I'm not advocating banning violent media. I'm saying that it affects your psychological state. To say it doesn't have a measurable effect is ignorant.
What does that mean? That, by itself is a pretty vacant statement- in psychological terms that's like saying "the sky is blue" Without quantifying the statement, it doesn't do much but state the obvious.
I can take a dump in the morning and it might affect my psychological state. I might see a horrible car accident. I might have a pleasant conversation with a female. I might be sick. All of those things can have an effect on my psychological state. Further, they could be positive or negative influences. Or a combination of both.
Further, How could you reliably test for it? I don't think you really can effectively test "violent video games influencing real world violent tendencies" without putting people in a situation where they have to commit actual violent acts, up to and including causing the death of another human being. There are obviously real world moral/ethical limitations in psychology against doing so. To conduct a proper experiment would require that one go WAY beyond the things like the stanford/milgram experiments, for example. The only way you could probably do it and get reliable results without resorting to barbarism is via some sort of virtual reality simulator. Without tricking the person into believing they are in reality, you can't eliminate the effect of the person being influenced by the fact that the results are not real - it's a classic human condition problem.
There are lots of variables at play here, too. Obviously a young child is going to be influenced differently than a teenager or an adult, as their brains are all at different stages of development. Even children at the same age might have completely different levels of maturity and understanding. There's also simply no way to "control out" lots of things, too, for example, nature vs nurture, etc, etc. Cekim's example of the hardcore gamer kid going 110% emo clam/wussbag after firing a gun is a classic example of this. Every person is completely different.
FWIW if you can show me some interesting research on the subject that doesn't look like it was expelled straight from Jack Thompson's or Tipper Gore's rear end, I think it would be an interesting read, although I'd likely still remain pretty skeptical. Most of the crap that's out there is based on exposing someone to a "game" for some period f time and then making them take some sort of a test designed to prove the taker is now "more violent" as a result of having played the game.
I totally agree it's up to the parent to raise their child. It's also the parents choice if they want their children to be exposed to numerous acts of real or pretend violence via the media.
Yes, but realize past some point or another that it;'s possible for whatever shielding that is going on to have a negative effect. We live in a society where there are a bunch of moonbats that prance around going "violent videogames are bad because all violence is bad" constantly proselytizing the "violence is always bad" mantra, which basically sets kids up for various forms of personal failure.
I'm obviously not saying parents should start telling their 5 year old why a LEO or Soldier (or for that matter, joe citizen) had a good reason to kill someone, and then show him/her a video of the bloody corpse of the bad guy that just got killed, but there are some moonbat parents out there that keep up this charade with their kids well into adolescence. That's' why we see idiots quoted in newspapers that say stupid things like "Well, why didn't they just shoot the guy in the leg!!!?!?!?"
Also, some people do not have properly aligned moral compasses. That's the whole reason we have police and a justice system.
Agreed, and some of them are simply bats**t insane- eg, their moral compass is "missing" never mind misaligned.
Some of you guys are so paranoid that when someone says "you know that may not be good for you" you think the person wants the government to regulate and prohibit such acts.
It's because it first starts with "xyz is bad" and then someone says it often enough and then, like goebbels big lie theory, it starts to become the truth, and then eventually some idiot legislator believes those people, and then bans whatever XYZ is unless there are a substantial number of people around who are interested in defending XYZ.
We're "paranoid" about this kind of thing for a damned good reason. Every time some alarmist comes up with a new form of "moral panic" (which is what the "videogames are bad" crap is) dumb laws and prohibitionist crap usually follows it. This sort of thing is no different than the "playing that judas priest record backwards" stuff or death metal music making people violent, or many many years ago, the "knife control movement" induced by "gang" hysteria. Gun control was larded on us as a result of the "moral panic" caused by prohibition era gangbangers, and then the panic had "fluffers" like the JFK/RFK/MLK assasinations, among other things. Then people started prancing around going "buh wuh weah waaah guns are bad!!!! waaah!" like a bunch of morons.
The end result is that the fetish people having with banning things or trying to blame them for some problem, is that whatever it is, is not usually caused by the thing itself but rather the "lets ban stuff" discussion is a smokescreen or a cop out for some bigger problem that nobody wants to talk about, because its "too hard" or "too complicated". People want to blame things but they don't want to talk about how johnny's parents are scumbags or how some public school committee is completely incompetent. Objects are easy to blame for nearly any problem because they generally don't talk back or don't put up a fight.
-Mike