Games = Violent Thoughts?

SAS

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Here is another study 'claiming' games are turning us into mindless thugs. This time we maybe programming our minds to think violently...

Have a scan of the study below and post your views. Do you think violently after playing games. Would you say you're a more violent person since becoming a gamer?

The Study

A German team studied 13 men aged between 18 and 26, who played games for an average of two hours a day. Brain mapping scans showed the same kind of activity as when people imagine being violent themselves, New Scientist reports.

They asked the men to play a violent game while their brain activity was monitored using magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning.

Dr Niels Birbaumer, from the University of Tubingen in Germany, suggested playing games regularly would strengthen certain circuits in the brain, and a regular player faced with a real life violent situation may be more likely to react aggressively. This could make games players "primed" for aggression.

Dr Guy Cumberbatch, head of the independent Communications Research Group in the UK, said: "If the findings in this study were the same as when people responded to imaginary situations, why is it any different to seeing violence in films or at the theatre?

"The problem is, it's very much a witch-hunt in relation to video games."

He added: "The instinct to punch someone on the nose is pretty basic. I don't think it is influenced in any way by playing these games."

The full article can be read here on the BBC.
 

SiD

Fledgling Freddie
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The instinct to punch someone on the nose is pretty basic. I don't think it is influenced in any way by playing these games
Dr Guy Cumberbatch

I think that sums it up really.

Yes mabbe it is the same as actually getting angry with someone but you are taking that agression out by killing them in game. I find FPS games very stress relieving from my stresses of work and looking after my dying mother.
 

dysfunction

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Not another study on the violence of games.

I absolutely love playing kill em all type games such as doom or CS or HL or BF2.
And I am extremely passive.

I also find that if I'm really stressed out I can play a "violent" game and at the end of the session I am completely relaxed and calm.
 

Dommers

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after a hard day at school, i find "PWNING SOME n00bs" at cs quite relaxing :p
 

Sharma

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I know....

Lets take 13 members from this forum, and ask them if they think studies like this are bullshit.

I can take a good guess 100% agree.

There, I shall now publish my finding in the newspaper to attempt to make the professors look like idiots also.

Or maybe not.

What is the obsession with supposed "Upper class intelectuals" trying to prove video games cause violence?

I know, lets go on a protest saying that Chess makes you violent because its a depiction of old time battle strategies and lets see their reaction.


Jesus H christ, will they ever cut this bullshit?
 

tris-

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i think they are bull shit. who says these 13 men are not already having violent thoughts without thinkin, or something in the past has triggerd it, or they are naturally pre disposed of it, or or or

there is not enough research into, its like saying people who smoke pot turn psycho. what if they are pre disposed to it?!
ok so the chance is tiny that the people they pick are always pre disposed to something in the study, but its possible. there is probably studies we dont hear about, because nothing they think will happen DOES happen.
 

SAS

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Exactly 13 people? Talk about a small sample size.
 

Talivar

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Seems to me the human mind needs some sort of violence anyway to sate it.You never hear of riots after a boxing match for example and way way back the romans understood the need to sate this and hence arenas where used.So in reality playing a violent comp game prob stops a lot from being violent.
The ppl who do play games then go murder ppl would have still killed the person if they had read a book or watched a film IMO.
 

dysfunction

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SAS said:
Exactly 13 people? Talk about a small sample size.


The sample size doesnt mean anything. As long as its a near perfecrt representative of the entire popluation then your result extrapolation will be fairly accurate


:p
 

Lakashnik

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videogames dont make me violent. its managing to meet the people who are the retarded ****s that are just generaly people who if i met irl i would probably feel violently to without playing a game.
i can happily play games with friends with as much killing blood and gore and not get stressed at all. i can then play the same game witha bunch of random fktards who dont know their feet from their hands and either just generally fk up the simplest things or act like cockbags and mess things up on purpose. this like if they did these things irl would get me agrovated.
u cant blame video games for peoples violent tendancies what so ever.
all these studies are a crock of poop. the only way to end all this would be to live in a world without emotions. kind of equilibriam film style but without the rebels.
 

Sharkith

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the sample has no indication of power and so the data is basically meaningless.

To explain; people might feel the same when their bus is late or when the train is late. Yet. There remains no data to show how inappropriate planning and poor infrastructure in public transport is promoting violence in people. Making people angry so we claim that video games are evul when bus planners might leave us with even more reason to feel as aggresive is simply hypocritical....

This is a very simplistic study that few in the discipline would think is representative.......
 

Louster

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Games definitely lead to violent thoughts; they're all such generic, pointless, moneygrubbing piles of shit these days that they make me want to break stuff.
And yet, being the loser addict that I am, my jaded cynicism still doesn't stop me playing the damned things.
 

FuzzyLogic

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The last game that really made me want to hurt someone was Toejam and Earl, and that was over ten years ago...almost had me Megadrive confiscated (broke a pad and almost flung the console through the window...you try going through 59 levels of that game and dying on the last level with the last piece of the ship to a bloody boogeyman).

The games of these days feel very much tame to me now, and that's with them trying to be as violent as possible (they're not even coming close to the level of pissed off I was that day). Games are just another scapegoat for the media to cry over as much as comic books were in the fifties or movies were before that, bugger it, if the media wants to be sensationalist over nonsensical crap, let 'em, I just find it worrying that idiots believe all the nonsenense they spew at times.


[disclaimer; I'm not saying that games can't provoke violent reactions from people, oh they can, I just don't see them as being much different from many other outlets in the world today, ps, does being a little pished count as an excuse for writing crap?]
 

Honza

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LOFL, research made on 13 men.... muheheheeee ... even 1000 men are not considered as a representative sample :p
Guess some noob scientist wannabe famous ;-)
I'd like to see comparing video games and evening TV news. Bet for violence TV news own 99% video games hard.
my 2 cents
 

mank!

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SAS said:
Dr Niels Birbaumer, from the University of Tubingen in Germany, suggested playing games regularly would strengthen certain circuits in the brain, and a regular player faced with a real life violent situation may be more likely to react aggressively. This could make games players "primed" for aggression.

of course, this doesn't take into account the fact that 90% of gamers are total nerds who never leave their house ;)

now fuck off or I'll slit your throat
 

haarewin

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im probably the least violent person i know. in real life i will go out of my way to avoid any situation of potential conflict.

tris- said:
there is probably studies we dont hear about, because nothing they think will happen DOES happen.

most studies like that dont get published. or if they do get published, people use them as an argument against an idea/theory. they dont get publicised (by the media) because then the public has to think up a new scapegoat for their violent children rather than poor parenting skills.

Dr Cumbercatch has the right idea. its a witch hunt which they should drop. the same as the idea that watching television causes people to become murderers.
 

MKJ

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Well I was a nutcase in rl before playing games. Now I am a violent nutcase cos I played DAOC for so long. The first inf i see in rl I gonna ring it's neck ;) .
 

old.Tohtori

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Most people didn't really read the good doctors comments and just saw "game discussion" and went "No boo hiss!!! Games can't be bad!!!"

And they wonder why they think gamers are a bit...hmm...aggressive.
 

Taen

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There has been countless numbers of studies done on the link between video games and violence/aggresive behaviour and nearly always the result is the same. That is that there is a definite link .. so strong in fact is the link that its not far behind statistically from the link between smoking and lung cancer. Psycholologists are not on a witch hunt against video games, in fact its the other way around ... studies are suppressed by and ignored by the media all the time.
 

Alliandre

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It's an interesting idea. People play these violent games, getting the feelings of being violent. For some reason they can't play the game for a week or so after playing it daily for long periods. They then find that they can get the same feeling through real violence. But how do they find this out? Either they read this survey that effectively tells them this, or they already had violent experiences before, or they somehow get provoked into it.

Now this is the big problem. The researcher for this survey suggests that the pathways in the brain for violent thought may strenghten the circuits in the brain for this violent behaviour. This would suggest that they are more likely to get into a fight after being provoked, but how much more significantly (if any, cause in fact does strengthening the pathways make people want to use them more) do the people want to be violent?

Overall there seems a very small chance that the person will get provoked enough to be violent in a space of time that they'd noticably miss such an "addiction" to violence within games.
 

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