Another Mass Shooting, (Just Another Day) in America

■■■■ it. I want those 2 minutes back dammit.

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Thank you.

You will realise that that doesn’t actually prove anything though, right?

I don’t know anything though. I have played these games heaps. (although not recently), for me playing every day for a few years didn’t make me more inclined to violence, aggression, whatever…as far as I could tell. However, I also don’t assume my experience is everyone’s experience. (and I dreamt about the games, and saw lines and maps when walking through normal places, so it was clearly in my mind.

There is plenty of study to do. Do video games make kids more violent? I’d have no problem with the answer “on average, no”. But I would also think that there’s differences between those with specific types of mental disorders, or other drivers, and I’m not seeing that research yet. I’m seeing lots of people doing the preliminary research that needs to be done and that being picked up by a press wanting to definitively answer a question hat probably doesn’t have a definitive answer.

I play plenty of GTA and i dont much feel like going on a violent rampage.

The issue is one of mental health and the severe lack of support services for those affected by it.

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You got any proof that smoking causes cancer, or man causes climate change.

I’m skeptical about anything that claims it’s answered, game over.

Research needs to consider different games, different gaming habits, different brain structures, etc etc. Nothing is simple, not when it comes to people and the mind.

At least no one’s blaming METAL. \m/

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Thank you again.

Tell me, do you think this experiment is designed so as to answer your question with no further study required?

"In one study, participants played a game where they had to either be a car avoiding collisions with trucks or a mouse avoiding being caught by a cat. Following the game, the players were shown various images, such as a bus or a dog, and asked to label them as either a vehicle or an animal.

Dr David Zendle, from the University’s Department of Computer Science, said: “If players are ‘primed’ through immersing themselves in the concepts of the game, they should be able to categorise the objects associated with this game more quickly in the real world once the game had concluded.”

Quite likely.

Or this link between mental health, medication, video games, life circumstances, and on and on and on and on.

Guaranteed at some point someone will be publishing a study showing “proof” of a link. They’ll get heaps of media. It won’t mean there’s a link, in the same way that the current studies don’t mean there isn’t.

My snark wasn’t so much directed at you. More the issue.

Video game violence is something that looks like a logical obvious link. It has been studied to death and there’s no causal link.

I too play a lot of games. I’ve had images and patterns from a game on loop in my mind when I closed my eyes. It’s weird. I understand the feeling that this has a link to behaviour.

What has an impact is mental health, social factors, media/propaganda and access to weapons.

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No, the issue is there’s too many guns, particularly automatic, in america.

Mental health issues are the same everywhere
Video games are everywhere

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btw, I’m not actually arguing there’s a link, just that I don’t think the way the lack of link is reported actually makes sense given the data and the experiments. they’re all just building the knowledge. It’s not like you can do a randomised controlled trial on this stuff.

you’re the one with the inference, proof up.

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JFTR, there actually are studies confirming a link to these games and incresed agressive behaviour, … but it’s not as bad as some, (like Donny Dump recently) make it out to be at this point.

*citation provided

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Combine all of those factors and they form 95% of the course. Not one of those things is a single course of these.

Poor Mental health with next to no support who then play and are affected violent video games with easy access to high power weapons.

I’ll say first America’s gun laws are ridiculas and need to change but changing only gun laws does nothing.

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I have no proof. I can’t have proof. You can’t actually “prove” anything from the sort of studies that are being conducted. You can just build the knowledge to the point where it is generally accepted one way or another, and then if a new study comes in that can change the accepted answer.

It’s why the smoking lobby could get away with it for so long, and is the playbook that “big oil” has followed.

Is there a “big games” lobby? Who knows. I reckon there’s unlikely a link for people without specific mental disorders (which is what these studies seem to be showing), but beyond that I don’t know. I’ll wait and see.

Anyway, thanks all for some interesting discussion. I really need to do some stuff now! :slight_smile:

You pretty much can.

You can easily buy video games in virtually every country in the world.

You can easily, legally, and affordably buy automatic weapons on the same day in 1.

There’s a mass shooting every other day in 1 country in the world.

“We just can’t be sure”

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There’s 2 ways to study this.

  1. Control for everything in a lab and put people through specific experiments and measure behaviour. Problem is it’s very hard to apply unrealistic models to the real world. I get why you had a problem with this.

  2. Take real world data and look for population groups with different environments. My take on this one is Video games are ubiquitous, but gun violence is focused on a few places in be world. If video games caused violence, then the effect would be felt universally.

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Again, there are what, 250-300 countries in the world?

And 1 of them has the shootings.

What you mean is it wouldn’t change instantly. And it wouldn’t.
There’s ~400M guns in private hands in the US. It’s going to take a generation to wind that back.
But you still have to do it.