs. Reality may finally become the exclusive domain of our higher nature, unpolluted by our base, obsolete animal/tribal urges.
People are so quick to fear the "corrupting" effects of virtual reality, but it may very well be that VR is the key to establishing an unimaginably better reality.
Re:Is this for real? (Score:3, Interesting)
I can still 'look outside my screen' now, but in 20, 30, 40 years' time? We could easily have Matrix-style total immersion VR. And when that VR looks identical to what does go on in real life, your brain will carry lessons over from one to the other.
Gaze not into stupid, lest it gaze back... (Score:1, Interesting)
Back in the 90's I there was a 'virtualpet' game/simulator/timewaster app that I played with. You could create a virtual pet and abuse it until it would cower in constant terror. I told a girl I worked with about it, and she though that was an awful thing to do. I pointed out that all I was doing was flipping 1s and 0s in a computer's memory, and she still thought it was a bad thing to do.
This is the sort of problem we face with this fight. The people who have problems telling the difference between real and fantasy AREN'T THE GAMERS. How can you fight that kind of stupid?
Re:Violence and murder (Score:1, Interesting)
About a year ago a friend showed me a game called Grassy Knoll in which you play as Oswald and you have to shoot at JFK as he drives by. When he first told me about the game I was appalled by the very idea of playing an assassination simulator. A few days passed and he eventually showed me the game and, to my surprise, I couldn't put it down. It was running on the GTA 3 engine, the visuals were realistic (as were the reactions of those in the car), and the controls were on par with a regular sniping game. For about forty minutes I played the same 2 minute segment again and again trying different shots. It wasn't so much that I loved shooting at the president but rather it was so realistic I was curious to see how it was done. Video games like that are on par with shows like CSI. You don't watch it because of the acting but rather to see how the poor sob gets it. It's that curiousness that makes even casual gamers wonder about games like this.
Re:Ban how to host a murder while you're at it. (Score:1, Interesting)
Those studies never, ever have valid controls. Their control group is always made up of people playing Candyland, or not playing any game at all. They don't use sports games or other non-violence-oriented action games for comparison.
Re:Unpopular but interesting. (Score:2, Interesting)
I have read it, and I'm sorry, but I'm far from convinced: he makes some good points in his book, but this one is just silly. It's one thing to take a soldier who's going through the brutalising process of basic training, teach them to shoot a gun at a target, then throw them into a war-zone with a gun and people shooting back at them and expect them to shoot back; it's a huge jump to go from there to claiming that shooting a few pixels on a screen using a mouse button in the comfort of your own home will make the average person more likely to go on a killing spree.
It's not a far jump to say that simulating an environment in which we are trained to kill has absolutely no effect on us. Boot camps are essentially extended training simulations, when you look at it like this.
Re:Violence and murder (Score:1, Interesting)
I can agree with this. I was on babysitting duty for my younger cousin the other day, so I introduced him to the FPS SWAT 4 to keep him busy. The first thing he did was ask me if he could shoot his teammates, and entertained himself for the next 20 minutes or so by killing his fellow officers before actually trying to play the game.
Re:Ban how to host a murder while you're at it. (Score:4, Interesting)
No it does not, because a simulation is still a simulation, as real it might be. If he would only play such a game, never go out, never leave his house, never communicate with anyone. Well if that happens now or in 50 years, such people who might loose the grip of reality, loose it anyway.
Missing the Point (Score:1, Interesting)
Somehow the author missed the point about graphic violence and photorealism, especially considering Bioshock. The "fun"-part is not slaughtering human-like monsters and cute little girls throughout the game, it's rather /not/ doing it.
While I have no problem whatsoever killing Monsters that - if at all - look just remotely human all day and all the way long, when it comes down to more and more real looking humans - maybe I even can identify with them - I, as the player, have to make an /ethical/ decision. Which in return adds a whole new dimension to gameplay. We should'nt be looking at graphic violence as a risk or danger to the game industry, we should see it as a chance to create deeper, morally and ethical challenging games. Maybe with a little character-development thrown in.
Take "Fable" for an example. You can go around slaughtering as many humans as you wish and to show that you are "evil" you get horns. Its boring. I as the player have no real ethical choices to make, I don't /get/ as a human that I'm doing evil. I "understand" it, because I get the fuckin horns, but on an emotional level I dont /get/ it. /BioShock/ on the other hand has made a tiny step for me to be morally inclined in my actions in an "murder-simulator", which is a very, very good thing about the game.
Re:Oh, please. (Score:3, Interesting)
That 5-digid uid should make you old enough to think up something better than a middle school insult.
Re:Ban how to host a murder while you're at it. (Score:3, Interesting)
The studies aren't flawless by any means. For example, in the cinema experiment, it would have been impossible to properly "blind" the researchers to the trials they were conducting - they must always have known whether the film on show was violent or not, and that could have biased their reactions as they timed the helpful behaviour of the film-goers. The delay in helping was also small (although statistically significant). The same applies to the first experiment's differences in whether recruits heard the fight or how serious they thought it was.
The link you had also didn't mention how they took into the causality and correlation aspects. It seems like it was there in with the tests of people going into the theater, but the link is just a summary and it's too hard to tell if it was really taken into account.
Re:Ban how to host a murder while you're at it. (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the point of the article is simply this: a) take something you find disturbing b) imagination a perfectly realistic simulation of that thing and then imagine the effect on people. I don't agree with the author that a legal solution is correct in this instance but I do think there are psychological and social issues to be faced here.
Not exactly (Score:5, Interesting)
You seriously underestimate how easy it is to psychologically indoctrinate a 'normal' person to do all sorts of horrific things. The reason ex-combat soldiers rarely go on killing sprees is the indoctrination is surrounded by discipline... which while it allows them to stop killing when they get home apparently, as we are finding out, has a major psychological cost.
And even if you doubt the psychological evidence, such as from Milgram and the Stanford prison experiment, do you really think everybody actively involved in the Holocaust, Siberian prison camps, Cultural revolution, Rwandan genocides, Darfur,Bosnia/Serbia, Armenian and Kurdish genocides, My lai, the Killing fields, etc, etc etc were all psychopaths?
Or just maybe, it's not that hard to desensitize a person towards killing. And if it's done in a non-disciplined setting, especially something like a video game where you get some type of reward for instigating indiscriminate murder, the line will get blurry for quite a few people if they get upset, or are in an emotionally charged situation.
I think that glibly writing off any possible consequences to 'well, they were psychopaths anyway' ignores both what we know of psychology and history.
Re:It's just evolutionary. (Score:3, Interesting)
Simply being able to reduce something to binary data, or destroy it by turning off a switch doesn't make it less alive. If I'm on a ventillator, and its possible to destroy my life by turning that off, that doesn't mean I'm not alive.
If at some point in the future its possible to create a digital copy of a person's mind, that can be run as software in a completely turing-compliant way, I for one would have qualms about pulling the plug.
Now I'm not saying anyone should feel bad for 'killing' computer game opponents
Re:The decrease in violence is the real key (Score:3, Interesting)
Have a look at Roman history, where blood sport was very popular. You had real fights often to the death for the amusement of the masses.
I agree with you overall, but I'm not sure that point is as strong as you think. Take a look at ultimate championship fights or bare knuckle fights or mixed martial arts fights and you'll see most of the contestants end up in the hospital. At the same time roman gladiators were often (OK, not always, many started as slaves) paid professionals who lived and trained together and the fights were probably highly choreographed (like today's WWF 'fights').
Re:Ban how to host a murder while you're at it. (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, imagine that it's 2050 BC. Your friend, Thogg, finds a shiny sharp rock, and spends a month imagining bashing your head in with it so that he can have your cave.
Not knowing this, you decide to invite him over to your cave to eat some leaves. Halfway through the first handful, the fire goes out.
How sure are you that Thogg won't bash your skull in? He's been doing it in a photo-real environment for the last month.
I think it's clear that we should all agree not to use our imaginations, for fear of the consequences.
You don't need BioShock... (Score:3, Interesting)
What about this? Is it morally acceptable for 12 yrs old kids?
Are all them children of torture supporters like the previous american administration?
Cheers,
One paragraph had the most impact on me... (Score:2, Interesting)
"Show BioShock to a non-gamer -- someone who hasn't been desensitized to killing virtual people -- and watch their reaction. Show them how you bludgeon people to death with a pipe wrench. If they don't wince and express some form of shock at what's taking place on the screen, they're either seriously disturbed or they're a seasoned gamer."
Re:Ban how to host a murder while you're at it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, the point I was trying to make was that the injunction stopping the friend from carrying out the murder grows successively weaker with each ultra-realistic simulated murder
No, the point you were trying to make is that for some inexplicable reason you believe that. You've given no evidence, no arguments, nothing. You've just said, "Hey, it just makes sense to me that..."
If you have any evidence whatsoever that repeated exposure to simulated murder makes a statistically significant difference to people's willingness to actually commit murder, please present it. Otherwise, state your opinion as an opinion, unsupported, anti-empirical and baseless as it is.
You're aware--since you have an opinion on this issue and it would be unethical to form such an opinion without doing at least a little research on the matter--that there is a very significant correlation between easy availability of pornography and a large decrease in the incidence of rape (http://www.impactlab.com/2008/01/06/internet-porn-shown-to-decrease-incidence-of-rape/)? (curiously if you google "rape decrease pornography" the machine kindly asks you if you meant "rape INCREASE pornography", so deeply embedded is the "it just makes sense to me" in our culture.) The detailed structure of this correlation in time and space makes it pretty compelling that the link is causal: would-be rapists are using pornography as a surrogate for actually committing rape, rather than a training manual as a certain bunch of anti-empiricists want to believe.
Plausibly, the same phenomena could apply to other crimes of violence, and I believe there is some evidence to show that people who play violent video games are less likely to commit violent crimes. Oh look, here's Google again: http://www.livescience.com/health/070425_bad_video.html [livescience.com]. Please note that finding someone who has committed a violent crime and then pointing to his use of violent video games for entertainment does not increase the Bayesian plausibility of the statement "people who play violent video games are more likely to commit violent crimes" one tiny bit.
So again: when you have something beyond your imagination to support your position, please share it.
Drawling the line at BioShock (Score:1, Interesting)
Funny the OP should mention that -- I came to the same conclusion myself. That game is simply disgusting.
But I'm much, much more concerned with games that portray realistic violence against recognizably *human* figures. Complete with realistic "death animations", and plenty of virtual gore. These are, in my mind, right up there with "horror" movies: incredibly damaging to the human psyche.
I'm sorry, but if you like games where you murder people in a realistic fashion, or movies that present realistic images of people being butchered, then you are a sociopath.
These games are not just games anymore; these movies are not just movies. They are not harmless entertainment. They have crossed a line. I am a strong believer in free speech, but there must be a limit.
Spielburg's AI (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The decrease in violence is the real key (Score:1, Interesting)
Check for yourself rather than just state something as fact without a reference.
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
Violent crime is on steady rise from 1960. Some specifics, if you want to isolate them such as rape and burglary have gone down but overall annual violent crime from 1960 to 2007 has gone from 288,000 to 1.4 million. Now unless your math is horrible, that is most definitely an increase.
Do not side step the actual discussion. When I was in the Army, we use combat simulators (aka video games) for the purpose of desensitizing soldiers so that when they do shoot and kill someone, they are prepared for the affect it will have on them both physically and mentally. We did it because it works. It also works on the unsuspecting armchair warrior.
The visual shock of seeing someone's brains splatter out the back side of their head is not something that should be included in a game. Neither is the loss of grief for causing someone harm.
I'm not against video games in the least. I think UT did it right. Turn off the gore and change the death into a teleportation out of the arena. Same fun without the gore. It is unnecessary. It doesn't change your tactics, team skills or adrenalin rush. The only thing it could do is help a sick person on the brink continue to escalate his desires for gore.
If you had some real life experience, kids or have been a victim of a violent crime I think you would feel differently towards this subject.
ethics that no one wants to hear (Score:2, Interesting)
If it's bad for your kids, it's bad for you, too. If you are covering your kid's eyes/ears on a movie, game, whatever - that your own should probably be covered as well.
I'm not saying all entertainment except Dora and Barney should be eliminated and I'm also not calling for massive censorship of games/movies/etc.
But I am saying that hearing cuss words on TV is just as harmful for an adult as it is for children.
Re:There will be screaming, but no crying. (Score:3, Interesting)
When I was about eight years old I remember my father offering me a 25 cent bounty for every mouse I could trap in the house. So I set my first trap and was terribly excited when I caught the my first mouse by it's tail in the trap.
Well I knew my father didn't want live mice so I had to figure out how to kill it. After thinking it over for a minute my brother and I took it out on the back porch and put it in an old metal bucket filled with water to try and drown it. Apparently our mouse had taken swimming lessons and after a couple minutes wasn't showing any signs of going under. So we proceded to drop pebbles on him to try and push him under. After about ten minutes of all this we decided that the mouse had earned his freedom since we just couldn't manage to kill him.
So we dumped him out in the flower bed by the steps and figured he'd go elsewhere. Did I mention this was in the middle of winter and our short attention span was partially due to it being freezing cold outside.
Yeah, so my father came home from work and wanted to know about our mouse and why we had not thrown it away but instead left it by the steps. Needless to say he wasn't very impressed with out efforts to drown and stone it, and then leaving it to freeze to death. He pointed out that we should have just clubbed it once with a peice of wood from his shop or something. Our horrified reply "that would be too cruel!"
Conflicted Compassion (Score:2, Interesting)
I am speaking as an indulger of violence and gore. There is a physical stimulation, an adrenal reaction when I am creating bloody messes in Fallout 3 or watching a person get sawed in half in High Tension. We like violent games because the more realistic they are the more they stimulate us.
To people that cite the fact that they are still able to feel something when they look at images of people who have been violently killed I have to question how proud one can really feel about this. Whether violence between people has been reduced throughout the world or not, the fact that we are constantly exposing ourselves to violent stimulus and even simulating them ourselves shouldn't worry us as much about how the player will then act out violently himself but how he views all of the pain and suffering of others; essentially, the player's ability to feel compassion.
People suffer every day whether it be from poverty and hunger or disasters or suicide bombings. These are true tragedies but we are able to ignore them all too easily till the images are plastered in front of us. Sure this isn't solely from violent video games but it is certainly among the factors contributing to an overstimulated, desensitized society.
You can talk all about the instinct of man to be violent and the survival of the fittest and all sorts of nasty aspects of human nature but shouldn't we try a little harder to cultivate the parts of our nature that make us a more loving, caring and generous society?
I guess I should just speak from my own experience and that is that I will continue to expose myself to these stimulations for the time being but there is a part of me that wishes I actually didn't feel the addictive urge to watch guts splatter across the screen.
Re:Ban how to host a murder while you're at it. (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem isn't always getting them to fire, it's getting them to actively try to kill people.
From "Behavioral Economics: Lessons from the Military" (Alexander J. Field), mostly quoting On Killing by LTC Grossman:
A well trained solider could expect to get off 4 or 5 shots a minute. In drills soldiers spent five percent of their time firing; the remainder was consumed by the loading process. As Grossman notes, if most soldiers were attempting to load and fire as fast as they could, then 19 times out of 20 they should have fallen with a weapon not ready to be fired. Moreover, a fallen comradeâ(TM)s loaded, cocked, and primed weapon would have been taken up by a survivor and fired (Grossman, 1995, p. 22). In light of this, the number of unfired weapons recovered from the battlefield is truly surprising. The thousands of rifles with multiple charges indicate that many, many soldiers went through the drill of loading, then neglected or chose not to fire, and then commenced again with the reloading process.
In the eighteenth century, the Prussian army conducted experiments in which a battalion of infantry fired smoothbore muskets at a target 100' by 6', designed to simulate an opposing infantry battalion (smoothbore muskets were less accurate than the rifled Springfields or Enfields used in the Civil War). At 225 yards, one out of four shots fired by the Prussian soldiers hit their mark. At 150 yards this rose to 40 percent, and at 75 yards to 60 percent. The Prussian studies indicate a 60 percent hit rate at 75 yards. Facing off against a 200 man battalion at 75 yards, 120 men on each side should have been hit in the first volley. Since it is generally agreed that the effectiveness of a combat unit often distintegrates at the 50 percent casualty rate, such withering fire should have ended battles quickly. And yet the historical evidence indicates both that these battles typically went on for several hours and sometimes days and that typically only one or two men per minute died in exchanges between battalion strength units (Griffith, 1989). High casualty rates were apparently the result not of intense and effectively aimed fire, but of the fact that battles persisted for a long time (the introduction of artillery fire could also raise the fatality rate). Obviously, even at a kill rate of 1-2 per minute, hundreds or even thousands of men could die over the course of such a battle.
For example, the battle of Antietam in 1862 during the American Civil War killed almost 6,000 soldiers (US Army Field Manual 7-21-13, 2003, ch. 2). But the battle lasted 12 hours, which means men were dying at a rate of "only" about 8 per minute. The battle was certainly bloody, but the casualties resulted from the length of the battle, not a potential rate of killing using rifled muskets at close range that was much higher. Estimates of casualties in the Battle of Gettysburg vary, but again, it appears that total deaths over the three day period were in the range of 6,000. Assuming 12 hours of fighting per day, this works out to under 3 men per minute killed (four or five times as many men experienced wounds, of varying severity.)