Again, then why is US different from every other country that has lively game markets? Saying that games are murder simulators is a red herring, it’s a convenient scapegoat that isn’t backed up by any research that’s been done. People contemplating actual murder are going to act on it regardless of access to games.
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Its absolutley our might makes right culture, and our gun fetishism, and our overt racism, and our easy access to mass murder weapons, and the mental health crisis, and the disenfranchisement of struggling people… and and and… I also dont believe there is a hard line above video games that forever removes their influence from the conversation.
The aviation industry relies on simulators. Below is an article on how F1 uses simulators. Many industries use simulators as standard practice.
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You don’t even need a study to prove it. Video games are sold worldwide. Yet the United States has about 250 mass shootings so far this year (the number is changing so fast I’m not sure of the exact count as of this moment). In second place is Mexico with 3. Most countries have had 0 mass shootings despite all those violent video games they’re playing.
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Because as stated above FPS games are not even remotely close to real shooting other than the team work and coordination. Point and click the mouse is not even remotely close to heft up the rifle, aim, pull the trigger, adjust for recoil, know how to properly and quickly reload the weapon.
Also relevant video from Penn and Teller.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9ukt0
Your flight sim set up if you are into it a lot will have proper controls and if you are in a big commercial rig feedback that you would get from a proper plane. I wouldn’t say you could properly fly but in a pinch you could take over with ground control help much easier than anyone else could.
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I dont believe a video game can make a person a better marksman. But can a violent video game inspire a person that already is showing violent tendencies, in the same way that maybe an inspirational song can motivate someone at the gym?
That’s like saying the pinch of salt on your rice side dish is a bigger problem in your weight gain than the six teaspoons of sugar and quarter cup of cream in your coffee.
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No. I previously listed at least 6 bigger problems than video games.
Simulators are not games - the only meaningful similarity is that they both use screens. Everything else about them, from controllers to feedback to purpose to context to reward, is different. Trying to link them is like saying this should be used at teaching hospitals
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Im guessing if I posted a single graphic frame of a FPS I could get banned for a week. But at the same time we are going to downplay it?
The comparison to Operation is ridiculous.
Kung Lao has a finisher that shows him sawing his opponent in half with his hat. The comparison to Operation is pretty apt. It’s gross, but utterly ridiculous as well. Also I notice we don’t have daily hat-saw massacres. I do, actually, think the overall fascination with graphic violence is overvalued FWIW and that violence is often the only form of creative expression encouraged in males. I just don’t think it’s realistically the way that radicalization works.
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We are downplaying the link between video games and gun violence because it has been the subject of scientific study for decades now and no one has yet presented evidence of a causal link between the two.
I MIGHT be inclined to accept the theory that some target shooting games help would-be killers hone their marksmanship skills, but only if the game console had a full-size rifle style controller. And even then it wouldn’t be nearly as useful as a little time at an actual shooting range.
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And so can a song, movie, book, tweet from a racist shitbag on Fox. Yet we seem to never blame any of that. Just video games.
I would argue other bits of media from real people that give a wink and nod to go ahead and treat others who are ‘different’ from you as not people have a bigger influence here.
ETA thanks @orenwolf for splitting off this derail.
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On the link between video games and violence:
This graph exists
Case closed.
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I dunno-- video games have gotten a lot more realistic since the first Mortal Kombat.
This ain’t your Daddy’s fighting sim.
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I love a challenge.
Almost 7 minutes of the Doomslayer killing demons. Blood everywhere. Doom sold around 2 million units just on PC. We should have a global epidemic of people getting killed with plasma rifles at this point, right?
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So now violent music is also making people violent?
No, they have studied this for TV and Movies, music, and video games. The evidence is clear, simulated violence doesn’t make one more violent. At the worst it might trigger violence in an already violent person. e.g. they blow up when losing a game.
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The only right-wing gaming I can support
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See, I get where you’re going with this, but it just doesn’t follow. We know of no studies that link videogame violence to real world violence, which does not directly invalidate what you’re hinting at here, but it is not unexplored territory.
I’ll use FPS as a stand in for whatever you mean by killing simulators.
Cultural influence is complicated but we can infer something from how both of these types of games are marketed, and the example that best supports your position that I can think of is call of duty 4 modern warfare, which came out in the PS3 era, that’s a game that was leaning into realism a bit too much for my tastes, here’s the trailer for it from 2007.
The most important bit is right up front:
“The following trailer consists entirely of actual gameplay”
There is a real sense that the context in which we should experience this is of real war in real places against real threats. The enemies on screen are caricatures to be sure, the bad guys irredeemably bad and your intervention is a good thing, all of this is fantasy but not far off from fantasies real world people had about real wars at the time. An argument could be made that these types of videogames could shape impressionable minds the wrong way, but that would ignore the most obvious flaw of that argument, this video game aspires to recreate the feeling of how war was perceived at the time. Not playing this game did not change what you thought of as real about war or violence or who the bad guys were or the righteousness of the violence in the real world.
No, I don’t think this is a net good for society, but this is as bad as it got and it didn’t last long, let’s look at another game that aspires to realism
This time, at the start we get “captured in real time in 4K”, followed by “Powered by satellite data and Azure AI”, not a direct allusion to reality but they are letting you know that this is not pre-rendered footage, and of course can also be interpreted to mean that it is not real world footage either but that it is based on reality. Nothing here is cartoonish. In the extremes, we can look at the types of controllers that are commercially available for flight simulators like those in this video.
There is nothing even remotely similar for FPS games.
Now. lets look at how modern FPS games are marketed today.
“Actual in game footage” this does not allow the same level of suspension of belief as in the flight sim, we are told this is a game and the visuals are from the game.
Cliched lines like “fine line between right and wrong”, a cigar chomping, grizzled looking team leader “going dark” followed by what looks like a movie trailer, the visuals are certainly impressive but they’re offering the movie experience of war with heroic/dramatic musical cues and what feels like a narrative with clear cut good guys and bad guys. This is not meant to be understood as a real war fight against a real world enemy. IT is the movie version of war.
I have not described the gameplay experience, I have only looked at how these games are sold, which is how they convince people to pay for the games themselves, the sort of experience people are buying.
Because most people don’t actually buy these games to feel like they’re killing people, the way people who play flight sims want to feel like they are flying a plane. People who want to kill people may buy these games and are unable to differentiate real life from fantasy, but it doesn’t follow that this sort of behavior is learned by playing games or that any real life skills for killing people can be gleamed by playing.
Sure, but that’s the problem with larger pictures, there’s a lot in that picture besides FPS games, there’s despair caused by global warming and too much money trying to stop us from addressing it, hatred stoked by politicians for power and money, general feeling of unease because the rich get richer and everybody else is just getting by. Looking at the bigger picture, would you go so far to say that violent video games are cause or effect? Or is it even more complicated than that?
Edited for typos and clarity.
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ARMA is a pretty accurate combat simulator. As is Squad. But they’re both milsim, and and based on objective play. Not gunning down as many people as quickly as possible in an urban environment. A lot of the time it’s just trying to get from one point to another safely, and you end up getting gunned down by a single well-placed machine gun that wasn’t marked off by the scouts.
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