
In Defense of Call Of Duty - CMartucci
http://whatblag.com/2011/08/13/in-defense-of-call-of-duty/
======
Jach
Hey, this is actually a more serious article than I thought. (I thought it was
going to be about defending the sequel-after-sequel business model.)

This page has a decent section on violent games that I snipped below:
<http://www.theodoregray.com/BrainRot/> (I mostly use it as a link in the
argument over letting students use calculators in Calculus and above.) I
thought the following section was pretty interesting. On the one hand it seems
that violent games can condition a person to react more violently in certain
circumstances, but on the other hand the existence of violent media seems to
decrease the number of those circumstances (depending on which data you look
at anyway, the freakonomics post linked here is certainly intriguing, and a
decrease in crime is probably more strongly linked with an increase in median
standard of living).

====

 __Theo __: Let's start with something I'm sure most people would agree has
little educational value, the video game. We'll discuss later how video games
are related to educational software.

To understand the effects of video games, one needs to go back to debriefings
conducted by the U.S. Army after WWII. Interviewing soldiers returning from
battle, researchers discovered a very disturbing fact. A significant number of
soldiers had been face to face with an enemy soldier, rifle in hand, enemy in
their sights, gun not jammed, and had _not fired_ . Something deep in their
being, some sort of innate humanity, had prevented them from actually pulling
the trigger.

Needless to say, this was very disturbing to the military. They began a
research effort to figure out what to do about this problem. They discovered
that in the heat of battle, under the incredible physical and psychological
stress of being faced with another human being you were supposed to kill, the
higher mental functions were largely absent. Under such conditions, the mind
reverts to much simpler modes of operation, to deeply wired, almost
instinctive behaviors. In other words, no amount of target practice at
bullseye targets and classroom lectures about how you're supposed to kill the
enemy had much effect when it counted.

Over the following decades and wars, the Army learned that the way to get
soldiers to reliably pull the trigger was to use very basic, repetitive
operant conditioning, along the lines of standard behaviorist theory. Now,
behaviorism provides a very poor model for how humans act in everyday life,
but it turns out to be a pretty good model for how humans act when they are
under stress and have to act quickly, and are responding primarily to fear.
Under stress, fearful people do what they have been conditioned to do.

The Army's solution was to replace dry target practice with realistic training
grounds, complete with pop-up targets, loud noises, smoke, stress, the works.
The goal was to condition the soldiers: If it moves, shoot it _now_ , don't
think about it. Repetition, repetition, repetition: Target pops up, you shoot.
Target pops up, you shoot. Do that often enough, and, research shows, next
time you see something pop up, you are more likely to shoot it, even if it's a
real human in a real battle. This is not just a theory, it is documented by
exit interviews from soldiers in later wars: The Army got what it wanted.
(What armies do, and how that is similar to video games, is forcefully
presented in the book _On Killing_ by David Grossman, a former military
officer (Little Brown, 1995)).

Now, what does this have to do with video games? The answer should be obvious
by now to anyone who's ever seen one. The whole point is, if it moves, shoot
it. Again and again and again.

 __Jerry __: Well yes, but it's aliens and other fantasy figures they are
shooting at, not people. Does it really carry over?

 __Theo __: Yes it does. (And by the way, it's not all aliens; many video
games have photo-realistic people complete with recognizable human faces, and
blood splatters. You stick your handgun in their face at point blank range and
pull the trigger.) Intellectually, no one would confuse a video game with real
life, but we're not talking about an intellectual situation. We're talking
about a scared kid with a Saturday night special in his hand seeing a member
of a rival gang move his hand around in his coat. That kid is thinking at an
operant conditioning level; what matters more than anything else is how many
times in the past he has pulled the trigger. In reality or in a video game, it
doesn't make that much difference. For a good discussion of the current
consensus opinion on the effects of violence on TV and in movies and video
games, see the book _Mayhem_ by Sissela Bok (Perseus Books, 1998).

If you think watching violent TV is bad, video games are much, much worse. TV
is a passive medium, requiring no participation from the viewer. A kid
watching a murder on TV may not be benefiting much from it, and maybe he's
learning a certain degree of callousness, but at least he is not being
conditioned to pull the trigger. He is just watching. In the video game, he is
the murderer, _he pulls_ the trigger, _he participates_ in the violence.

When soldiers are trained to kill, it is with a certain amount of context,
with an effort to teach honor, duty, self restraint, and the difference
between civilian and military life. When a 12-year-old kid comes out of his
bedroom after spending three hours actively participating in the killing of
people, what context has he had? what debriefing does he get?

I should mention that most of this chapter was written before the recent
outbreak of kids shooting their classmates at school. To what degree video
games contributed to those incidence is of course subject to endless debate,
but the public does seem to have been alerted to the topic. There are even
reports of, for example, Disney resorts removing violent video games that
include humans as targets. A fine move, but obviously mainly symbolic. As long
as parents pay to have killing arcades installed in their kid's bedrooms, the
harm will be done.

------
hmayer
I have a question: does seeing violence around you make you more violent?

For example, societies which experienced a lot of war are not more violent
societies. Actually, my experience is that seeing violence makes you less
violent. Is that possible?

My second comment is about violent games...

Video games of _any_ type are not good for kids. Not because of violence, sex
and other things. It is because they don't go out to socialize. My theory is
that instead of limiting "what to watch / play", parents should more focus on
limiting "how much to watch / play".

~~~
Detrus
Seeing violence should indeed make you less violent unless you're a psychopath
or trained to commit violence like modern soldiers are.

This is a fun doco about most WW1-WW2 soldiers being unable to kill in combat,
only 2% shot to kill, being psychopaths, and 10-20% shot in the direction of
the enemy.

<http://youtu.be/2vlGR7S2wcI>

Modern training makes 95% of soldiers killers. The training consists of
simulating combat as realistically as possible and turning it into a routine.
Amount matters there. Can realistic videogames give people some level of calm
in a combat situation, which would allow them to kill better? Perhaps the
military has some studies.

Is it related to being the aggressor in shooting rampages and gang violence?
Perhaps weakly.

------
Getahobby
I always thought the freakonimcs guys had an interesting spin on exposure to
media and how it relates to elevated rates of violence.
[http://freakonomicsbook.com/superfreakonomics/chapter-
excerp...](http://freakonomicsbook.com/superfreakonomics/chapter-
excerpts/chapter-3/)

~~~
CMartucci
Thanks for sharing that link. I think it's an interesting addition to the
discussion. It fits well with what Dr. Bruce Perry was saying in this article:
[http://teacher.scholastic.com/professional/bruceperry/aggres...](http://teacher.scholastic.com/professional/bruceperry/aggression_violence.htm)

The culprit is more likely a child's upbringing, which may have been
negatively affected due to television, but not directly caused by television
itself.

~~~
jshort
Those children that are allowed to play video games or watch t.v. on end in my
opinion are those that are most likely to end up in a poorer situation because
there is little parenting done.

------
erikb
When I was young I also argued, that violent computer games and movies don't
make me more violent. That they are fiction and that I can distinguish them
from reality.

From what I know now (which might be half knowledge and thus totally
bullshit), the problem with violence is not really agression. Everybody is
angry from time to time. Also other feelings like fear, frustration and
psychological sickness might make you act violent or make you feel that
hitting and killing other people is not an act of violence. But other factors
are important. One is, that you can picture (meaning have the clear idea) of
hurting someone and the barrier that stops you from executing this picture,
which is made of empathy ("you are like me, I should not hurt you") and
moral/ethics, which are an artificial created result of society. Based on this
I feel that violent computer games really increased my chance of one day
hurting other people. On one side, when I am angry with other people, I can
picture more clearly how I want to hurt them and which tools might be useful
for that purpose. Without my "experience" from movies and c.games I might have
to think more clearly, how to efficiently apply pain to other people. I have
more clear ideas then "take something hard and attack, when totally in rage".
Also I feel that my barrier is lowered through these impressions. If I often
watch this kind of movie and play this kind of game, the "experience" itself
becomes more of a daily experience and less something being special and
disgusting.

Maybe I am just not mentally healthy or the one in a million who reacts this
way to computer games. So I can't really speak for other people. But I myself
am quite sure that violent computer games increase the chance of me being
violent and that my parents did a good job of trying to keep these away from
me.

