DraQ said:
Black Cat said:
"Violence is much harder in movies and much much more realistic since it is filmed with real humans. Why isnt the focus on that then?"
Interactivity. In a videogame you are not watching someone kill people regardless of how realistic or not it is, it is you doing the killing, having the intention to do the killing, and getting pleasure or relief on it. I do think they totally exagerate it, though.
On the other hand, when both a game and film show some killing in positive light, the film evokes stronger drive to imitate, because in a video game it already was player who did it.
The vast majority of scientific studies on the concept that were around a few years ago when I was interested enough to look into it either demonstrate longitudinally that exposure to violent media - be it games, TV, movies, the news, whatever - is associated with increased aggressiveness or demonstrate in controlled conditions (i.e. a lab) that exposure to violent media increases aggressiveness in the short term relative to control subjects or those exposed to non-violent media (there are probably a few long-term studies out these days, I should look it up sometime). Aggression has many forms, though, and violence is only one of them; psychologists can't ethically attempt to incite violence in scientific studies, so they tend to measure aggressiveness in terms of things like reactions to social cues and the content of conversation if they're using behavioral measures (instead of, say, questionnaires). There are also real-world observational studies, but they're generally not very good for showing much besides support that observations made in the lab apply in the real world. So pretty much any article saying that scientists have proved that violence in some form of media causes real-world violence is bullshit, because it would require an experiment that would never pass an ethics committee. (Never mind the distinction between "proving" a theory and "providing support" for it, and the fact that demonstrating causation in a lab isn't the same thing as demonstrating causation in realistic conditions.)
It seems likely that exposure to violent media increases the amount of violence in the world, because aggressiveness in one form is associated with other forms of aggressiveness - there's a reason they're grouped together under a single construct. (Besides which, aggressiveness on the part of one person can elicit aggressiveness from others). So, many investigators believe that it does cause violence. But again, it's difficult to support directly via experimental studies due to professional ethics. So it's entirely possible that exposure to violent media may increase some forms of aggressiveness (such as the aggression one displays in a conversational setting) without increasing others. For example, if the popular folk theory among gamers is true and enacting violence on-screen lets you "get it out of your system", it could increase verbal aggressiveness while reducing the tendency towards violence. (I'm skeptical of this due to findings on processing fluency, but it's certainly possible.)
And then there's the problem with psychological experiments in general, which is that they are used to make predictions about individuals based on tendencies within groups, and there are almost always exceptions. In all likelihood, playing violent video games makes some people act more violently and makes others act less violently, and games may cause people to act more violently in some situations and less violently in others. And hell, maybe it depends on the game in question. You can go back and try to get at what causes those exceptions, but that's not done most of the time, and even when it is you can rarely draw all-encompassing conclusions because there are thousands of variables that contribute to how we act in any situation, and at any given moment psychologists are just looking at a few that tend to contribute a helluvalot more than others. You can make pretty accurate predictions but will never be right 100% of the time on an individual level. So regardless of whether media exposure to violence increases real-world violence in general, trying to ban/censor violent games, movies, etc. is kind of like trying to impose restrictions on access to alcohol because it makes some people more aggressive: using the law as a substitute for self-control, limiting the choices available to everyone because there are some who will make bad choices.