‘Watch this:’ How ultraviolent video games and ultraviolent films differ

A scene from the 2013 film “Fast and Furious 6,” Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action and mayhem throughout. (Universal Pictures)

A screenshot of the video game Bulletstorm, showing just one of the many violent ways of killing for which the game rewards players. (EA)

Defenders of the video game industry say they’re unfairly blamed for the actions of criminals, arguing that movies, books, and TV shows promote just as much violence and aberrant behavior. So what’s different about video games?

Some experts on digital addiction and psychology say games are a training ground for killing people: Their interactive nature pulls you into the gore, they argue, and reward you for being a killing machine.

Special Series

This is Part Three in a series exploring the connection between video games and violence.

Watch for Part Four Monday, which will examine the latest installment in the popular video game series “Grand Theft Auto.”

Part One: ‘Training simulation:‘ Mass killers often share obsession with violent video games.

Part Two: ‘Frag him:‘ With today’s ultraviolent video games, how real is too real?

Part Three: ‘Watch this:’ How ultraviolent games and films differ.

“We can’t say video games caused the Newtown shootings,” said Dr. David Greenfield, the director of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction. “But we can say [Adam Lanza’s] actions in killing those kids as well as he did was enhanced.”

Greenfield argues that games train your nervous system to be more efficient at killing. In the human brain, dopamine fires as a physical reward for accomplishing goals such as clearing a room quickly or sniping an enemy from a great distance. Movies, shows and books don’t have the same level of reward, he told FoxNews.com.

“How could you make the statement that this has no effect?” he said.

David Ryan Polgar, a noted tech ethicist, says video games rarely have a strong storyline equal to that in a book or movie. This creates a lack of empathy in the gamer for that character. He says the added realism of next-gen consoles makes this more problematic.

“The prospect of being Travis Bickle from the movie ‘Taxi Driver’ or Holden Caulfield from ‘Catcher in the Rye’ as opposed to viewing them would offer the highest level of altered perception and potential increased levels of aggression. That wouldn’t causally lead gamers to violence, but it may blur the lines between reality and the virtual world for an unstable user.”

Chris Ferguson from Stetson University, who has studied the effects of games on psychology, disagrees that playing games can cause violent behavior at all — or that movies, TV shows, or books can cause violence.

“We find no evidence for either violent video games or television having an impact on youth violence,” Ferguson told FoxNews.com, referencing a study published in April in the “Journal of Youth Adolescence.” He said the idea of a first-person shooter being a trainer for killers is absurd and moralistic.

“Your brain also releases dopamine when you read a good book, have sex, enjoy a sunset or a nice meal,” he said. “Playing a videogame is no different in this respect from eating a cupcake. It’s psychobabble to make a perfectly natural process sound much scarier than it actually is.”

‘The prospect of being Travis Bickle from ‘Taxi Driver’ as opposed to viewing him would offer the highest potential increased levels of aggression.’

– Tech ethicist David Ryan Polgar

Ferguson says connecting game use to the Newtown shooting is absurd as well. “How efficient do you need to be when using an AR-15?” he asked.

Microsoft, Ubisoft and several other gamemakers declined to comment but referred to existing research related to game violence and to the game associations.

“Scientists have found there is no connection between playing games and acting violently,” said Dan Hewitt, a spokesman for the Entertainment Software Association.

Hewitt points to reports by the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Department of Justice, findings at the Supreme Court, and other research that has determined games do not cause violence. “If you talk to folks in the military, they say games don’t teach you how to shoot a real gun,” he said. “You can play a flight simulator all you want but it doesn’t teach you how to fly a 747.”

Another expert says we need a more balanced understanding. Kevin Roberts, the author of “Cyber Junkie: Escape the Gaming and Internet Trap” and a video game addiction counselor, says he works with kids who have violent tendencies, but there is no research to suggest a videogame can cause those reactions more than any other entertainment media.

“Watching violent videos over time desensitizes people to the violence they see in videos, a fact that can literally be measured by brain scans,” he told FoxNews.com. “Playing violent video games arouses certain areas of the brain, leading to a feeling of intensity. But most people who watch violent movies or play violent video games will never turn to violence. However, people at risk for violence might be further induced down this path by both forms of media.”

For gamers thinking of storming the castle in October, there is no clear answer. No current research compares the effects of playing games to the effects of watching other media. What’s clear is that more violence is coming.

[foxnews]

‘Training simulation:’ Mass killers often share obsession with violent video games

A decade after Evan Ramsey sneaked a 12-gauge shotgun into his Alaska high school, where he gunned down a fellow student and the principal and wounded two others, he described how playing video games had warped his sense of reality.

“I did not understand that if I…pull out a gun and shoot you, there’s a good chance you’re not getting back up,” Ramsey said in a 2007 interview from Spring Creek Correctional Center, in Seward, Alaska. “You shoot a guy in ‘Doom’ and he gets back up. You have got to shoot the things in ‘Doom’ eight or nine times before it dies.”

Since Ramsey’s 1997 rampage, several other mass killers, including Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, have been linked to violent video games. And some experts worry that as the games get more violent and more realistic, so does their power to blur the line between fantasy and reality in alienated gamers.

‘It’s quite possible that playing this script out numerous times in the game influenced his decision-making — and that is in fact what he said.’

–  Dr. Paul Weigle, child and adolescent psychiatrist

“Doom,” the computer video game Ramsey described, was all the rage in the 1990s, but primitive by today’s standards, where gamers can play first-person shooters with movie-like graphics on high definition televisions.

“More than any other media, these video games encourage active participation in violence,” said Bruce Bartholow, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, who has studied the issue. “From a psychological perspective, video games are excellent teaching tools because they reward players for engaging in certain types of behavior. Unfortunately, in many popular video games, the behavior is violence.”

Harris and Klebold, who killed 12 fellow students and a teacher in 1999, were reportedly obsessed with “Doom.” Seung-Hui Cho, the 23-year-old who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech University in 2007, was, according to the Washington Post, a big fan of violent video games, specifically “Counterstrike.”

Three more recent killers, Aurora, Colo., movie theater gunman James Holmes, Jared Lee Loughner, who killed six and injured 13, including Rep. Gabby Giffords, in a 2011 Arizona shooting, and Breivik, who killed 77 people in Oslo, all were active video game players.

Adam Lanza, the troubled 20-year-old behind last December’s school shooting in Connecticut which left 20 children and six adults dead, was an avid player of violent video games.
In some cases, murderers appear to have been reenacting specific video game episodes when they killed in real life.

“Anders Breivik said he actually used his video game ‘Call of Duty’ to train for mass murder,”  Dr. Paul Weigle, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Joshua Center, in Enfield, Conn., told FoxNews.com. “He called it training simulation. And certainly there were some reports Adam Lanza saw Breivik as a rival, and he was also engaged in shooting games and even the same one.”

Wiegel also cited the case of Devin Moore, an Alabama teen with no history of violence when he was brought in by police on a minor traffic violation. Once inside the police station, he took a gun from a police officer and shot three officers, then stole a police cruiser to make his escape.

“Life is a video game,” Moore, who said he was inspired by the game ‘Grand Theft Auto,’” told police later. “Everybody’s got to die sometime.”

“It’s quite possible that playing this script out numerous times in the game influenced his decision-making, and that is, in fact, what he said,” Wiegel said.

Advocates of victims of mass shootings have taken aim at the companies turning profits in the multibillion-dollar gaming industry. The parents of the victims killed or injured by Michael Carneal, a 14-year-old who fired upon a group of classmates at Heath High School in West Paducah, Ky., in 1997, filed suit against a host of video game manufacturers in relation to Carneal’s obsession with violent games including “Doom” and “Mortal Kombat.”

The case was dismissed in 2001, with the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that it was “simply too far a leap from shooting characters on a video screen to shooting people in a classroom.”

Several experts agree with the court decision, telling FoxNews.com that the link is either inconclusive, or that playing violent video games can at most be just one of several causes that prompts people to kill.

“I think it’s the wrong question — whether there is a link between mass shootings and violent video game play,” Dr. Doug Gentile, a research psychologist and associate professor at Iowa State University, told FoxNews.com. “I understand people want to look for a culprit, but the truth of the matter is that there is never one cause. There is a cocktail of multiple causes coming together. And so no matter what single thing we focus on, whether it be violent video games, abuse as a child, doing drugs, being in a gang — not one of them is sufficient to cause aggression. But when you start putting them together, aggression becomes pretty predictable.”

Dr. Phyllis Koch-Sheras, past president of the American Psychological Association’s Society of Media Psychology and Technology, said the link between fantasy violence on computer or television screens and real violence that leaves people injured or dead needs more study.

“We have to be very careful about saying what causes what,” Koch-Sheras said. “There is a lot of debate on the issue. But this much is certain: We need to definitely be studying this more before the violent video games run amok.”

 

source: FoxNews