$10m look into games and gun violence a bust

Let me just google that for you:

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They want to study the correlation? I volunteer to help! How 'bout they peel off about $10,000 or so of that grant money, send it to me, and Iā€™ll record the hours I spend playing Mass Effect and Borderlands vs. the number of times I shoot someone.

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After the Sandy Hook shootings, at presidential behest, $10 million was allocated to to explore links between gun violence and video games.

A further $15 was originally allotted to explore possible links between guns and gun violence before being shot down in the Senate.

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[quote=ā€œAnthonyC, post:19, topic:22361ā€]
Also, note the complete lack of a distinction between genres. There are violent games which make meaningful distinctions based on the morality of killing in different circumstances, and other violent games that just donā€™t care.[/quote]

Context is everything. Itā€™s not just the justification for violence within the game setting, but the whole attitude toward it. In fact I think the attitude toward violence presented by the game might be more important than the story.

I was replaying Borderlands 2 around the time Sandy Hook happened, and I found myself needing to quit it and uninstall. I did not want to put myself in the shoes of a psycho who chuckled every time he shot someone in the face, splattering their brains all over, and mocking everyone else he killed as well. There was a profound disrespect for human life which did not square with the story about trying to save it. Having the most hateful villain Iā€™ve ever seen in a game, and adequate justification for violence, was not enough.

I donā€™t believe gun violence, or other violence, is caused by video games. But I do think itā€™s worth considering what games, and all other media, are saying.

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Are you talking about the original Civilization, or Civilization: Call to Power?

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Probable Civ or Civ II :slight_smile:

One of the many genius things about the Half Life series was that Freeman kept his mouth shut, allowing the player to project any personality on to him they wanted.

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If you havenā€™t already, check out The Witcher games. Consequences actually exist in them.

Problem with BBā€™s coding here. I keep clicking ā€˜likeā€™ but it only goes up once

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It looks like the big peak was in 1982ā€¦
Iā€™m looking at you, Q*bert!

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Does it help that death in the Borderlands universe seems to be temporary? In a world where killing someone simply results in them being reconstructed, murder becomes a minor inconvenience.

Unfortunately, jumping doesnā€™t. I found that distracting.

Gamesā€¦gunsā€¦satanic musicā€¦dungeons & dragonsā€¦ Weā€™ve tried banning all the symptoms.

When will someone have the courage to stand up to Death and the powerful Dying lobby?!!?

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What? But the crafting is totally realistic!

I can see how people would get confused.

Itā€™s something to think about. However, as with many other games where resurrection is possible, the application is very inconsistent. Where it suits the plot for people to die, nobody remembers to try Phoenix Down the New-U Station. There were quite a few key NPCs, on both sides of the sympathy divide, who seem to die permanently in order to drive the story.

Hyperion owns the New-U stations and operates them for profit. Once the plot gets going in Borderlands 2, one might be led to believe Angel prevented the vault hunters from getting locked out of that system. It seems unlikely that the penniless, desperate former miners/criminals would be given a free ride.

Death only matters in cutscenes.

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Iā€™m perfectly aware of that, and that the gun ownership rate also declined during that time. But all thatā€™s irrelevant to the issue at hand, which was research (or at least the intent to do research) sparked by anomalous spree shootings (which represent a tiny fraction of the gun violence in the US anyways).

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