Give this man a beer.
That’s why I liked the absurd “burnout” way more than the hyper realistic “gran turismo”
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It’d be a clumsy PR move to say “I got into the games industry because of the power of games to make people do what they just did in the game”. But I don’t think anyone says that. Works of art can produce all kinds of responses, of which emulation is just one; in fact, people very rarely respond to art by emulating its content. It seems like a connection you’d only make if you’d already made your mind up.
I do believe the media we consume is deeply entwined with our psychological constitution, just not in anything like the silly, facile cause-and-effect sense claimed by Pat Robertson.
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you raise an interesting point. While the dragon (and the slaying of) is clearly fantasy, game developers are serving the market’s desire that the dragon and violence against the dragon feel more real to us. The character models are more sophisticated, the animation is more realistic, the blood and viscera is more gruesome, because IMO those are methods to create a more “realistic” and therefore impactful experience.
I may be wrong, but if a game product company came out with a matrix-like shunt that we could plug into the back of our heads which would allow us to experience game sensations as if they were coming from our 5 physical sense, billions of us (me included) would flock to it. That is the direction much (not all) of game design is heading. The excitement of kinect, then occulus rift is inching us closer to that. Of removing the game interface and dropping us into the game itself. I think thats what i mean about games more and more blurring the lines.
Or a shorter way of saying it is: when I say “realism” i dont mean the minute details of our mundane lives, i mean the realness of the sensation experience and impact of more genuine feeling storytelling.
You summed up my point much more succinctly.
Gran Turismo is only hyper-realistic until you hit something. One of the more ridiculous conditions car manufacturers impose on video game makers is that if you want to show an actual manufacturer’s real-life vehicle, you’re not allowed to show it damaged, because apparently that would make us think that all their cars fall apart or something. Which is why any racing game that’s any fun has thinly disguised versions of real cars.
Personally I love doing GTA missions driving the Prius. Might as well save the planet while you’re rampaging.
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No, that’s a Gran Tourismo technical limitation. Take a look at Need for Speed: Most Wanted, for example, and you’ll see cars of tons of manufacturers getting banged up. Not coincidentally, NFS:MW was made by the developers of the Burnout series. The reason THAT series only featured make-believe cars is because they didn’t have the budget or marketing muscle to afford the licensing costs for those name brand cars. So they invented their own analogs.
I guess the car manufacturers have relented somewhat, then.
I would disagree that it is much more effective. I do believe it to be EQUALLY effective. Watching a movie that brings tears to my eyes or reading a passage that makes me laugh out loud is no less effecting than the victory of achieving a mega-evolution in Pokemon Y.
The presumption is that by making it an interactive process at a high-level (i.e. requiring specific strategic or timed inputs in real-time) versus a lower-level interaction (fully focused attention, physically turning pages or viewing content), it somehow becomes so affecting that average people somehow lose control of themselves. There is no evidence to back up this assertion as far as I know, other than moral panic.
The written word has sufficed for millenia as a way to motivate people to great heights and terrible lows. Powerful oratory has done the trick for as long as we’ve had language. Actors on the stage, on the radio, on film, on television and on the web have managed to affect viewers. They didn’t need video games for Rite of Spring to nearly cause a riot or for it to be considered influential to the audience.
The issue is not whether or not video-games affect their audience or immerse them: it’s whether or not that immersion influences them beyond their own self-control, driving them to terrible acts of violence or depravity. There is currently no evidence to indicate that they have any more power than other forms of media to do this. They are a convenient target that is no longer terribly compelling. When millions of people play a game and don’t show an increased propensity for violence, it requires a certain burden of proof to show that the claim of increased violence among it’s players is a reality.
Of course, most of these claims are made by people who don’t actually regularly play the games in questions, not unlike the people who claimed D&D taught actual magic spells. One thing that people forget is the mundanity that games often offer as part of their immersive experience. Yes, Call of Duty involves a lot of well-animated running and gunning…but it also features lots of menus, overhead maps and magical healing. It involves an internal logic that works in the game but doesn’t apply even to the players experience of crossing a room, let alone vaulting over a crashed airplane fuselage to toss a flashbang at a nebulous enemy terrorist.
Video games don’t deliver an alternate reality and likely rarely or never will. They deliver a different reality…a more entertaining one. Just as no one wants to play Dungeons and Dragons as a serf working the field 10 hours a day with the occasional festival or war to break up the monotony of subsistence survival in the medieval world, no one plays Pokemon to run away from home or Call of Duty to experience sitting at a guard station for 8 hours straight. Call of Duty delivers a Bruckheimer film, Burnout a bumper-cars writ large experience and so on. And like many such experiences, they can be exhausting in large doses for many.
It isn’t an argument that video games have absolutely no effect on gamers: it’s more that the scale and nature of the effect are not transformative or inherently bad (or worse than other forms of media entertainment).
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It doesn’t even correlate to violence. In fact, youth violence has dropped as sales have increased over the years.
Why is this even an issue anymore? Because there is a little bit of political traction left for some people to play on the fears and ignorance of a generation that does not have much direct experience of video games.
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Specific manufacturers were very adamant about it, specifically Porsche and Ferrari. But there are games that have had the damage modelling for almost a decade, now. Forza, Need For Speed and others have featured them. The Getaway (2003) on PS2 had plenty of destructible vehicles, from Citreons to Toyotas.
Now, on the flip side, many manufacturers made it very hard to negotiate that eventuality. In Forza, for example, the car can’t be totaled, just very badly damaged. It still has to be drivable, to make manufacturers happy. That’s why many went with fictional cars…it was much less work. GT’s total lack of a damage model in many versions was a source of wide-spread criticism of what was otherwise a pretty sophisticated driving model.
Me, I love Burnout cause you can totally destroy the HELL out of those cars.
So do knives. Five kids were knifed to death in Calgary a few weeks ago.
Ban kitchen knives.
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I would agree that all forms of media affect us. (Well, ALL experiences affect us, just media experiences are ones designed to be create specific responses so critics tend to focus on them to be especially “bad” or “good”) And I also acknowledge that i cant say that video games have a higher potential to encourage “bad” behavior more so than books or movies. Its a hypothesis that if a form of media allows the user to have a higher level of control over the experience the audience attributes more of themselves to the experience over more “observational” media. Now, i can think of arguments against that as well, such as my personal involvement with a good book is much higher than a video game given the internal insight and relationship that can be developed with a character in a book. So in terms of emotional investment, for me books are much more effective than video games.
On the other hand, after playing GTAV for four hours and then I go out driving, i have to admit i find myself looking at parked cars and people on the sidewalk a little… differently. (You might think im unique in this but ive talked to others who have admitted a similar experience.)
Maybe the question I’m searching for is “does level of ability a medium has to blur my awareness between where the media begins and i end have a greater impact on my behavior?”
I’ve officially entered into academic navel-gazing. 
Well, sure. There’s definitely a valid argument to be made that games can influence your thinking, perceptions or emotional state. I have experienced the kind of mental adjustment you describe, myself. But I ALSO have had the same kind of reaction from other media. One need look no further than the movie ‘Jaws’ and hear about people afraid to go to the beach that summer. My daughter, who is old enough to drive, needs to be escorted to her room and a light left on after watching a horror movie (though she insists on watching them). The movie psycho did that for showers, where people were suddenly nervous about something they’d never been nervous about beforehand. By the same token, I remember very distinctly having to put down the third Game of Thrones book after a certain traumatic event. It emotionally devastated me and it took a few days before I could pick the book back up; I needed time to process what I had read and was moody for a while after having read it.
I would expect this is true for many or most people: media in all its forms is compelling and involving. That’s the appeal of the arts, be they paintings, books, movies or video games. Your question is a valid one and certainly worthy of study. But most research and decades of experience with immersive media have shown us that generally, normative people have no problem with this.
Think of it this way: the possible mythical story of the Lumerie Brothers showing the first motion picture of an train coming at the audience claims that people were frightened and shocked by it. Modern thought is that this is conflating that version with their attempts at 3D, which would have been more overwhelming. Either way, it was considered that people might not be able to handle it. Video games are, in many ways, the same. I remember being amazed by gameplay in the early 1980s. I remember thinking that Metal Gear Solid 2 on the Playstation 2 was damned near photorealistic. It’s a sliding scale based on experience. The original Halloween seemed incredibly graphic and violent, once. Now it seems almost tame (though still effectively scary).
There’s no question that more legitimate study of these topics is valuable.
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“This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of Reason.”
Wow. That’s some powerful technology, that lets you republish an article that hasn’t been published yet.
Was it delivered by a DeLorean?
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I think the point of chellberty’s post is that the fact that a Koch brother sits on the board of the Reason Foundation is more important than any information, opinion, or analysis one might find in Reason magazine.
Which would be a very silly point, indeed.
The article clearly points out the stupid things said by the head of the NRA and other conservatives about video games. Reason is regularly critical of Republicans, and many of its writers voted for Obama in '08. I don’t agree with them on many issues, but you’d have to avoid ever reading the magazine to think that they’re in the tank for Republicans.
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Video games aren’t real. You guys know that, right? If you’re an adult taking cues on how to behave from fiction, then you have serious problems.
Media influences behavior pretty much the same way that everything you experience ever influences your behavior; the same way things you’re not ever aware of do (e.g. lead content in gasoline). It’s fine to do studies, but if your end goal is to prove “This is it! Video games (or movies or music or hamsters or whatever) made him kill!”, then you’re probably doing it wrong.
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Regardless of this or that real or imagined prior “moral panic”, I think one could make a very convincing, Real World / “on the ground” argument, and a pretty common sense one, that the problems we’re seeing with childhood and adult obesity are a direct result of home-based video game systems and The Internet.
By “home based” I don’t mean Odyssey (which I had, and didn’t like) and basic Atari (which was engrossing. But from personal experience my friend and I never played it for more than a couple of hours a day) but rather Nintendo in '87 and Super Nintendo in '90 (which were of the quality of arcade games, which most of us were already obsessively feeding quarters into during the early to mid 80s) and most of the game systems released since that time.
I distinctly remember the very responsible, level-headed girlfriend (who has since then luckily gotten her PHD in Oceanography and Microbiology, I think?) of a totally goof-off / slacker coworker choosing to miss numerous college classes in '87 - '88 because of her obsession with playing various Nintendo games at home (Super Mario maybe?): my goof-off coworker friend was the one trying to convince her not to skip class.)
Games aren’t going to get any less engrossing in the future. They’re going to get better (or “better”): more realistic and more addictive. That’s what they’re there for. Games are produced a) for the creators to make money, and b) to influence and encourage continued, future game playing. Games may be great, intelligent, fun, etc, but they’re not here to make the world a better place, or to make the gameplayers better persons. Their purpose is to make money: their method is to remove the players from the real world for an increasingly pleasurable and addictive period of time.
And that “time” is getting longer and longer, for your typical gamer.
The world sucks. A lot. For some people, it sucks most of, if not all of the time. Who wouldn’t choose to, if able, stay at home and comfortably, comfortingly compete against oneself via a video game, eat whenever they want, and sleep as much as possible?
Fast food? Fast food tasted pretty much the same in 1975 (when, for me, eating at McDonald’s was a treat: something my family only did once or, if I was good and deserved it, twice month) as it does now. One could definitely say that the advertising for it has gotten more pervasive, and more psychologically manipulative (“Love” has nothing to do with a Subaru, a McRib, fabric softener, etc.) but “fast food” is chosen so often, I think, because it IS fast. When people want to eat, they want to eat RIGHT THEN. Hunger =s an immediate need for satisfaction: this is encouraged by food manufacturers. The “right then” also comes into play so that we can collectively get right back to our video games, our Internet, our BlueRays, our obsessively-absorbing and over-discussed television shows (Orphan Black anyone? True Detective? Game of Thrones? Lost?)
Fast food, microwave foods, individually packaged, pre-cooked or no-cooking-needed foods, “comfort” foods, they all remove us from contact with The Real. The real world, where things happen. Where hot is hot and cold is cold and things don’t disappear when you shoot them or grab them; where stuff takes time to happen, and requires time for it to be enjoyed or appreciated.
PS- I realllly enjoy games.
Slippery slopes do exist. Some slopes are, actually, slippery. A can lead to B and thence to C and D and etc. What started as media (newspapers, magazines, books, phonographs, telephones requiring a switchboard operator for certain calls, telegraph, wireless radio) are a far cry from Ipads and Smart Phones and GoogleGlass, from PS4 or 5 and Siri and our cars telling us where to turn. We Google to remember the little things we forget, the details of the world (“What’s that big gray animal that charges? With a horn on it’s head? A Rhinosaur!”: an actual conversation I once had.) We don’t remember our best friend’s phone number: our phone does it for us.
A family, in the 1940s, could sit around listening to a radio show, talking about the day’s events, while playing a game of cards together. All at the same time. Now, we’re all glued to our variously-sized handheld screens, zeroed in on and engrossed our own things, or listening to our MP3s with earbuds in our ears, zeroed in on our own little area of interest, focussed on not focussing on anything else: isolated from the person sitting right beside us, as well as from our immediate environment, the world around us. As long as we have our little comforable, womb-like environment of entertainment/distraction, Hot Pockets, Mt. Dew and a comfy chair, we don’t care what’s going on anywhere else. Why would we?
No Mazes and Monsters? No disassociated-from-reality Tom Hanks!!???
Kitchen knives have a primary purpose which is not murdering people. There is no device safer than a kitchen knife capable of performing the same task.
Likewise, cars are extremely dangerous and kill thousands of people every year. But murder is not their primary function, and there are heavy regulations in their design, production, ownership and operation in an attempt to minimize those dangers.
Video games are intended to entertain people. There have never been any fatal accidents caused by operating a video game, nor have there been any intentional murders where a video game was used as the weapon.
Guns on the other hand… you don’t use them to prepare food, you don’t use them to take your kids to school or to go to work. You use them to kill efficiently, or to threaten to kill.
(That said, I understand there actually was a petition signed by doctors in the UK to attempt to ban kitchen knives.)
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