Violent Video games cause aggressive behavior

Homicidal Cherry53 said:
http://www.gamespot.com/news/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=26044594&sid=6182965&action=convert&om_clk=latestnews&tag=latestnews;title;1

Well, violent games cause aggression, especially in younger kids. I can't say I'm really surprised though. If you sit there, and view any kind of violent media, excessively, I would expect that you would start to model the behavior, especially if you were a young, impressionable kid. I have no objections to them doing this study, but why are they limiting this to video games? The fact that they aren't sitting there, seeing how some uber violent slasher film affects kids makes me think they're just trying to use video games as a scape goat for society's problems...again.

Jack Thompson will probably have a field day with this one though. :-\
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Meh. Kids are just violent no matter what. I mean they play cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians etc...even without ever seeing a video game. I mean, sure, a movie or game can give them specific ideas..but they would think up their own anyways.
 
I've said this before, but sociology has basically proven that human beings are incredibly unoriginal creatures. Aside from the ability to suck (literally, like, from a bottle) and the urge to eat, humans aren't born with any instincts, behaviors, or natures of any kind. All behavior is learned, and imitated. This is why children who go through traumatic moments early on in life can be affected by it their whole life.

As long as someone (say, a responsible parent) is their to guide the child through the experience of playing a videogame and put it in context for them, the effect it could have would be minimal. A child who is left on his or her own to try and make sense of Grand Theft Auto could assume that it is reflective of reality, and that could lead to aggressive behavior, yes, of course, but that's nothing that we haven't already known for years. If a child grows up in a violent environment then the child will grow up accustomed to violence and expect that it is like that everywhere.

Hence, the ESRB rating system is used to ensure that a parent has to at least acknowledge the fact that some games that are out there are not for kids. The parent has to judge the maturity level of the child and... blah blah blah.

It's the same old story, beat to death a thousand times. If you want to eliminate violence in videogames then you have to do likewise for every expressive medium. Movies, music, TV, a painter's canvas... people were aggressive before videogames came along, and they'll be aggressive if video games were taken away. The public's desire to play violent or aggressive videogames is a symptom of a much larger problem, and studies of this nature do nothing to solve it.
 
stealth toilet said:
I've said this before, but sociology has basically proven that human beings are incredibly unoriginal creatures. Aside from the ability to suck (literally, like, from a bottle) and the urge to eat, humans aren't born with any instincts, behaviors, or natures of any kind.
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Yeah, ive always wonderd why this is? and why werent we born with proper defence mechanisms like other animans? I.E. claws,fangs, poison, ect
 
but, claws are always sharp. My fists couldnt fight off many animals. :lol
 
Boom$ickle said:
Yeah, ive always wonderd why this is? and why werent we born with proper defence mechanisms like other animans? I.E. claws,fangs, poison, ect
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It's evolutionary. Claws, fangs, and poison are common in cold blooded vertebrates, and invertebrates because their parents are often gone by the time they are born. Mammals and birds generally don't need them at birth because they rely on their parents for protection, in the case of some mammals, for years.

But Stealth was talking more about instincts, like many animals have who aren't nurtured by parents, have from birth.
 
Actually the same can be said for animals as well. I haven't really looked into the animal kingdom that much in terms of their instinctual behaviour, but from what I understand many animals are essentially blank slates when they are born as well. I think it's mostly due to the fact that an animal's capacity to learn limits it to learning only essential survival skills, and so while it takes a human several years to learn how to survive and function in our society, it can take an animal a matter of days or hours to learn the essential skills it needs. Thus it looks as though animals are born with instinctual behavior, but ultimately they just have a lot less to learn.

However, I really don't know if this logic is sound, and I would be open to learning more on the subject if anyone can contribute any opposing views.
 
stealth toilet said:
Actually the same can be said for animals as well. I haven't really looked into the animal kingdom that much in terms of their instinctual behaviour, but from what I understand many animals are essentially blank slates when they are born as well. I think it's mostly due to the fact that an animal's capacity to learn limits it to learning only essential survival skills, and so while it takes a human several years to learn how to survive and function in our society, it can take an animal a matter of days or hours to learn the essential skills it needs. Thus it looks as though animals are born with instinctual behavior, but ultimately they just have a lot less to learn.
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I too am no expert on the subject, but I would think that many animals, especially many invertebrates, wouldn't have the intelligence to mirror the behavior of others in its species (nor are there any parents to observe in most cases). I would think, in the case of these animals, much, if not all, of what they need to know survive is already there when they are born because they don't have the capacity to learn and understand new things.
 
Homicidal Cherry53 said:
I too am no expert on the subject, but I would think that many animals, especially many invertebrates, wouldn't have the intelligence to mirror the behavior of others in its species (nor are there any parents to observe in most cases). I would think, in the case of these animals, much, if not all, of what they need to know survive is already there when they are born because they don't have the capacity to learn and understand new things.
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Yeah, I did a quick search on it and that seemed to more or less be the consensus. In several cases when an animal is born its actually abandoned by it's parents, and if the species is able to survive thus, instinctual behavior has to be a key to it's survival. I also more or less confirmed what I said earlier, that when it comes to humans, concerning the definition of the word "instinct" since about 1961, human beings don't have any.

Go figure.
 
Ok I mostly play violent games but thats not even a small reason why i kill people, its because i have a tainted vision of reality to where everything is wrong and only i can fix it by killing...or so my shrink says that idk any of those words mean
 
Yeah............ ::)

anyhow, I think the only issue is that kids are brats whose parents dont teach them anything, so they think what they deal w/ in games and stuff, is real.
 
Homicidal Cherry53 said:
Does it not make sense that an 8 year old who plays GTA for a couple hundred hours wouldn't be inherently more aggressive?
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There lies the problem. An eight year old child has no business playing a game that is rated for those older than 17 years of age because they will act out what they see. Not by agression, but because a "game" makes violent acts fun and sociably acceptible.

Now a bit off topic:

@ Boom. I'll come out and say it because there's no way to sugar coat it. Are you stupid or something? To say:
No, the hate will stop when this bullet finds her head...or I delete her on myspace
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has got to be the most irresponsible thing someone can do, joke or not. Why? Because someone can read this and take it as you being serious. In opther words, if there are any more threats of this nature on this board, that person will likely take a permanent vacation from the forum.
 
Well he did...and I'm kinda thinking you're stupid too for posting something like that. There's a fine line between joking, being serious, and being stupid.
 
stealth toilet said:
Actually the same can be said for animals as well. I haven't really looked into the animal kingdom that much in terms of their instinctual behaviour, but from what I understand many animals are essentially blank slates when they are born as well.
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Studies of different primate "tribes" from different areas show a tendency to behave as they've been taught by their elders. Some tribes often war against members of their own species, some hunt and kill other species for food and some are vegetarian and rarely fight or kill. That would seem to support that theory that violence is a learned behavior. The same could be said for domesticated animals released into the wild that don't know how to hunt or defend themselves.
 
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