MEDIA & VIOLENCE!!!!

[Rob G]

Oh man, I was playing SOCOM last night while listening to Cypress Hill.

Xbones, us dudes upstate having been playing SOCOM online. Its free, you just plug your high speed internet into your playstation and it works. You play a team of seals vs. a team of terrorists. You and your buddies have headsets and collaborate to kill. ITS FUCKING GREAT.

Concerning your posts, Awesome shit man. Great where to start up an intelligent debate. I have considered many of the ideas you presented here. Particularly the parts bout Rap Music and MTV. When i considered them though it was more in the context of holding back and continuing the cycle of criminality within the african american culture.

The thing with the video games is probably right. But I believe its just one of the setbacks to living in a free society. As americans i think the creators of these games have a right to create and sell them. I have a right to buy them. It helps to put safetys on them so children cant buy them. But its my observation that many of these standards are already in effect and simply are not enforced. I would take all these freedoms and consider them in the rightious realm of freedom of speech or expression. Its all out there. As you mentioned its up to us the parent to decide what our children will be subjected too. The truth is kids are sponges and every single thing that happens to them along the way crafts and molds what they will become. Even the best parent though have to work and cant be there 24 hours a day every second along the way.

I wonder though if i protect my kids from such things if i am handicapping them. Perhaps i should get my kids video games associated with dodging bullets. So that when Tyrone starts busting caps my kids can go all NEO on him.

And I am always weary of how mucy we allow the governement to fuck with.

Let me refocus here. So i think the games and movies and MTV are here to stay and rightiously so in my mind.
Thats America.
We as parents must do what we can to filter it and at best be educational about what we cant filter out.

But it comes to me that even if i can keep my kid on the right path so that he does not become a mass murderer that it still dont stop him from being a casualty.

But the sad reality is there are no more parents. Most kids are raised by society and the thousands of random factors that permenate it. Kids dont have 2 parents these days. They either have 1 or 4, both are worse then 2. Fuck, Kids have kids and not only does the cycle perpetuae itself but it the pool grows larger with each generation.

How do we make kids be parents again.

What about Parenting as a class in high school. What about morals as a class in elementary school. Am i crazy?

Fuck i gotta go to work. Great thread pete

[ring87]

Video games are responsible for me being such a good Tank gunner. Hell, we use to train on ultra-real simulators in the military to save money. Depleted Uranium cost allot of money and is slightly radio-active. Anyway, if you turn the thermal sight on you can't see great detail but you can see everything and it looks allot like a video game. We are capitalist society that has built our modern day empire on the bones of those who stood in our way. What do you expect. Back in the day you were lucky to live to 40 and could be hacked to death by all manner of weapons. (just like in Africa now) What I am trying to say is, it is all how you look at it. I don't know if it is better these days or not just different. War, Murder, raping and pillaging are not as common but violence is part of who we are and it will always be that way. Teenagers in the Middle East are blowing themselves up so
I guess the little bit of crap our kids will do is not as bad as it could be. I wish it could be different but the liberal ways that afford us freedom have cost us some of our morality. Everything comes at a price; it is just a matter if you are willing to pay. Peace sell but nobody's buying. Video games on the other hand, are flying off the shelf and the bloodier the better. It's all supply and demand. Hell need souls and we need sin so it's a win, win........violence is so cool, just look at my new avatar.......I wish we could control ourselves but that's everyone personal battle. "battle" sweet.....this shit is subconscious.

[Ken]

OK, I finally finished reading all the data this thread provides. I was certainly overloaded but i feel I have enough background to tackle this subject. First of all, Grossman presents his data in a more favorable light then Aveni, who I feel has little credibility. It is Aveni who oversimplifies his data. It seems that Aveni is pulling articles and statistics out of his ass that have very little to do with the topic that Grossman presents, or the facts that Aveni presents to rebut Grossman are completely irrevelant or wrong. Aveni comes off as someone pissed-off, who has a definite axe to grind against Grossman, which makes his arguments suspect right away. He doesn't present in a calm manner, but attacks, which also hurts his credibility. Finally, I don't believe the evidence Aveni presents adequately backs up his rebuttal against Grossman. It seems that Aveni is grasping at straws, quoting articles that have little to do with video game violence.

That said, the reason this is important is because Grossman is correct, not because of any statistics, or training, but because of common sense. Yes, his training backs up his arguments, and he is correct on many points and levels, but anyone who has played video games can attest, and is a psuedo-expert, that video games have an affect on the mind. What that affect is, to me, is just plain common sense, and what the American Psychological Association and others try to do is over-analyze and over-synthesize what should be simple common sense.

For years, the APA did studies trying to find a correlation between TV violence and violence in children and for years their studies concluded that there was no correlation! As a psychology major back in my college days, I was always amazed by this. It was these studies that formed the initial crack in my belief in psychology. That crack later widened into a chasm, and now I am a total cycnic in regards to psychology.

The trend towards believing there was no correlation between TV violence and violence finally reversed itself due to simple common sense, which just could not be ingnored any longer. I believe we are witnessing a replay of this correlation just differentiated by video games.

How many of us have played a video game, only to look up and find that hours have passed, instead of minutes. Were we put into a trance? While in this trance were suggestions implanted into our subconscious? Suggestions of violence? Acceptable violent behavior? Were our thought patterns altered?

Hopw many of us had to stop playing the game because we had to go to work, and couldn't wait to get home to play again? Were we addicted? Did we have to have a fix? How does this addiction transfer into the real world? For children? We, as adults, can withstand the urge, but for children and their young minds, how does that affect them? Did this Carneal kid just want to continue the game in the real world, get his fix? Did he recognize that in the real world real people remain really dead?

Grossman is dead accurate, pardon the pun. The military used to train soldiers to fire at human silhouettes popping up out of the ground to simulate Viet Cong popping up from behind cover in Viet Nam. It dehumanized the Viet Cong, made them just targets. Are video games training children to dehumanize targets as well?

I believe Grossman is correct, and video games can have an adverse affect on children and can cause violence in the future. But it is just part of the package. There is also TV violence, movie violence, print violence, etc. We are surrounded by it. I think video games are even more impactful because you actually interact with them, coordinate muscle memory and directly influence the results.

There is a common thread with all the types of violence I have mentioned above: parents. WHERE ARE THE PARENTS?! As everyone here probably knows, I am a big advocate of parental responsibility. Greater parental responsibility would prevent children from seeing movies they are not ready for, playing video games they shouldn't play, reading material they shouldn't read. When will the APA do a study on parental responsibility and how is affects childrens behavior and society at large. I always think this is the elephant in the room, but a study like this would rock the very foundations of the family and this country.

[ring87]

Cool. Who's angry? It dos'nt matter anyway. D and D, TV, video games, movies and books all glorify violence. I guess we must accept that agression in part of being human. It is how you deal with it that makes you "civilised". I don't have the time or the patients to write a long post. So if it seem oversiplified oh well. Violence is here to stay in video games and TV ect.....liberalism......peace......not!

[abisai]

I view music, games, books that individuals like to be the product of the society values they internalize. These things reinforce internalized value structures that were imbued by parents, teachers, media, and anything about education/child-raising I left out. TV put Vietnam frontlines on the morning news before school, but the parents allowed TV in the home for a reason and allowed it to consume them for a reason. Our culture is incredibly violent, not just in terms of our entertainment choices but the crimes and inequalities that persist. These are all the results and not the causes of our belief systems, though perception reflects back precisely what you want to see. The preacher who thinks pornography is an unavoidable temptation that should therefore be stamped out is the most likely to fall into it if ever around it.

Extreme individual to the point of the inability for compassion allows as much. That is our national collective identity. I think this is the paradox, allowing individualism while finding a means to restrain ourselves from harming ourselves with self-destructive behaviors.

There are dozens of TV channels every day struggling to compete with the speed of the Internet so they show unfiltered raw suffering, pain, death, blood, and guts. No journalism, just a rubbernecking lens staring uncompassionately directly into the most painful imagery possible. This is the real life we tell ourselves as a nation exists and so this is the manner in which we tend to view the world. I am all for less restraint from government forces. Parents do not limit their children in exposure to these things because they literally cannot. Teachers are literally prevented from espousing value structures for children. Day care providers cannot usurp the authority or their employer or risk losing their clients by espousing a value structure. And even if these secluded events were to transpire, the collective conscious would supercede them and undo any ethical gains brought by these efforts.

[larr]

i was mute as a child until i learned to speak the language of the manatees

[ring87]

I once saw a baby put into an incubator onto TV as a kid and thought that they were cooking him in an oven. I was also told the devil was in a hole in the wall and other crazy shit. It's a wonder I am not a serial killer.

[Ken]

OK, when I used to hang with my cousing Artie when I was a kid, he lived in Yonkers. Subsequently, he had cable TV before anyone I ever knew because Yonkers was the first city to have cable. So I was sleeping over one night and we were watching TAPS, starring George C. Scott, Timothy Hutton, Tom Cruise, and Sean Penn. Great movie, by the way.

Anyway, towards the end of the movie, one of the kids panics and runs for the gate, to the waiting arms of his parents. But at this crucial moment, I think one of the soldiers panics and fires a round. It hits the little kid, who couldn't be more than 10 years old, right in the chest. He is dead instantly in a shower of blood. I was shocked. I wasn't expecting it, and I was about the kids age. It was the first time I realized that terrible things could happen to kids, like me (at the time). It certainly shattered my innocence, and disturbed me for quite a while. Even now, when I see that scene, and I haven't seen it in a while, it gives me the chills.

You spoke about Robocop before. One scene that really did me in was the scene when they first murder Peter Weller in that industrial complex. They didn't just shoot him in the head and be done with it, they actually blew his hand off and tortured him a little before they killed him. I always thought that was fuckin' sick, and I refuse to watch that movie. All the Robocops had a very high level of gratuitious violence, and so none of them interest me anymore. This may sound funny coming from me, because I am such an action enthusiast, but I believe in "justified" violence. When Arnold blows someone away, its because that mutherfucker deserved it. Fuck Sally, he should have let him go.

TAPS definitely began the end of my childhood innocence and it was a futile attampt thereafter to hold onto it.