Oh hell. I'm not saying I agree with the NRA! I''m not saying that a violent media culture is the reason there are massacres. They aren't. Yes it's ridiculous to use video games as the scapegoat for the Connecticut shootings.

Still, violent video games/media etc. must have some psychological effects to a certain extent. And there is still a debate over what those effects and that extent are.

Didier wrote:Still, violent video games/media etc. must have some psychological effects to a certain extent. And their is still a debate over what those effects and that extent are.

Saying it "must" do doesn't make it true. As it happens, there does appear to be some support for improvements in visual/spatial skills and so forth (here for example, though I've not been able to dig up a decent review with a couple of minutes' searching - they must be out there though), but no support for long-term increased levels of aggression or violence. The key here is there is evidence, rather than a proclamation of "well there must be some effect!"

^I say this because I'm not a scientist and I'm much too lazy to bother with a full blown portfolio of credible scientific research that indicates a link. I was just speaking logically.
Couple minutes of my own searching came up with this Rather poignant is the phrase:

wrote:A growing body of research is linking violent video game play to aggressive cognitions, attitudes, and behavior

And no, I don't care enough about this subject to pay 31.50 for the PDF file, so I'm using exclusively the abstract. Sue me. The abstract should reflect what is actually in the article, so it's still valid.

The problem with "just speaking logically" is that it's frequently completely wrong, which is why we need the scientific method in the first place. Ben Goldacre uses the example of giving steroids to head trauma patients - steroids reduce swelling and inflammation, so this was logically a very good idea. Some doctors finally decided to do a study to see whether it actually helped. There was quite a lot of resistance to the idea, because they'd be taking this logically beneficial treatment away from half of the patients in their study group, which would therefore kill more of them. The study went ahead, but had to be stopped early because the death rate in the group receiving steroids was so much higher they couldn't ethically continue. The logical treatment was killing people for years and nobody realised because nobody tested it properly.


You're quoting a single unsourced line of the introduction of the abstract of a study finding a video/games aggression correlation. The study itself is weak evidence; an unsourced line from the introduction is not. I posted a systematic review which found no link. Systematic reviews are important because a single study may find anything by pure statistical chance; you must consider multiple studies in order to draw reliable conclusions. (And as a side note, all studies should be published, whether or not they find an effect; there's a serious, but understandable, problem in that studies which don't find anything don't tend to get published, whereas studies that find things do get published, so the literature ends up with a biased sample of the set of all studies which were performed. Illustrated by xkcd here, and if you're interested in this sort of thing you should read Bad Science and Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre.)

Didier and Mwamba have some decent ideas, but the point is, there's a lot more evidence of access to guns and lack of adequate mental health care being responsible for a good deal of the recent mass shooting in the States. Obsessing over video game violence is just a distraction from more important issues, as is junk like the NRA's "We should put armed guards at every elementary school."
I highly doubt the man who just shot dead two firefighters responding to a blaze was an avid video game player - he was in his 60's. (I guess the firefighter's should have had guns with them too, then everything would have been fine.)

Didier wrote:Everybody is stupid as hell.


True story

Yeah, if there's anything I've learned in the last couple of weeks, it's that I really need to restrain myself from reading the comments on online articles, they leave me too upset. It's common sense, I know, but it's certainly been awhile since I've seen so much concentrated stupidity/hatred that it's kind of hard to look away. I'd like to thank you all for at least being civil and reasonable.

I'm getting really tired of the way the media is covering the story as well. Between jumping right in and accusing the shooter's brother, and totally unrelated people with the same name, to attempting to interview the kids that were there (seriously, most are 6 years old and are going to have to deal with this trauma the rest of their lives, stop trying to make it worse for the poor kids) and asking the President almost nothing but questions about the fiscal cliff at a press conference talking about gun regulations, I'm starting to wonder just what the hell they think they're doing...

(Edit due to ninja'ing: Just celebrating that I actually know what p>0.05 means now after a recent bio exam. Whoo.)

Sentynel wrote: a single study may find anything by pure statistical chance; you must consider multiple studies in order to draw reliable conclusions. (And as a side note, all studies should be published, whether or not they find an effect; there's a serious, but understandable, problem in that studies which don't find anything don't tend to get published, whereas studies that find things do get published, so the literature ends up with a biased sample of the set of all studies which were performed.

Calling evidence for the other side of the argument weak and saying the scientific literature is biased? If you want to play that way, fine.

If I can quote from your systematic review:

wrote:Effect sizes were adjusted for observed publication bias...Publication bias was a problem for studies of aggressive behavior, and methodological problems such as the use of poor aggression measures inflated effect size

So basically, two guys with PhDs from a business school in Texas decided they weren't satisfied with the results of a bunch of studies so they made some adjustments and concluded that all the research was actually showing nothing at all. And this is strong evidence?

You can "observe" bias wherever you want. Especially in this case, because, like I said, there's no such thing as an aggresivometer. It's tricky to operationally define "aggressiveness".

I'm not even arguing that media violence causes aggressiveness! I agree this is not the issue that needs to be pursued in the wake of massacres. No, not all shooters play video games.

My argument is that there is no sweeping consensus in the scientific literature as of yet, and therefore, we cannot dismiss arguments like "video games may influence aggressive behaviour". I know this is an unpopular theory. Probably because a lot of people like their video games, and maybe people are a little too narcissistic to admit their interests can have negative influences on them?

Read the study again, and then read about publication bias and the file drawer problem. It's a very well known issue which affects every field of science - with no malice involved by any party, studies accepting the null hypothesis are far less likely to get published than studies accepting the alternate hypothesis. Read a parapsychology journal sometime if you don't believe me - loads and loads of studies finding evidence for psychic powers and all manner of wacky stuff get published, and comparatively few finding no evidence, but do you believe in the existence of psychic powers?

This has been most extensively studied in the medical literature, since screwups here kill people, and yet it's still a huge problem. (Of course, here there's the added issue that pharmaceutical companies have a financial incentive to bury unflattering results, but I digress.) And since it's been extensively studied, people have come up with clever statistical tests which can be applied to published studies to determine whether there are missing studies. The distribution of effect sizes versus sample sizes should follow a funnel shape, with larger sample sizes clustering much closer around the true value than smaller ones. If you plot the studies of something like this and you don't see a funnel shape, then something is wrong - publication bias and poor study quality are likely explanations, though there may be other factors involving systematic variations in study design linked to sample size.

So, that review uses this method and identifies that some, though not all, of the research areas covered show evidence for publication bias or study design flaw issues, and that taking this into account the hypothesis is not supported.


If this makes you uncomfortable despite the statistical grounding, here's a book, which is a little older, but reviews every English language study of media violence available at the time and finds that fewer than half show an effect, with no overall effect supported.


With that educational digression over, kindly put your strawman back in its box and stop accusing me of being "too narcissistic to admit their interests can have negative influences on them" unless you can point out where exactly I've said any such thing. I don't know how I can make this any clearer. The evidence available in the current literature does not support the hypothesis that video games, or other violent media, cause aggressive/violent behaviour. This does not mean that a whole pile of further evidence couldn't be released finding otherwise (though this is unlikely given the volume of studies currently available), or that video games make you less violent, that video games don't have any other negative effects, or anything else. It means only, as I keep saying, that that hypothesis is not supported. There is no link in evidence between video games and violence. Until and unless there is, this goes in the box with all the other plausible-sounding ideas that have no support in evidence, because ideas without evidence are dangerous.

Sorry to interrupt this parrying of words, but just to confirm, London Police still don't carry firearms on regular duty, am I correct?

The Met has various armed specialist units (moreso than the other police services in Great Britain), but no, regular police don't carry firearms.

FuzzyLobster wrote:Didier and Mwamba have some decent ideas, but the point is, there's a lot more evidence of access to guns and lack of adequate mental health care being responsible for a good deal of the recent mass shooting in the States. Obsessing over video game violence is just a distraction from more important issues, as is junk like the NRA's "We should put armed guards at every elementary school."

Mental health care, I can agree with. However, at the risk of sounding "Texan" I think banning guns (at least in the States) would be about as useful as the rampant anti-pot laws out there. Sure it will probably decrease the negative rates some, but not in proportion to the resources the government would spend in enforcing such banning. As a group, Americans are generally more murder happy.

Here, I'll use a prettily packaged concise source that isn't even really opposed to gun control.

This study(opens in PDF)
backs up Sentynel’s point pretty well (I haven’t read through of all your monster posts, so it might already be posted).

---

Mwamba wrote: Here, I'll use a prettily packaged concise source that isn't even really opposed to gun control.

I agree, income disparity is a factor in violence but other weapons as less likely to be instantly fatal like the story about the deranged man in China in this article.

Also, it's far easier to kill people with a gun when you don't have to get up close and personal

Oh heavens that last post was lengthy...

Sentynel wrote:With that educational digression over, kindly put your strawman back in its box and stop accusing me of being "too narcissistic to admit their interests can have negative influences on them" unless you can point out where exactly I've said any such thing

Relax, bro, I'm not calling you narcissistic. I said people are narcissistic. It's called participant bias. Subjects of experiments may like their video games and consciously tone down the aggressiveness so that the study doesn't reflect a link.
If you get to go there with "the literature is biased towards non-null hypotheses", then I get to go there with participant bias.

Sentynel wrote:The evidence available in the current literature does not support the hypothesis that video games, or other violent media, cause aggressive/violent behaviour. This does not mean that a whole pile of further evidence couldn't be released finding otherwise

Except that there are already studies that have been released that find otherwise. I'm not saying they are perfect, I'm just facing the fact that they exist. You're systematic review suggesting studies coming to a pro-aggresion conclusion were methodologically flawed and, accounting for bias, didn't actually show any link? This article suggests the systematic review was flawed
And here's what the author had to say about the existing literature:

p 171 wrote:the simple question of whether violent
video game play is a causal risk factor for aggressive behavior; the
scientific literature has effectively and clearly shown the answer to
be "yes"

It's not an open and shut case. I'm just saying: keep an open mind.

Luciene wrote:This study(opens in PDF)
backs up Sentynel’s point pretty well

And even in this source, the very first thing the abstract admits is: "It is not yet clear whether violent video
games uniquely contribute to long-term youth aggression or whether any relationship
is better explained through third variables such as aggressive personality
or family environment."
^This is *exactly* my argument

In that individual Chinese man's case, I'm sure if it occurred to him (thank goodness it didn't of course) even if he couldn't acquire guns through underground means (I will look this information up on my own time at some point), could have massacred through arson and explosives (homemade or non) with comparative ease.

In addition,

There is a Harvard Study that is showing otherwise on gun control.

Though I must say, considering that I was originally arguing on the acknowledgement that the US is especially bad violence wise (but that gun control is not the solution), I will go ahead and acknowledge ignorance overall on the subject. Thus, I shall check out until I have thoroughly re-evaluated the subject and can make more confident assessments.
I wish Apollo was here so I wouldn't have to be the loner arguing this one point.

Another argument for Didier on the Violence Within Video Games: There seems to me to be a more negative correlation between video games. Video games in general (and by extension violent ones) rose in the 1990s, which negatively correlates with the overall crime rate, which has been generally dropping except for recently.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/17/us/violen ... index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_in_video_gaming

Mwamba wrote:]Mental health care, I can agree with. However, at the risk of sounding "Texan" I think banning guns (at least in the States) would be about as useful as the rampant anti-pot laws out there. Sure it will probably decrease the negative rates some, but not in proportion to the resources the government would spend in enforcing such banning. As a group, Americans are generally more murder happy.

Here, I'll use a prettily packaged concise source that isn't even really opposed to gun control.

Yes, there's no way an outright gun ban would ever happen, that's ridiculous. But why the hell is it legal to buy semi-automatics? Why do we even manufacture the things for anything besides military use? There's no good reason that I can see (although I will admit to my googling skills not being all that sharp at this time of night). And it seems like putting in some stricter regulations regarding background checks and psych evaluations couldn't hurt.

But yes, it would be much more helpful -not exactly an easy task but some attempt would be nice- to try and change the way people view guns. "No, they're not cool; if you're in a situation where you need to use one (unless for hunting) something's already gone horribly wrong." But I've already gone over all this before, there's not much else new I can say on the subject...

Didier wrote:And even in this source, the very first thing the abstract admits is: "It is not yet clear whether violent video
games uniquely contribute to long-term youth aggression or whether any relationship
is better explained through third variables such as aggressive personality
or family environment."
^This is *exactly* my argument

Followed quite quickly by: "Violent video game exposure was not found to be predictive of delinquency or bullying, nor was level
of parental involvement. These results question the commonly held belief that violent video games are related to youth delinquency and bullying."

I'd go on longer but... it's 2AM Christmas morning and why am I writing this now? :P (a long story involving a fireplace... I'm close to no longer thinking coherently...)

MWAMBA IS TEXAN SHE'S BEEN BRAINWASHED DON'T LISTEN TO HER!

...

But in all seriousness indeed gun control is not the only solution - however saying people with murderous intents will find a way to kill regardless is hardly a reason to not restrict obtainment of guns.

First let's address the possibility that other weapons can be obtained.

At Columbine the two students had about 100 explosives made in total along with their four firearms.

Casualties with explosives: 0

Casualties with guns: 36

Naturally it is possible for someone more talented in the field of chemistry and explosives to really cause much more damage. It is also possible that someone carrying a butcher's knife can go around stabbing people, like the incident in China. Of course this doesn't mean we ban butcher knives.

First, it takes a lot more effort to plant a bomb, and then detonate it without anyone noticing. Arson does not guarantee death. A lot of other objects can be used as a weapon. A plastic bag can be used as a weapon. Realize the convenience with which guns can afford people. That's a frequent argument for which citizens claim that guns are useful. They don't require as much training in comparison to say, a katana. Both can probably kill the same amount of people in the right conditions. Yet samurai took years of training before reaching such a status. Guns, as many owners put it, are equalizers against any dangers.

It also gives enumerable power to the gun owner against any unarmed.

This is where the NRA says "LET'S ARM EVERYBODY WITH GUNS!" Security guards, teachers, firemen, children, pet dogs...

And I think we all know the logic behind that is not sound.

Let's not pretend that guns are the only reason for America's violence issues. HUGE PROBLEMS are never that simple. There are so many factors, and it's infuriating I imagine to gun supporters who have the senses to realize that, and just want to have a 9 mm handgun that they keep hidden in a safe with a 5 digit code that only they know. That's a cultural belief that is unique to America, and it's fine.

Let's also not ignore logic and statistics, where clearly lives can be saved, and one of many factors can be resolved, with gun control.

All these long posts that I can't be bothered reading.

My opinion is that gun control should be increased until it starts imposing what I would consider to be unacceptable restrictions on legitimate owners and enthusiasts.

Didier wrote:Relax, bro, I'm not calling you narcissistic. I said people are narcissistic. It's called participant bias. Subjects of experiments may like their video games and consciously tone down the aggressiveness so that the study doesn't reflect a link.
If you get to go there with "the literature is biased towards non-null hypotheses", then I get to go there with participant bias.

Would you like to cite any evidence at all that this is happening on a significant scale? You're suggesting independent deliberate meddling with experimental results by an enormous number of people (and bear in mind that to the degree possible you don't inform participants exactly what you're studying beforehand to avoid this sort of thing), and it can only possibly effect lab studies, which can't provide any useful information about long-term aggressiveness, the actual issue at hand, anyway.

wrote:Except that there are already studies that have been released that find otherwise. I'm not saying they are perfect, I'm just facing the fact that they exist. You're systematic review suggesting studies coming to a pro-aggresion conclusion were methodologically flawed and, accounting for bias, didn't actually show any link? This article suggests the systematic review was flawed

The lead author on that article is the same guy who was pulled up in the court case earlier for cherry-picking his analyses to show a video games/violence link. At any rate, did you look at the book I linked? As I said, that addresses literally every available English language study available at the time, and doesn't consider publication bias, avoiding those possible criticisms. And nobody is denying that some studies find a relationship. It would be seriously strange if they didn't! That isn't the point; the point is the sum total of the evidence.

wrote:And even in this source, the very first thing the abstract admits is: "It is not yet clear whether violent video
games uniquely contribute to long-term youth aggression or whether any relationship
is better explained through third variables such as aggressive personality
or family environment."
^This is *exactly* my argument

You know what this means? It means there is no support in current evidence for said relationship, but that they consider the possibility that it might be supported with further evidence. I really don't understand the conceptual difficulty you're having here. Nobody is arguing that video games have been proven to be safe or any similar absolutism. This is a binary choice. Either the current evidence supports the hypothesis that video games cause violence, or it does not. It does not.

Didier wrote: And even in this source, the very first thing the abstract admits is: "It is not yet clear whether violent video
games uniquely contribute to long-term youth aggression or whether any relationship
is better explained through third variables such as aggressive personality
or family environment."
^This is *exactly* my argument

No they concluded that "Only trait aggression, family/peer support, and stress were uniquely predictive of delinquent behavior." and "Video game violence exposure was not predictive of delinquency"

Believe me, I don't support the NRA by any means. That particular BS of theirs only benefits gun manufacturers (whom they truly represent) rather than responsible gun-owning citizens. I was trying to make a general argument that banning guns, even semiautomatics, will not lessen violence in general.

On the other hand, the 'ease' that is argued against I believe is a strength that outweighs the cons.

Example: Susie Q is already 21. At that age, time has given her a chance to prove whether there is anything wrong with her. Looking upon her records she is shown to be responsible and mentally stable. She hasn't gotten into any incidents in the law aside from a couple of speeding tickets when she was younger (which may indicated *some* impulsive-ness and recklessness) but even that that wasn't too recently long ago.¹ Thus she gets certified and acquires a handgun that is extremely easy to load and shoot.

She sometimes will walk alone at night because her friend's house is only a few blocks away and she doesn't want to bother with using her gas guzzling vehicle when she can get away with it due to financial and environmental considerations. Besides, the whether is pleasant that night and she wants to enjoy the fresh air.

As she is walking by, however, an man starts following her. And she quickens her pace and his pace quickens accordingly. She won't have time to call the police. And she would never have been able to fight him off even with a knife because he is far stronger and can easily overpower her. She calls out to him demanding who is he, and that is when he betrays his evil intentions. (And due to her gun safety training she is able to discern this most efficiently.) This levels the playing field and makes it more difficult for her to be harmed...

Versus she can, 'y'know, be raped and whatever else. If her story became widespread the police could only give lame pieces of 'community advice' which would be generally ineffectual and inspire Slutwalks from feminists²

And if more women such as Susie Q did this on a wider scale, that would actually help reduce crime against women in general, as more people would view them less as physically vulnerable (and naturally women *are* more vulnerable due to biological reasons we can't escape from.) And attackers would think twice because they're no longer necessarily easy pickings since any one of them has a decent probability of being armed.

Sure that doesn't stop her attackers from also having such a weapon, but the point is that rates of victims will still drop overall because it will be a greater calculated risk to mess with ordinary people (especially women, and I'm totally not biased due to me being five-foot with absolutely no upper body strength :P)

*Incidentally, speed limits tend to be enforced in most places. However, nobody decries that high horsepower cars deserve to only be on racing tracks. In addition, traffic accident deaths far outweigh gun-related or any other sort of violence in the first place.

**Not that I blame them. Really, not wearing short-skirts is the solution!?

---

And ideally, guns would also come equipped with a fingerprint recognition system that wouldn't mess with efficiency for the user but would make it useless for anyone who stole it. And with current technology, that doesn't seem too far-fetched, with time lessening how expensive such a product is. If guns were to be regulated, that's how I would prefer it to be.

^ Mwamba, I noted that it has been noted to be an equalizer. A case like yours has been cited many times to be a strong case for gun availability. That is why I don't think that guns should be outright banned. However, the ease with which guns can be obtained is still concerning. A restriction on guns will not outright cut the crime rate in half. But to say it won't at all affect crime? I think that is just gun companies clutching their money a little too tightly.

A quick read in case anyone is interested, a pretty good opinion piece that summarizes video games, violence, and mental health history in America.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/article ... l-Programs