Long-term Study Finds No Link Between Video Game Violence and Real Violence 250
A reader sends news that a study has been completed on the long-term effects of violence in movies and video games on violence in real life. A researcher at Stetson University found no link between the consumption of violent media and an increase in societal violence. The study was published in the Journal of Communication. From the article:
"Entertainment Software Ratings Board ratings were used to estimate the violent content of the most popular video games for the years 1996-2011. These estimates of societal video game violence consumption were correlated against federal data on youth violence rates during the same years. Violent video game consumption was strongly correlated with declines in youth violence. However, it was concluded that such a correlation is most likely due to chance and does not indicate video games caused the decline in youth violence. ... Previous studies have focused on laboratory experiments and aggression as a response to movie and videogame violence, but this does not match well with real-life exposure.
What? (Score:3, Insightful)
What?
So what you're saying is that humans can tell the difference between reality and video games??
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Glaring exceptions for the ones in politics, the media, teaching in high schools, serving on PTAs, and participating in some forms of religeon.
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Now, if they were just trying to do this idea to TV, it would be sure to be squashed immediately. A pity.
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If you read the article you will find that the conclusions are presented with so much 'hand waving' that basically the real conclusion of the article is: we don't know wether there is a correlation between violent games and movies and real violence.
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That's OK. The null hypothesis is always that a correlation does not exist. Hand waving while supporting the null hypothesis is perfectly acceptable. If the evidence does not clearly support correlation, then the assumption must be that no correlation exists, much less causation.
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No, that's not how statistical tests of significance are interpreted. Failure to reject the null hypothesis does not prove the null hypothesis is true.
http://www.statisticalmisconce... [statistica...ptions.com]
For example, consider the null hypothesis is "all guns shoot bullets". Then if my test sample happens to contain only bullet-shooting guns, then I cannot reject the hypothesis. But it doesn't prove it either, because my sample may have overlooked legitimate counter
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I would suggest comparing violence today with 50 years ago.
This would be valid if the only change over the last 50 years was the introduction of violent video games
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The violence I've read about most frequently seems to be motivated by greed, personal revenge or jihadism.
I thought you were talking about civil unrest, not aggression by the USA.
I don't recall any lead-poisoned or desperately poor criminals involved. Can you list some specific examples?
http://science.slashdot.org/st... [slashdot.org]
When I was a kid we lead pipes and lead paint in our houses and the air was filled with tetra-ethyl lead from leaded gasoline. Also a lot of lead solder in those ancient TV's and radios (before integrated circuits). So the 50's and 60's should have been more violent because of all the lead in the environment.
There was actually less lead in the environment in the '60s than the '70s and '80s. The amount of electronics increased greatly, as did the consumption of leaded fuel, and the lead lingered after leaded fuels were restricted.
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I agree. Hollywood has learned us that violence solves every problem. Even children's cartoons are full of angry characters and violence these days. I wouldn't let my kids watch Cars II, for instance, and there are more 'children's cartoons' like that. I can't believe all the violence kids see during their lives doesn't have any influence on them, especially if they watch it without their parents around to help them make sense of what they see.
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Until such a time as the NEXT "study" comes out and shows that video-games bring out violent behaviors.
Study; people place far too much emphasis on this elusive beast. Tack on the word; scientific and you have a tool to move the masses toward a political view.
Put it in a college dept. and you can keep your students busy and out of your hair, giving something to grade their performance by, while promoting your political views and affecting public opinion. (In spite of the fact that much relevant criteria was
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citation(s) much needed
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I thought 4chan is there to rescue us.
Meanwhile... (Score:5, Funny)
Another long-term study found a link between empty wallets and gaming PC upgrades.
Re: Meanwhile... (Score:2)
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Ain't that the truth. I just got done doing a little shopping hoping to get my PC up to spec for the games coming out this month and next.
I'll hate to have to tell my daughter, "No college for you", but that Geforce GTX 980 looks sweet.
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Ain't that the truth. I just got done doing a little shopping hoping to get my PC up to spec for the games coming out this month and next.
I'll hate to have to tell my daughter, "No college for you", but that Geforce GTX 980 looks sweet.
Get the GTX 970 instead and invest the difference. Your daughter and wallet will thank you. It will also reduce the violence in your household when your wife finds out... (grin)
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Good idea.
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I always find it interesting that so many people rage about top end models and having them, when steam hardware survey consistently shows that overwhelming majority of people using discreet nvidia graphics are using x50, x60 and x60Ti models, followed by x70 and x80 being a vanishingly small minority. At the same time overwhelming amount of reviews show that x60 and x60Ti models are typically the sweet spot of "performance per money spent", with x60Ti and x70 models being typically sweet spot for "sufficien
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Here's something for you to chew on.
Shadow of Mordor had insane system requirements for ultra settings. Not "recommended" but "minimum" settings. For example, it was said to require 6 gigs of video ram.
Similar issue with Watchdogs.
In reality, people are reporting no problems running ultra with about half that. It seems that this console gen, devs don't even bother testing their own software on PCs and just throw out whatever requirement they think will sell Maxwell. For example, I could run Mordor on mostly
Re: Meanwhile... (Score:4, Interesting)
Except correlations can be due to chance. You can test this, by picking things which can't possibly be causally linked, running the same statistic analysis, and observing how often you get a correlation hit.
And it's important to know this, because such a statistical issue was very much the cause of various excited reports of radiation, cellphones, powerlines and every other type of factor "somehow" increasing risk for cancer, despite the absence of any measurable causative effect.
Until it was realized that if you ran the analysis on any set of variables, you'd always get "roughly double" the risk even if the question was "cancer rates vs. mean daily use of swear words" or "cancer rates vs. global population of pirates".
Which is why they don't just report the result. Because without context, the result is meaningless.
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The study was clearly flawed when it came up with the conclusion "such a correlation is most likely due to chance and does not indicate video games caused the decline in youth violence."
Why would that be the case? To me, that result seems like a perfectly reasonable think to say. They demonstrated that increase in gaming didn't cause an increase in violence because violence in fact decreased, but they weren't able to demonstrate that it was gaming that caused decrease in violence because other factors could have caused that as well. The situation doesn't seem symmetrical to me. The latter would require an additional study.
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A receding tide lowers all ships (Score:2)
During the period of the study, ALL violence was in decline, public perception to the contrary (thanks to our overhyped news cycle that treats news as infotainment).
So, GIGO strikes again.
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As violence in video-games was in ascend, you fail.
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The study is garbage, hence GIGO.
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I admit I didn't bother to read this article on the subject, but my first thought on reading the summary was this:
Violent video game consumption was strongly correlated with declines in youth violence. However, it was concluded that such a correlation is most likely due to chance and does not indicate video games caused the decline in youth violence...
So what the article is saying is that when young (presumably mostly male) people started to spend large amounts of their time pretty much alone in their homes, participating in essentially solo activities, as opposed to hanging around with their 'gang' mates outside in public places, the amount of violence they committed against others decreased...
Well, colour me shocked!
Now, personally, I stron
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The study is absolute crap. They drew a comparison between murder rates and ratings on games. Well, guess what? Kids don't commit the majority of murders to begin with, and schools have become a bit better at kids bringing guns and knives into the school and at doing lockdowns.
They should have looked at the types of violence that are more typical of kids, and compared that the to overall population's violence rates.
Now, as to whether it desensitizes kids or not - I don't know. Kids have had easy access
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And the last I looked, there's been violence in the middle east for a thousand years. They've just gotten better weapons.
Well They never found a link between TV Violence (Score:2)
and violent acts either. It really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that the rise in violence had a very well explained physical cause
http://www.forbes.com/sites/al... [forbes.com]
What kills me, is that more hasn't been done to stop these legal/political shakedowns of particular industries. The formula should be known to everyone by now,
1. Find Deep Pocket
2. Blame problem on their activities
3. Agitate in the media until they make token gestures (Wow all cartons have to have morals) and pay off the people shaking t
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Television does not affect behavior. Unless its the network selling advertising time.
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And of course shakedown of industries for token gestures, that include cash bribes to further lobbying efforts.
The problem we have in America isn't that we have socialist politicians, the problem is the socialist politicians have been replaced with jackass "cronyists" who are simply more capitalists, who really don't give
Uh what correlation? (Score:2)
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Consider all authors, other authors (Score:3, Interesting)
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Study tells nerds what they want to hear. (Score:2, Funny)
Nerds declare it's long been obvious. Details at 11.
Uh huh... (Score:2)
And advertising has no effect on consumer buying habits. Political campaigning has no effect on the vote...
wish I could believe that, experience disagrees (Score:2, Offtopic)
My strong support of free speech makes me wish that were true. However, I've seen that kids who grow up watching violence and vulgarity tend to be inclined to violence and vulgarity, while people like my wife who grew up on G-rated material tend to act in G-rated ways, and be uncomfortable around that which they haven't been exposed to.
When we were dating, my foul language was a major turnoff to my wife, who had grown up around more polite language and thus didn't cuss herself. I had to clean up my lan
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As a counter example, a woman once told me that she thought my foul mouth was awesome.
"Awww, fuck off, you asshole."
Blew her clothes right off her body. She was super smart and had the body of a 22-year-old stripper.
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So essentially the 'potty mouth' is a self-created problem.
As for your anecdotal evidence, it seems to contradict studies and everyone elses anecdotal evidence, indicating a perception bias on your part. Do you have anyway to defend your comments besides "HURRR LIEBRALS", and "DAMN COMMIES", and tired cliches and baseless rhetoric?
most studies, obvious common sense. See Iran, Neth (Score:2)
Sure you can find studies either way. Most studies show that what we see and hear affects what we do, but sure you can find some that look at a completely spurious correlation and claim otherwise. Check out "Internet Explorer vs murder". It's hilarious, and very similar to this study - comparing trends over time rather than comparing groups who have/do one thing with groups who don't.
Rather than using spurious correlations with literally thousands of other factors in play, a study can do the obvious- c
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When you compare kids who see a lot of crap vs those who don't, shockingly the kids who see crap tend to do crap.
Where is your rigorous scientific study that isn't based off of subjective soft science, and where is the scientific consensus?
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Also, equating real-world experiences to fantasy violence seems rather silly to me.
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foul launguage is a problem for society. I mean serious. These kids will grow up and not be offended by foul language, and won't teach their kids to be offended by it either.
Yes, I agree, some words are inherently bad because some people arbitrarily decided that it is so. It's not like it's a subjective matter or anything. Like how the word "doctor" is a bad word and shouldn't be used on formal occasions. Everyone with Common Sense knows that.
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These kids will grow up and not be offended by foul language, and won't teach their kids to be offended by it either.
So if... nobody is offended by it then how, exactly, does that make it a problem?
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You however forget the obvious counterpoint. People use these mediums to vent their natural violent tendencies, leaving them with less active natural violent tendencies in real life.
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The study's researchers dismissed the inverse correlation they found, saying that they didn't believe violent video games could decrease violence, but their data did actually suggest it... which is pretty much what most folks on this board have been saying for years.
data said less violence over time. See IE vs murde (Score:2)
Check out the graph of IE market share versus murder rate.
This is precisely the same thing. They picked two things that changed over the last 20 years and reported them as if this would test a cause and effect relationship. If you chart Obama's age vs atmospheric CO2 levels, you'll see that the older Obama gets, the higher CO2 there are. To save the planet, we must kill Obama now before he gets any older, thereby increasing CO2.
Over the last 30 years, speed limits on highways have increased. Also, the
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Without looking at the data, I'm speculating a lot with that suggestion, but I don't think you should dismiss the possibility of inverse causation out of hand.
There's a huge difference between two completely unrelated things being correlated and two different expressions of the same basic psychological urges being correlated. Internet explorer use and CO2 levels are only very distantly related in that both represent signs of a strong economy in a technological society. So odds are good that such a correla
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No one cares about your personal experiences, and they won't disprove a rule.
My strong support of free speech makes me wish that were true.
What does free speech have to do with this? Let's say that video games did cause violence for some people. Okay, so what? Freedom is more important than safety, so that still wouldn't be a reason to limit free speech unless you're an authoritarian asshole.
Chance? (Score:2)
I am inclined to believe that they are simply wrong and it is not due to chance. From what I remember, previous studies have found that on a societal level violence goes down.
Who funded it? (Score:2)
If it's funded by a special interest group then don't even bother to look at it. Whoever pays the bills gets the result they want. This is true for academia as much as anyone else.
Games do not make people violent (Score:2)
Neither do cartoons. When I was young, two of my favorite cartoons had a whole bunch of people dying (Grendizer and Harlock's french versions), My first FPS was DooM, I played Quake2 and Unreal/UT for countless nights, and still have a thing for a nice deathmatch from time to time.
It doesn't mean I'll go on a rampage and kill people with a chainsaw. People who have problems making the difference between reality and fantasy could also snap by reading a book or any other trigger.
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People who have problems making the difference between reality and fantasy could also snap by reading a book or any other trigger.
Exactly. Imagine the outrage if Mark David Chapman [wikipedia.org] was caught with a PS Vita playing Killzone instead of The Catcher in the Rye.
No link? (Score:5, Insightful)
I would actually have expected a reverse link -- violent video games having a cathartic effect.
Re:No link? (Score:5, Informative)
I would actually have expected a reverse link -- violent video games having a cathartic effect.
Oh wait, according to TFA, there is a reverse link.
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Video games probably have reduced crime substantially, the opposite would be the bored kids of the 1950s having no entertainment options.
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Catharsis doesn't exist. It's a pop psychology concept from Aristotle and Freud that's discredited in scientific psychology. At least that's my reading on it.
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It kinda exists, but its effect is the opposite of what many believe it to be. Venting in any particular way might be temporarily refreshing, but the next time that stress builds up, the subject is going to want to vent that way again, and in turn action becomes habit. Sometimes, as with any sort of stimulation, a person is going to want bigger fixes each time it comes around.
Ahaa! Vindication (Score:3)
Take that, Jack Thompson!
Correlation and Junk Science (Score:2)
Who else can see the glaring error in this "scholarly paper" published in The Journal of Communication?
I mean, it would be shocking if it wasn't so common in studies of culture and violence.
But but (Score:5, Insightful)
but Anita Sarkeesian swears it does!
Oh, wait, no, that's sexism, not violence. I'm sure it's completely different.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Guns (Score:2)
Re:Guns (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably negative in both cases.
From what I've seen, violent types will seek violence, gun or no gun. There may be something to the idea that allowing them to play out violent fantasies on a computer is catharic enough to reduce real world violence(and who cares how many digital mooks that have to 'die' in the process).
What guns tend to do is increase the consequences of the violence. Complicating matters is how do you differentiate people who have guns as recreation -hunting, target shooting, and such, and those that have them as a criminal trade tool?
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. There may be something to the idea that allowing them to play out violent fantasies on a computer is catharic enough to reduce real world violence?
Catharsis is a pop psychology concept from Aristotle and Freud that has been discredited in the light of scientific study.
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Let's wait till Hatred goes gold (Score:2)
I'm wondering how Hatred will be commented by games-cause-violence community ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
It is a bit like selling reverse crosses, pentagrams and virgin blood packaged with D&D rulebooks in 80ties would be
I'm generally quite tolerant game-wise, but I must say that Hatred crosses some line for me. But same is true for some movies (Saw, Human Centipede etc), which seems to be 'ok' for mass distribution, so probably something is wrong with me in this case.
They don't make you a misogynist either (Score:4, Interesting)
Can't wait for this latest attack on games to collapse under its own incompetence.
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One can dearly hope, considering how far and widely this twisted narrative is infecting others like some digital zombie virus.
mostly, it proves social "sciences" aren't (Score:2)
Rtfa, and what is immediately apparent is the confusion and lack of any concept of controlled testing. From the first 2 sentences of tfa:
"No link found between movie, video game violence and societal violence
An increased violent video game consumption correlates with declines in youth violence"
So, first:
1) there cannot be "no link" and a negative correlation at the same time. The words mean different things.
2) there are many points of subjectivity in the studies, from the movies ratings to the game rating
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What about advertising? (Score:2)
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Re: Sweet, can we stop talking about it now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course not. Now that they've ruled out video games causing violence we have a new crowd attacking games from a different angle. Now Grand Theft Auto doesn't make gamers into violent crooks, it makes them in misogynists because the game contains hookers. Princess Peach isn't just a pointless bit of story to explain why you're crushing mushrooms and turtles, she's "teaching boys to keep women in the kitchen."
So conservatives may have finally moved on, but a new group is attacking video games as being "bad for us" from a completely different angle. So be prepared to hear even more about that. And once people prove that isn't true, I'm sure the goalposts will be moved yet again.
Re: Sweet, can we stop talking about it now? (Score:2, Insightful)
New group? It's the same group: prudes.
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And the result will be precisely the same as with all the other "attacks" on popular media or entertainment. Nothing at all will change. That's why I don't get why people are flipping out about these particular "attacks". They're just social commentary, and simply designed to promote more awareness of the commentator's particular views - nothing more, nothing less.
What's hilarious is that feminist social critics like Anita Sarkeesian (that's who we're really talking about, right?) probably now get signif
Re: Sweet, can we stop talking about it now? (Score:5, Informative)
She does, in fact, claim that. She just uses more words to do it.
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Is this really controversial? The proof is in the amount of money spent on advertising. Sure, some advertising just gets the word out, but, for example, McDonalds or Coca-Cola ads are all about behaviour modification, because everybody has already heard of both things, even though individual people widely believe they are unaffected by the ads they watch.
That's why things like this study are useful to establish that violence is *not* among the things that are easily injected into consumer thoughts. Now,
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Part of it is also the reason that it should not be considered inconceivable that the way ratings tend to work for sex and violence has something of a schism. Now, generally I think the schism is bad - we can deal with this issue better. But at the same time, in thinking about explaining to children why something is or is not appropriate, violence is a lot easier to explain with far fewer edge cases:
Is violence okay? No.
Ever? Very rarely.
When? It is okay to defend yourself if attacked. You should try and av
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> In short, the more you think you cannot be affected, the more likely you are to be affected.
This is a nice kafka trap because you can't deny it without making it appear true. That leaves you with science vs. rhetoric and, well, let's just say that rhetoric tends to win even if it shouldn't, logically speaking.
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Tropes are not evil or negative.
Calling them as such is like saying grammar causes violence, or spelling teaches boys to rape.
Tropes are literary tools, just like spelling and grammar are. And just like how only certain combinations of letters in our alphabet make words.
Plot points can only combine in certain ways and keep the story readable. These are tropes and some tropes are more popular than others, damsel in distress is one of them because it's simple.
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Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Clinton, et al, come to mind as people who have jumped on the fear mongering bandwagon in the past.
>Can this "debate" please not go on like climate "Debate" has?
that would be a godsend, instead of a onesided monolouge ending in a massive restriction of rights and putting innocent people on terrorist watchlist as long as other forms of harrassment.
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Can this "debate" please not go on like climate "Debate" has?
Studies have shown that climate change makes people violent. No joke. [thinkprogress.org]
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>
My hope is that now that the 'video game make you evil' hysteria has been thoroughly debunked, we can have a more nuanced discussion on the subject.
Damn I started Lawful Good and wound up Chaotic Evil, I blame DDO
Re:Sweet, can we stop talking about it now? (Score:5, Insightful)
The blame game has always been popular. It is always some made up bullshit excuse instead of finding & treating the root problem. One small set (or sect/group/cult) of society tries to blame an inanimate object for all of society's woes and spreads their propaganda to anyone who will listen.
Every "next technology" is always scapegoated.
1900 Film
1920 Prohibition (Alcohol), Phonographs
1930 Jazz, Movies
1940 Radio
1950 Dancing
1960 Psychedelic Drugs, Sex
1970 Rock n Roll, Movies (again)
1980 MTV, DnD, Heavy Metal
1990 Computer Games
2000 Internet and "strangers online"
2010 Guns
Then you have idiot psychiatrists like this who say 20+ year olds playing computer games is not "normal."
http://www.destructoid.com/pla... [destructoid.com]
To which I'll counter:
1. Hey fucking retard -- the medium is irrelevant.
Why is playing a card, board, or sports game like poker, go, chess, or baseball / hockey / basketball / etc. considered "normal", yet playing a digital game isn't normal??
2. Well guess what -- all these people were not normal as well:
Leonardo da Vinci was not normal
Isaac Newton was not normal
Charles Darwin was not normal
Albert Einstein was not normal
Stephen Hawking is not normal
Normal people don't do exceptional things.
The real issue is:
Are _you_ balanced in your daily activities, responsibilities, and hobbies?
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You forgot cartoons and television. And I guess in the early 1500s reading was considered evil as well.
Re: Sweet, can we stop talking about it now? (Score:2)
I believe the term you are looking for is "limousine liberal". Yeah, we all hate them. But don't for a minute think DINO equates to conservative.
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Whether it's outright with a bullet to the head, or a slow smothering with punitive taxation and regulation, the result is esssentially the same. That's why there's little difference between leftists and neocons.
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All male gamers are still rapists though, right?
Well, yes, of course.
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Yes. You should clearly protest this unfair characterizing by leaping to the defense of people sending rape and death threats to women who write anything which could be construed as criticism! That'll show how peaceful and non-violent you are!
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Sure. According to one side, either you believe all male gamers are rapists (or at least overweight basement-dwelling misogynists), or you're aligning yourself with death threats and doxxing. Small wonder they're recruiting so many people to the so-called "death threats and doxxing" side.
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Thanks really. If video games make you violent, you're the problem. Thanks for stating the obvious.
I'd argue that was true for any object people commonly blame for their own violent behavior.
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please call us back after you've found reality.
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Tyrant or Victim of Changes?
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Sadly, we have to do these or long held 'common' beliefs never get challenged even when they're wrong, and we'd still be believing witches and such cause disease.
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Ban alcohol. A study on the economic cost of alcohol as a function of police resources, ambulance and hospital resources, lost productivity due to injuries and illness, and straight up population destruction, pegs the mean lost productivity at $20 billion per year.
Of course, we're not doing that because history tells us it will be a lot more if we do. Still...