GoblinCookie needs to stop having people tell him what he actually thinks. Hes all like the brain cant tell the differance blah blah blah. Well Look I being myself can say with certainty that I'm pretty sure I can tell the difference between real life and a game. You are not us. I am my self. Detoxicated is himself. KittyTac is himself. If we say we aren't sympathizing with a dictator when we want the ability to be an evil overlord in DF we aren't, well atleast I'm not. Here is another example. Lets say I play this game made by Neo-Nazis called ethnic cleansing. I play it a little bit and im pretty sure I wouldn't once think: Maybe the Nazi's were not that bad they only wanted to kill all the Jews and blacks.
It seems people would rather talk about video game violence instead of governments after-all.
We aren't talking about you becoming a Nazi, we are talking about you assimilating the mind of a Nazi into your brain. The Nazis weren't the only people to commit terrible atrocities, all the major powers fighting against the Nazis committed terrible atrocities themselves (the fire bombing of Dresden, the nukes in Japan, the post-war execution of his own released prisoners by Stalin).
Im rather sure violence has nothing to do with aggressiveness. Maybe to an extent desensitization. Think of it this way. If you have Quake. But you remove all weapons but the heart and it shoots a ray of hearts and you must love (to there point where they explode into rainbows and hearts) your opponent as much as possible and the game has no blood and its a nice peaceful meadow you love(fight each other in). People are still going to get full of Adrenalin because there goals conflict. Because you cant love your opponent as much as possible when he trys to love you. So you still going to get people screaming in chat and calling each other fags. And look the first violent game ive played was Call Of Duty: Black Ops when I was 6 and we just got an Xbox 360. And I can assure you. I would rather stay out of violence in real life I'm terrified by it, its horrible.
Also who financed these studies? I'm rather curious. Also these studies are from 2010. Any newer ones?
There is a study I now can't access due to a paywall that failed to find any connection between video games and violence, which worked similarly to your above scenario, they took the same game as re-skinned it so that it was 'nonviolent', but all other mechanics were the same. They did this because all the existing studies which proved the link to video games had to use different games, so could not control for things like difficulty.
This is of course fundamentally flawed because it assumes that the effect works on a graphical level rather than a mechanical level. A reskinned violent game is still mechanically the same, which is what the experimenters wanted. But in being mechanically the same, we will end up with the same effect if the effect is mechanical not graphical. The null-effects of this particular study, establish that it is the mechanics that the brain responds to rather than the graphics; it is the conflict itself that is important, not whether it is presented using lots of realistic gore.
That means that we cannot simply dismiss DF simply because of it's ASCII graphics. If the player assumes the role of a bloody tyrant, he will end up thinking like one, even if he is only oppressing little :)s.
I've been gone a week for vacation and gave some people(won't name names) the opportunity to give scientific sources to back up their claims, but all I find is walls of text that basically boils down to "My opinion is that it is this way so I don't have to prove anything to you." ...
I keep giving your sort of people the benefit of the doubt, I seriously want to believe that you guys have something substantial to back up your damning assertions, but I'm always disappointed to find the same emotional arguments over and over.
That is because we basically have already won, the link is proven; this is because a negative result from one study does not argue with a positive result from another study. If there is a link between two things, then we must determine the correct methodology to follow and the correct methodology is only provable to be correct by it's ability to produce a positive result. So if I with my methodologically correct study find a link, your ability to produce an infinite number of studies unable to detect a link does not cancel out my correct study; it proves you are using the incorrect methodology to detect a link.
This is a vitally important principle, if we do not accept it then any wealthy special interests (Monsanto for instance) can disprove anything that proves their substances are harmful, simply because they can mass-produce flawed studies that reliably fail to detect any effect (since they are too flawed to do so). If my studies are rubbish, they will not work to determine a link and I can fund as many rubbish studies as I wish.
The people who think violent video games have no effect do so because they are motivated to do so by their love of violent video games, while those on the other side have no real motive to invent a link without having a reason. The irony here is that the principle involved was known about long before even the invention of video games. This is because of the effect of a book called the
the Sorrows of Young Werther.
In this book, the protagonist ends up committing suicide because his unrequited love ends up marrying another man. As a result of this books publication, there was a spike in suicides in Europe. The general rule of all media is thus, be very careful who you make the protagonist because the audience assimilates the protagonist into themselves. If the protagonist is suicidal, the audience becomes suicidal, if the protagonist is violent, the audience becomes violent, if the protagonist is peaceful then the audience becomes peaceful, if the protagonist is optimistic the audience becomes optimistic and if the protagonist is pessimistic, the audience becomes optimistic.
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Topic: Government Types (Read 29145 times)