A Big, Wordy Scholarly Post.
Sorry the post is so late today, by which I mean I should have had an article up like 6 hours ago. Nonetheless, as I consider the time before I go to sleep to still be the previous day, even if it is actually 4 and a half hours into the current day, you can consider this the post for Monday.
This is the reason I actually haven’t posted. I had to write a long-ass research paper for my Sociology class. I thought I’d go ahead and post part of it up here. It’s about the effects of violent media on social groups and individuals, and this section in particular covers why I don’t think that the effects violent media (in particular, video games) have on people are as serious as you may think; specifically, because when a scientist says games cause “aggressive behavior,” he doesn’t mean the subject starts punching him, he means a stronger desire to compete and take action against what the subject sees as an opponent. When Jack Thompson cites that same study, he tries to tell you it means the games compel the subject, perhaps through black magic, to take up the nearest firearm (which people like Jack Thompson have gone out of their way to make as accessible as possible) and just kill everything they see. I’m a little too fucking tired right now to tell if this is good or not, and I may reconsider this in the morning and replace it with dick jokes and Galaga references. Enjoy it while you can.
An interesting component of this debate is the relativity of the way some material is examined compared to other, similar material. Consider two games, both of which involve similar activities. In both, the goal is to defeat your opponent by physically attacking him, attempting to completely disable and prevent them from being able to progress. The only difference is one is real life and the other is make believe. The activities I am describing are football (specifically playing defense) and the video game Mortal Kombat. Both have similar effects on aggressive behavior afterward, but the difference is that Mortal Kombat is considered by many to pose a danger to children, while the other is a routine activity children are encouraged to participate in. Mortal Kombat is sometimes seen as dangerous (in the same way as other games) because it increases aggressive behavior towards others in children. Football, on the other hand, is encouraged for children because it causes increases in competitive behavior in children. These are different words for the same type of behavior. Of course, I am not suggesting that football is “just as dangerous” as video games; in fact, I am saying just the opposite. My point is that, strictly from an observational point of view, the science so often touted to “prove” that video games and other violent media cause violence could be used against many activities that are considered “good” for children. While I was able to find several studies linking the play of video games to violent behavior, and several linking the play of sports to aggressive behavior, I couldn’t find any studies that compared the two. However, it would seem from the data presented that the emotions produced by both activities are similar, and despite the pejorative use of “aggressive” in many news reports about violent media, it seems that, in the actual scientific data, it’s very similar to the “competitive spirit” so valued in American culture. This is often a problem when a scientific study is done with the purpose of evaluating and proving or disproving a specific claim; sometimes the data found is not properly contextualized. While I am of course not encouraging aggression in children, I can say from personal experience that, having grown up an only child in a neighborhood with no children for 10 miles, video games and televised football both helped develop understanding of the proper way to compete with others and how to contextualize aggression developed as a result of competition. I have concluded through my research that the “aggressive behavior” and “more violent reactions” touted by the news media and moral crusaders are really the same things I learned by playing pee wee baseball; a desire to do better than my opponents and be successful.
