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Video Game Violence · Why We Do What We Do

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  You're listening to Why we Do what we Do? Welcome to Why we Do
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  what we Do. I am your two bit host Abraham, and I am
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  your first person shooter host Shame Nice. We're a psychology podcast. We talk
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  about the things that people do, why they do them, things that animals
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  do, sometimes, general psychological phenomenon, and pretty much everything interesting there is
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  to know about human behavior. Ever, yes, today we're gonna talk about
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  a phenomenon that people seem to be really upset about and seem to kind of
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  keep going back to, very similar to like the Satanic panic, and you
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  know, all kinds of things that come up true. And I think this
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  is one of those ones that is so fun because the subject itself is already
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  fun, right, and then we just get to dispel a bunch of myths.
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  So this is the kind of episodes I like, nerdy things, Yeah,
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  dispelling myths. Life is good, inherent fun. Yeah, that's just
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  we're all about it. So that is the thing. This episode is going
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  to come out on June seventh, which as some things notable for us to
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  celebrate and acknowledge. The very first thing I would like to shout out is
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  that it is pride month, so happy Pride Month, Happy Pride Month.
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  Yay. We are in full support of this. What I would say is
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  I wish every month was Pride month. Yeah. And also, don't be
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  jerks, you know, Yeah, we realize that people are in danger,
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  so you know, support legislation that supports folks that belong to marginalized populations love
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  their namor because it doesn't matter who they love. Yeah. And also Jesus
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  had two dads, so you know, I mean, everybody gets upset about
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  that and they forget that part. Indeed. It is also National Chocolate ice
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  Cream Day and Global Running Day. That'll seem a little bit incompatible. Man,
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  maybe you can make it work. Yeah, I don't know. I
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  mean, good luck, it's gonna be a messy run or uncomfortable. It's
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  also National VCR Day, which you know, as children of the eighties and
• 1:55
  nineties big fans of that shout dated technology. It's also National Taylor's Day,
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  which I've been to a tailor exactly one time and now those pants don't fit
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  me anymore. Yeah, growing old sucks. There's also Love your Burial Ground
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  Week, to a delightfully maccabre sort of feel to it, but has to
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  do with, you know, respecting and acknowledging and sort of going out and
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  appreciating the intricacies of our past as they are represented by tombstones, which is
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  kind of neat, super cool symbolism. And go back to listen to our
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  episode about burials, because we did a whole one on white people bury people.
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  So it's a fine episode. Fact a lot of information there. Yeah,
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  it's also National Candy Month. As a big fan of candy, I
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  like this, And it's also National Iced Tea Month. But like, I
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  think it's really important to pin this down. Iced tea is fine. Sweet
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  tea is where it's at. As a Southerner, it should be National sweet
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  Tea Month. There probably is like a National Sweet Tea something or other acknowledgement.
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  But I'm a fan of the iced tea not a Southerner, So I've
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  had the sweet sound Southern iced tea, and it is really good. When
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  I choose iced tea, I tend to choose not sweet iced tea, but
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  I do understand the appeal. So every restaurant that I ever worked at had
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  a version of sweet tea that would make and the amount of sugar that is
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  put in it is I'm surprised that the sugar industry is not bankrupt. It
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  is. I mean, I'm not joking when I say, like two three
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  full cups into a picture of iced tea, it's bonkers. Sure, wild,
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  Yeah, I think it's what's keeping the sugar industry afloat dentistry too.
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  Yeah, there you go, indeed, But we're actually not talking about iced
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  tea, believe it or not. We're talking about something else. And I'd
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  like to set the scene here by telling a story, and I would like
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  to make sure that we begin with trigger warning. This story does include violence,
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  particularly gun violence, and that is not the context for this entire episode,
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  but that if that is something you are uncomfortable hearing, you probably want
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  to skip ahead a few minutes where we start to get into the meat of
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  this topic. But that's what we'll be starting with. So let's set the
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  context here. Yes, so it is probably already nine gres at ten am
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  on a Saturday, August third, twenty nineteen in El Paso, Texas,
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  a place that is very hot. Yeah, many people were already there shopping
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  or we're maybe just bored and needed something to do, or maybe they were
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  trying to get out of the days already mounting heat, and Patrick Wood Crusius,
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  a twenty one year old who must have driven all night or perhaps arrived
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  a few days before from his home nearly seven hundred miles away in Allen,
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  Texas, a suburb of Dallas, pulled into the Walmart parking lot, wearing
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  ear protection and carrying a Wa Sr ten rifle and started shooting. Yeah,
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  he actually started shooting right as he got his into the parking lot. The
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  manager who saw the shooting began announced a code brown to signal to employees to
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  start evacuating customers due to the active shooter. Crusius sounds like that curse from
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  Harry Potter. Is crucio is what it is? Similar? It's close enough.
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  Yeah, Crusius entered the store and proceeded to murder twenty three people and
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  injure another twenty three, and of course he was arrested, charged, and
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  convicted for murder and hate crimes. Now, in response, then President Donald
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  Trump said, from the White House quote, we must stop the glorification of
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  violence in our society. This includes the gruesome and grizzly video games that are
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  now commonplace. It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with
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  a culture that celebrates violence. We must stop or substantially reduce this, and
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  it has to begin immediately. End quote side note, real quick shocking that
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  any of that was a complete sentence. True. I was actually going to
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  see if you had a good Donald Trump impersonation voice that you could try.
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  I have opted out because I just hate him so much. Like it is
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  one of those things where I have like such an intense rage towards this human
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  if you can't even call him that that I can't even like. I guess
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  it would be the closest be like, because I don't think that he says
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  words. But that's my thought on him. So sorry, I'm gonna get
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  off my soapbox. Now that's my bias, clear on our bias, I
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  think. Yeah, all right, So that's his response. Current Speaker of
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  the House, so though it wasn't at the time, Kevin McCarthy has similarly
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  echoed the sentiment, saying, quote, but the idea of these video games
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  that dehumanize individuals to have a game of shooting individuals and others, I've always
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  felt that is a problem for future generations and others. We've watched from studies
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  shown before of what it does to individuals end quote. Now I'm glad that
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  you mentioned the studies, Kevin. Let's take a look at those, shall
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  we yes, But before we go forward, a few more things that we
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  need to know about Patrick wood Crusius. So prior to his cowardly, pathetic,
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  bigoted, disgusting murder spree, Patrick posted a manifesto to the eighth Chan
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  sub credit and which he outlines as white nationalist and anti immigration beliefs, including
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  the quote great replacement end quote, hypothesis shared and pushed by the likes of
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  Donald Trump, Kevin McCarthy, and Bilbert creator Scott Adams, apparently of all
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  people. Awful yeah, weird thing. So this was a targeted spree aimed
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  at killing people of Mexican descent and probably allies to them. Doesn't sound like
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  video games had much to do with it, but I digress. There is
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  a lot we could unpack with video games. There's the effects on the brain,
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  video game addiction, even creative ways that video games have been used to
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  teach and socialize people. Wacky weird things that people have done with video games.
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  I've actually seen a conference presentation and linking video games and behavior science.
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  There's a ton a ton there. I mean, this could be an entire
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  podcast where every episode all we do is discuss things about video games because there's
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  so much content. But today we're focusing on the putative relationship between video games
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  and violent behavior that politicians and others love to claim exists. Yeah. So
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  there are many, many, many video games depict stunningly lifelike scenarios in which
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  the player is incentivized to wheel deadly weapons against other players and NPCs or nonplayable
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  characters for those of you who don't play video games, and they have gotten
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  so incredibly realistic that if you were to simply glance at a video game without
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  knowing what it was, it would be understandable if you thought it was a
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  video of real bodycam footage, which is a thing that just happened. There
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  was a video game that recently came out that was filmed from bodycam footage that
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  perspective, and it had like the player aggressively beating up criminals, like and
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  it was so lifelike that they were like, there were people that were like,
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  the ethics of this are weird. Yeah, and that was kind of
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  where that went. Did you see the Unreal Engine five video game thing that
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  they did sort of a proof of concept, someone like going into like this
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  abandoned warehouse. Yeah yeah, yeah, why I mean it is shockingly real,
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  Like I actually think that there's at a point now where you could not
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  make it look more real. It is as real as a video game,
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  Like it looks just like footage, like I mean, unbelievable. But we
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  all played Tony Hawk one, so like we know how real that was,
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  So you know what I mean, Like I think it couldn't really get more
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  real than that. He's seeing somebody skate around in the circle for an hour
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  and a half because you got a perfect balance code. Fair. I will
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  say this to be fair. Tony Hawk did like create like a whole situation
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  where like now skateboarders are like totally bonkers, Like it's it's wild to watch
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  skateboarding now because everybody was like a Tony Hawk diday, we could do it
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  fair enough, all right, So bias, I need to sort of just
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  get this on the table. I don't really play video games that much.
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  I've started to sort of get back into it and dip my toes into it,
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  but I do love them. I think we are both people who who
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  really enjoy video games, who have played a lot of video games, and
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  I'm actually personally very thrilled that there are so many video games, so many
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  different kinds of video games. But I would be convinced with sufficient evidence if
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  video games were in fact linked to violent behavior, that that would not be
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  an appropriate way to go, and that we should maybe do something about it
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  if the evidence was there, Because as a scientist, I'm always open to
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  the data and the research, and I follow where the data tell me to
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  go. Yeah, as a video game player myself, I also was never
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  very good at like the more realistic one, so like you'll catch me playing
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  as we were talking about before the show, linked the Past or Sonic the
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  Hedgehog, or you know, stuff from Saga and Super Nintendo and all that,
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  and then every now and again, I like the Switch games have been
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  really cool. So sure that's my bias. But I also grew up playing
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  Mortal Kombat and I haven't killed anybody yet, so same, just the thought.
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  Yeah, and actually that kind of leads us to a history of violence
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  in video games. So let's start to unpack and walk through the timeline here
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  and understanding violence in video games and what that's meant, what it's been,
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  and how people have responded to it. I love this graph that you included
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  in the notes, Like there's some really this is really cool data. Yeah,
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  that one's going to be when it would be referencing this graph that depicts
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  sort of violent crime in the United States over time. We want to be
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  referencing that a lot as we go through this. Yes, so let's start
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  in nineteen seventy six. We talked about this a little bit in the Tough
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  on Crime episode, and we've kind of covered this this little bit, But
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  in nineteen seventy six, violent crime had been on a consistent increase for decades.
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  Nineteen seventy six is the first year it decreases even a little bit,
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  and it doesn't decrease by much, but at the time, a very simple
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  tubit graphic game called Death Race is one of the first controversial violent games that's
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  ever been released. It is a black background and there are two white two
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  D kinds of car shaped things that would run over humanoid shaped gremlins. And
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  what parents found so concerning about this is that when the player ran over the
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  gremlin, it would make a ah sound and a little gravestone would appear,
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  which it's actually pretty interesting. Yeah, there's so little technology in this,
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  like it's so little programming, but it's like enough that they were like,
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  you know what we should do, we should program a tombstone here. I
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  think that's great. Yeah, and I think the image I saw is that
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  was was actually like a little cross that pops up where they were run over.
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  Yeah, and I mean these are very very crude shapes. I mean
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  they have very little detail. It's basically a side scroll but moving forward,
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  you know, an upscroll, so that the top of the screen is like
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  where you're headed toward, if you will, And so these little gremlin things
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  came at you. But anyway, because of this act sound and the tombstones
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  that would appear, that appeared just too gruesome to the parents of the time,
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  they really pressured heavily to have this video game removed, and it was
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  it was successfully removed from stores. If only they had any idea what was
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  coming. Yeah. Now, in nineteen eighty three, violent crime had continue
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  to surge in the United States, and for a second time, it decreased
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  slightly for a few years from about nineteen eight to nine eighty four. A
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  game called Custer's Revenge is released in nineteen eighty three. And in this game,
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  a Custer character runs from the arrows of Native Americans and proceeds to trigger
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  warning rape a Native American woman tied to a pole four points. And this
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  game is protested and it flops, and no one could find that type of
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  behavior in the game amusing or fun. And I'm glad the game just is
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  not around, Like that's just not a good situation. Yeah, good riddance,
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  Let's not do that sort of thing. Yeah, all right. Nineteen
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  ninety three we kick into high gear with the violent video games available. We
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  get three video games in nineteen ninety three that are specifically worth mentioning. The
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  first one Night Trap. In this game, the players are trying to save
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  a woman from being captured and killed by monsters. Of course, the problem
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  that people have a night Trap is not the fact that there's violence, and
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  there's not the fact that there's victimization of women. It's the fact that the
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  women are scantily clad in these little nightgowns and their pajamas and whatnot. Yeah,
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  so that's one doom is another one that comes out at this time.
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  This is the first person shooter, depicting graphic, bloody explosions of monsters as
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  you basically walked through hell killing things. But yeah, if you've never played,
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  you're killing demons in hell. Yeah, that's what the whole game is.
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  Yeah, I mean it could be called constantine, but they called it
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  Doom. Yeah, there's a Mortal Kombat, and this is the first video
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  game to feature a realistic, lifelike violence done to humans. Side note,
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  I'm not sure how realistic or lifelike any of that was, but it's the
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  first thing that I guess came that close to us. So there's that it
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  was one of the first games, or it was like the first game to
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  have like character actors be in the game, Like so when you the models
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  are like actual humans and actual actors that they filmed and put into the game,
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  versus like having sprites and stuff. So like, so that in itself
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  was like, oh, they're actually hurting humans, and you know, it
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  wasn't really it wasn't really that bad. Although side note, and I you
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  played this and I didn't, So I tried to capture some images from Night
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  Trap to include our notes here, and it looks like that one was also
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  filmed and so you as the player are sort of choosing. It's like a
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  choose your own adventure how the scene plays out sort of thing. Is that
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  right? Yeah, So it's like it's like a point and click kind of
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  like problem solving game, and it is filmed with like real life actors.
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  But when you look at it again, this was this came out in nineteen
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  ninety three, but it was filmed in the eighties, so it's very dated.
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  Like everything looks like it's the eighties. And like the whole thing is
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  you're supposed to set booby traps and stuff in the game to like prevent these
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  monsters or these people breaking into your house from like hurting people. Like that's
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  really the whole game. It's just it's like it's basically like Home Alone for
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  adults. But like nobody's thinking so well. But they were scantily clad and
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  all three of these games. That's enough. Yeah, that was the problem
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  because all three of these were brought before Congress. They were in congressional hearings,
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  but the only one that was pulled from shelves was Night Trap. It's
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  so weird. So Sega had a Mortal Kombat version that they like when you
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  punch people, they wouldn't bleed, they would just like throw a sweat off
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  of them. So like you could enter Sega got around it though, because
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  you could enter a blood code and then you had blood in the game in
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  the first Mortal Combat all right, Yeah, so like it was censored except
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  for there was a cheat code. But also Mortal Kombat is not realistic at
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  all. I mean, you're talking about people that throw flaming skulls at each
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  other, right, But all of this led to something called the e SRB,
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  and so this is a video game rating board that ended up kind of
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  establishing rules and guidelines for content moderation in video games. And so that's when
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  you say like T for teens on video games, that's the esr B stuff.
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  Yep. Now, at this point, violent video games are just exploding
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  on the market. There are tons of them. They're selling extremely well,
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  they're very popular, they're making it in two lots of homes. Nineteen ninety
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  five, US violent crimes are gently but steadily declining, and this game comes
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  out called Phantasmagoria. This is also a bloody sex crime game depicting violence of
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  women. Similarly, and rightfully, I think pulled from Shelves for its violence
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  depictions. Yes, also, and this is something that like he has come
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  up multiple times across multiple episodes, and I think it's worth pointing out here
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  as this quick side note. When we do talk about violence, it is
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  important to note that ads are also violent. So I apologize that we're imparting
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  this violence on you, but here are some ads we are back. So
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  we've been talking about the history of violence and video games, and we just
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  covered up through nineteen ninety five and we're moving on from that, so or
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  we got into nineteen ninety five. At this point, there are way too
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  many games to even attempt to summarize them all that are out. But we've
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  got things like Doom Quake, Castle Wolfenstein, Redneck, ram Page, Nightmare
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  Creatures, and Resident Evil. And this is the point at which someone brings
• 16:52
  the first lawsuit against video games. Did you ever play Castle Wolfenstein? I
• 16:56
  did. Actually, that was one of the few on this list I have
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  played. That game was super fun. I mean it was bonkers, but
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  it was super fun. Yeah, it is ridiculous. You know what,
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  I'm not going to spoil up for everybody listeners, Go look at Castle Wolfenstein
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  and see what it is. It is absurd. Yeah. Now, in
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  nineteen ninety eight is the first release of Grand Theft Auto, which really revolutionizes
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  the idea in a mainstream way of what video games can be. It's incredibly
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  popular and sequels at additional games immediately go into development. I mean I remember
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  in the two thousands playing Vice City NonStop. Yeah, it was one of
• 17:30
  those games. It was like it took it took the world by storm.
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  But nineteen ninety eight is the first edition of Grand Theft Auto. Yep,
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  okay, nineteen ninety nine. There is another trigger warning for people who have
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  a hard time hearing depictions of gun violence. Understandably, this is a short
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  one, so maybe I don't know a minute in the head, alright.
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  So nineteen ninety nine, two students at Columbine High School and Colorado go on
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  a shooting spree of their school, and then it turns out later that they
• 17:52
  found that the students were big fans of the Doom game, as most people
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  were, which causes a frenzied panic about video game violence in relation to violent
• 18:00
  crime. And although this was a horrific tragedy, it should be noted at
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  this point violent crime in the US is the lowest it had been since the
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  nineteen seventies. That's a huge thing. And also, you know, there
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  was a lot of pre planning and stuff before they showed up. So yeah,
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  it's hard to say that like there was, and we'll talk about some
• 18:18
  of the studies and stuff, but doom is not the problem. They were
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  not going to hell. Now. In two thousand and one, under pressure
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  from Congress and the public, the Surgeon General is tasked with conducting empirical research
• 18:27
  to determine the extent to which violent video games cause violent behavior, and in
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  his study returns a few important findings. This is kind of where we're going
• 18:34
  to start getting in some interesting data. A. Video games have no discernible
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  impact on violent behavior. This was a study done in two thousand and one.
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  Okay, r B media depictions may have some impact, but it is
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  very small, only about two percent on average. And see, the most
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  significant risk factors are home life and mental stability. I want to make sure
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  that we pay to that mental stability piece too, because that is a current
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  argument gun violence as well. Yes, that is true. Okay, so
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  we're at two thousand and one, and I think we're gonna have to kind
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  of skip ahead a little bit. Suffice it to say that over the next
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  couple of decades, despite an exponentially growing population, exponential growth of availability in
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  sales of violent video games, rates of violence and violent crime in the United
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  States continues to tick downwards to the lowest level seen since the nineteen sixties.
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  Interestingly, and this is just correlational. So there's no reason I think this
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  is causal. But I still think it's interesting if you look at the data,
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  whenever there is an increase in video game sales, there's a small decrease
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  in violent crime, And whenever there is a slump in video game sales,
• 19:45
  there's a small increase in violent crime. Yeah. So I mean, just
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  take it, take it how you will. I think it's just worth noting
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  that, Like I have this include the little graph here, Like you see
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  the biggest jumps in video game sales correlated, just correlated, not saying they're
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  cause late related, but just food for thought, correlated with the biggest decreases
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  in violent crime and vice versa. Like just on this graph, if I
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  look at twenty two eleven, two twelve, like, those are the three
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  data points that stick out to me the most. Yeah, you see there
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  is a certain amount in twenty ten, violent crimes are low. Sales increase
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  in twenty eleven, and violent crimes decrease, and then sales decrease in twenty
• 20:25
  twelve, and there is a slight increase in violent crimes. Yeah, super
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  interesting stuff. If you're looking at the very first time we saw a decrease
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  in video game sales in two thousand and five, this graph starts at nineteen
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  ninety eight, is the first time that violent crimes actually tick up from the
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  trend that they had been one. So they had been decreasing until two thousand
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  and four, and two thousand and five, video game sales decrease, violent
• 20:44
  crime slightly increases. So odd, so interesting, right, just a weird,
• 20:49
  just a weird correlation. I thought it was useful to point out food
• 20:52
  for thought. Yeah. Now, meanwhile, some states successfully temporarily are able
• 20:57
  to ban or limit the sales of violent video games. These end up being
• 21:00
  struck down the court for multiple reasons. Sometimes it's like interfering with businesses.
• 21:03
  Sometimes it's freedom of speech, like there's there's all kinds of stuff that kind
• 21:07
  of like get involved here. So a lot of times those violent video games
• 21:10
  were still able to make it out into the market. Yeah, and also
• 21:11
  nearly impossible to regulate, Like if a state that banned it next door the
• 21:15
  state didn't, people just cross the border and picked it up in a different
• 21:18
  state and it like had no effect whatsoever, you know. Or at this
• 21:23
  point, like it's getting easier and easier to order things online, Like they'll
• 21:26
  just order it online, and it's like that's not something they can easily regulate.
• 21:30
  So right, Yeah, many politicians, parents, academicians, if you
• 21:34
  will, speak out against violent video games. And meanwhile, the scientists and
• 21:38
  psychologists continue to run study after study and are finding no link between playing violent
• 21:45
  video games and violent behavior. Not really, but we will dig into what
• 21:48
  some of the research that Kevin was talking about might have been some of those
• 21:52
  studies. But I think it's important to note too, violent crimes only started
• 21:57
  to increase again in sixteen. Huh. Was there anything major that happened in
• 22:03
  twenty sixteen that we are not aware of or that maybe is slipping my mind.
• 22:08
  I can't think of anything in particular that would have led to that what
• 22:12
  happened in twenty sixteen, I don't know. I don't know either. I
• 22:17
  guess we'll never know, but I think it's worth asking, and you kind
• 22:21
  of already alluded this. We should ask everybody have you played video games?
• 22:25
  I played video games my whole life. I had a sega at a PlayStation.
• 22:30
  I was obsessed with Tony Hawk, like I never played the games that
• 22:33
  were like more violent games like I could. I was really good at Mortal
• 22:36
  Kombat, but I didn't really like fighting games. I liked platformers. I
• 22:38
  like Sonic the Hedgehog. I liked Mario A Super Mario Brothers, and I
• 22:42
  like Tony Hawk a lot, and in Crash Bandicoot like I played those games
• 22:45
  a lot when I was a kid. Sure, I never really got into
• 22:48
  I think we had a PlayStation two and I kind of left it like that's
• 22:52
  where my video game kind of stuff left, like I left it there.
• 22:55
  And then when I got kids, I started playing the Wii again, which
• 22:56
  was like, okay, I'm like sword fighting on an island with people,
• 23:00
  but it's not not real sorts, you know, with we sports. That's
• 23:03
  my experience playing video games in general, Like I played all those and you
• 23:07
  know, I would tell you right now plays on it. The Hedgehog did
• 23:10
  not make me run faster, and it did not make me destroy robots.
• 23:12
  So two of the ones I probably played the most is I played a lot
• 23:15
  of Mario. I loved Mario pretty much anything, And I also loved Halo.
• 23:22
  When I on Xbox, Halo is a big thing. I played through
• 23:26
  at least the first three Halo games. I played pretty religiously, you know,
• 23:30
  campaign and multiplayer and whatever. I loved. I loved all the Halo
• 23:33
  stuff. And I also was a pretty big fan of Resident Evil, and
• 23:37
  specifically I really liked the Resident Evil games that were very puzzly. Yeah,
• 23:41
  it was like find a thing that goes with the thing, so you can
• 23:44
  open the thing to get to the next thing you need to find to finish
• 23:45
  this other And there's a lot of this, like collecting stuff to solve these
• 23:49
  little puzzles in the game, and that I really enjoyed. And then just
• 23:52
  the zombie theme is one that I've talked about before, is something I just
• 23:56
  I really enjoyed. So I liked all of those. So the first person
• 24:00
  shooter of Halo, I did play a little Call of Duty, but it
• 24:03
  was not like a major thing for me. I was much more into the
• 24:06
  synthetic Halo world. I thought was a really fun concept. So that's why
• 24:10
  I enjoyed that one so much. Yeah, I think that makes sense.
• 24:12
  See, I was always like, you know, I was never very good
• 24:15
  at like pointing and aiming. Like there were and there were some games that
• 24:18
  came out that were really cool. Like I remember being super stoked about Metal
• 24:22
  Gear Solid, thinking it was really fun to hide in a cardboard box.
• 24:26
  I remember Grant that Auto coming out, and not because I could like run
• 24:29
  people over h people, but because you could steal cars and just like just
• 24:32
  hit ramps and stuff like that was more fun to me, right, Like
• 24:34
  the Twisted Metal was an example of that, where it's like it's just a
• 24:37
  ridiculous over the top game where you're like there was never a point in time
• 24:42
  where I was like, you know what I should do. I should go
• 24:44
  get an ice cream truck and put a rocket launcher in it. Yeah,
• 24:47
  it's one of those things where I always had fun, but it was It's
• 24:49
  like to me, it's like movies where it's like, you know, it's
• 24:52
  fake, like you don't like you suspend belief while you're playing it, but
• 24:56
  then when you go back to reality, you're like it's fine. Yeah,
• 24:59
  that's a great comparison. Actually, and I feel very similarly and I the
• 25:02
  same thing as like I liked. I don't know, it's like problem solving,
• 25:06
  puzzle solving a little bit, that sort of thing about it. But
• 25:07
  also, yeah, and I actually feel like we've sort of danced around this
• 25:11
  idea of playing violent video games, Like I thought. I thought they were
• 25:14
  a lot of fun, the ones that I did play. Yeah, but
• 25:15
  I a poor violence. I would call myself a pacifist, A mildly extreme
• 25:21
  one. Yeah, that's what an oxymoron. Mildly extreme. Anyway, that
• 25:26
  was at least my experience with it. But that's very anecdotal. We should
• 25:30
  ask science, what do you say science? In this moment, I will
• 25:33
  stand in a science For one thing, it is difficult to do research on
• 25:37
  this because so many people play video games. You don't have good controls in
• 25:41
  place, and particularly among populations of interest, it's very difficult to gather that
• 25:45
  information get those people into the studies. But I think it's worth asking the
• 25:49
  question of like, what is the argument here? And essentially the argument is
• 25:53
  that people are saying the violence and video games primes aggressive behavior, that it
• 25:59
  functions as a practice or a habit building around violent action and that it desensitizes
• 26:03
  people to violence and lowers morality. That's what people are kind of arguing like,
• 26:08
  it makes you want to be more aggressive, it gives you practice and
• 26:11
  habit forming activities to make you more aggressive or around violent action, and it
• 26:15
  makes you care about violent action less. Right. And the priming is like
• 26:19
  giving someone a relation ahead of time, some kind of like experience ahead of
• 26:23
  time that it's likely to affect them in the future. For example, I
• 26:26
  randomly say strings and then ask you to name an instrument. You are likely
• 26:32
  to say a guitar or a violin or a mandolin maybe yeah, as opposed
• 26:37
  to something like a trumpet or a drum or something like that. And it's
• 26:40
  just because the relation you have as strings, and even though you weren't thinking,
• 26:42
  oh, I should name a string instrument, and it was just like
• 26:45
  that is now part of what's at strength when asked to come up with something
• 26:51
  random, and so it's more likely to be And that's actually how some of
• 26:53
  the mentalism magic tricks work because they'll do a lot of priming to get you
• 26:56
  to say or choose something very specific right now. Again, so we're digging
• 27:00
  into the research part of this the science, As we said in two thousand
• 27:03
  and one, the Surgeon General conducted research which turned up no connection. The
• 27:07
  data not only don't correlate, they're actually inversely related. As we mentioned earlier,
• 27:12
  as we're talking about that, super important to note. Yes, let's
• 27:15
  go ahead and go into some of the studies, because there are studies that
• 27:19
  seem to suggest this link between violent video games and violent behavior through that priming
• 27:25
  effect, and so we don't have to talk through a few of those really
• 27:26
  quick. There is a two eighteen study that found that there was an increase
• 27:30
  in violent behavior among teens who played violent video games, specifically that they were
• 27:34
  more likely to be sent to the principle's office or getting fights. It's important
• 27:38
  to notes when looking at this research, the effect was tiny. It was
• 27:42
  technically statistically significant, but there was very very small change in the group that
• 27:49
  was more likely too. It was like two percent more likely to than the
• 27:53
  other group or something. And so just leaving out the actual number, they
• 27:56
  just say more likely to it it sounds like a lot. It wasn't a
• 28:00
  lot. It was just technically statistically significant, right. Other important feature of
• 28:04
  this study was that although they showed there are more likely to get in trouble.
• 28:07
  There was no association whatsoever between playing violent video games and violent crime.
• 28:12
  Okay, so that's a good place to start. Now. Several other studies
• 28:17
  also found causal links between violent video games and violent behavior, mostly things like
• 28:22
  hypothetical scenarios, brain waves, and heart rate. They've found that, but
• 28:26
  never actual correlations too violent crimes. And that's really interesting to point out there
• 28:33
  was never a causal link to violent crimes or even correlational. Interestingly, almost
• 28:37
  every one of them was from the same author, Craig Anderson. Anderson has
• 28:41
  been on a crusade against video games since two thousand and seven, producing study
• 28:45
  after study at their study showing how exposure to violent video games cause violent behaviors.
• 28:52
  Yeah, and so just to sort of talk a little bit more about
• 28:55
  this because I don't I don't know if I planned to bring it up again,
• 28:59
  But as I said, it was hypothetical. It was like after playing
• 29:03
  violent video games, they would ask questions like, would you be willing to
• 29:06
  if someone took something from you, squirt them with a water bottle, or
• 29:08
  even give them an electric shock. They didn't do those things. They didn't
• 29:12
  even pretend like they were doing those things. They gave them the hypothetical situation
• 29:17
  of, like, do you think that you would do those things right now?
• 29:19
  And they saw that there was an increase in people saying that yes,
• 29:22
  they would was basically how they did it. And again there was no actual
• 29:26
  association between actual behavior. It was all that hypothetical stuff. That's so wild
• 29:32
  to me. Now we'll say this, Okay, So, like going on
• 29:34
  Anderson and his cronies, I feel like cronies is a good word. Minions
• 29:37
  is another good word too, But like, yeah, his folks, his
• 29:41
  research people, crones is good, cronies, minions, whatever you will call
• 29:44
  them. They have been heavily and widely criticized by the scientific community for overstating
• 29:48
  his claims, as well as a myopic interpretation of his data. Basically,
• 29:53
  what they're saying is is they're making sweeping generalizations about data that they have a
• 29:59
  very picular bias towards. Yeah, they kind of just did their best to
• 30:03
  line up to get the results that they wanted, and everyone's sort of calling
• 30:07
  bs on that. But I think it's probably worth also unpacking what the word
• 30:11
  myopic means. Myopic is a really good word, right, It's one of
• 30:18
  my favorites. Nice, I don't use it nearly often enough. One definition
• 30:22
  of myopic is near sighted. But the yeah metaphorically, Yeah. The actual
• 30:30
  definition that we're looking at here, though, is lacking imagination, foresight,
• 30:34
  or intellectual insight. And the way that I kind of look at it is
• 30:37
  like myopic is it's very narrowed. Yes, it's like you almost like got
• 30:41
  blinders on. You can't see any other data or you're not willing to see
• 30:45
  any other data because you are like you lack the intellectual insight to consider any
• 30:48
  other options. Yeah, I'm very frequently use it. And heart used to
• 30:52
  say like narrow minded, so hyper focused on what you want to see that
• 30:57
  you don't see anything else. Like another way to look is like single cited
• 31:00
  right, like a cyclops. You wouldn't say cyclopic, you'd say that cyclops
• 31:04
  was myopic. I believe so. I maybe I don't know, I just
• 31:07
  made that up. I just wanted to figure out how to talking about cyclopses,
• 31:10
  cyclop cyclopics, cyclopads, yeah, cyclopeans. All right, we need
• 31:15
  to figure out what the correct plural of cyclopius nous is. And in the
• 31:18
  meantime, and speaking of a lack of intellectualism here some ads. All right,
• 31:32
  So, as promised, we have learned that the plural of cyclops is
• 31:36
  apparently cyclopes, or that's at least the generally agreed upon plural. Yeah,
• 31:41
  I don't like that. If you were just joined, I don't know how
• 31:42
  you'd just be joining us right now. But if you were somehow just joining
• 31:45
  us, you'd be not I don't think you would realize that we were talking
• 31:48
  about video games, but we are. We just happened to also be talking
• 31:51
  about cyclopes. Yeah, it's it's a wild time over here at why we
• 31:55
  do what we do. So talking about the literature around violence and video games,
• 31:59
  the literature this doesn't actually and couldn't actually measure violence. So and you'll
• 32:04
  find this is like the case with like a lot of violent crimes. A
• 32:07
  lot of times it's very difficult to study violent crimes because they usually only happened
• 32:09
  once, and so like, because they only happened once, you can't identify
• 32:14
  trends among individuals. You have to look at like other things, and they
• 32:17
  doesn't really it's very difficult. But what they do typically is because they can't
• 32:22
  measure actual violence, they measure proxies. And one proxy was to ask about
• 32:25
  thoughts and feelings related to violence. And like you just mentioned before the ad,
• 32:29
  they were asking people after they played violent video games. They were asking
• 32:31
  them whether or not they would do something that would be considered violent. Yeah,
• 32:35
  and actually so I couldn't remember if we were going to bring this up
• 32:37
  again, but essentially you're right that we did. What they did is they
• 32:39
  had players in groups where the one group played violent games the other one played
• 32:44
  non violent games. That they created a mock or hypothetical situation in which they
• 32:47
  asked the players to think of harming someone by either blasting them with a loud
• 32:51
  sound or making them meat hot sauce. That was their violence that they did
• 32:53
  to them. Right, They never saw another person to have these things done
• 32:58
  to them. They did not witness or directly inflict any harm or see any
• 33:00
  effects of harm. They were just asked about these these hypothetical scenarios. And
• 33:05
  so sure, that also to me seems I mean, eating hot sauce seems
• 33:08
  fundamentally different from shooting someone. Yeah, to me, at least maybe someone
• 33:12
  else sees them as being similar, But I think they're different a little bit.
• 33:15
  Yeah, it's not worth doing a really deep sidebar on this right now,
• 33:19
  But there is probably a conversation to be had about how people are to
• 33:22
  one another when they're not face to face. So if I asked about,
• 33:25
  like, would you do this to X person that you don't like, you'd
• 33:29
  be much more willing to not face to face that person say yes, I
• 33:32
  would do harm to that person. Versus when you actually talk to someone.
• 33:36
  It's really hard to bring that level of cruelty to another person when you're standing
• 33:40
  face to face with them. And this is actually kind of similar to road
• 33:44
  rage. We see other people as cars and not as people, and like
• 33:46
  people obviously do get they'll get out and they'll leal at each other, and
• 33:50
  they'll get in fights, and horrible things have happened. But in my experience,
• 33:53
  limited as it is, and as biased coming from me as it is,
• 33:57
  as like, when you actually are talking to someone and face to face,
• 34:00
  I'm not screaming them calling them names, even if I'm mad at them,
• 34:04
  right right, Like, I'm having to sort of problem solve the situation.
• 34:07
  And I think that that's a normal thing to do. Yeah, maybe
• 34:12
  I'm unique. Yeah, I mean I feel like that's like a humane thing
• 34:15
  to do. Yeah, I think one of the most important things to unpack
• 34:17
  and have a discussion around is that a thoughts and actions are not the same
• 34:22
  in a fundamentally important way. We often think and say things when we are
• 34:25
  frustrated or in any state of high stress that we do not act on.
• 34:29
  Okay, that's important, and be the effect of people reported more violent thoughts
• 34:35
  only lasted between about four to thirty minutes. It was temporary, and so
• 34:38
  watching a sad movie might also make you temporarily sad, but it doesn't cause
• 34:43
  depression, right, And I think that's an important thing. These are fleeting,
• 34:46
  passing emotional moments. I will say this too when you're talking about like
• 34:50
  psychological intervention a lot of times, like one of the core fundamental things about
• 34:53
  like doing therapy is that you understand the fundamental difference between thoughts, actions,
• 34:58
  and feelings, Like they all produced different responses and when you're kind of like
• 35:01
  examining them, and so they are fundamentally different. Emotional responses versus logical responses
• 35:07
  versus behavioral responses are three very different things. Yeah, and they teach that
• 35:12
  in basic psychology interventions, right, So I'm shocked that like psychologists are like
• 35:15
  missing that well, the myopic anti video game activists are missing it. Yeah,
• 35:21
  yeah, for sure, another trigger warning for violent gun violence. This
• 35:23
  is a sort of single point here. So again, short after the Sandy
• 35:28
  Hook shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, the media jumped all over the report that
• 35:31
  the shooter at Sandy Hook was a huge video game player. However, although
• 35:37
  he did have some of the standard what you might call violent video games,
• 35:39
  such as Call of Duty, what they didn't really report and a lot of
• 35:43
  people didn't think about, was his favorite game that he played far and above
• 35:46
  everything else. And what I saw in one place is as much as ten
• 35:51
  hours per day was Dance Dance Revolution. Yeah, very different. Now,
• 35:54
  that's not in the general category of violent video games that I'm aware of.
• 36:00
  I mean, unless you are into dance fighting, Okay, is that something
• 36:05
  you can do in dance dance? I don't think you can do in dance
• 36:07
  dance, but you can do it if you are part of West Side Story,
• 36:09
  okay. Or Grease. I feel like they dance fought in Grease.
• 36:13
  Yeah. I think you're right. Okay, But I think that's an important
• 36:15
  point. If your argument is violent video games, then we have provided there
• 36:17
  are multiple cases where that has not been the situation. Like dance dance revolution
• 36:22
  is not a causal thing for video games for for like I'm sorry for shootings
• 36:25
  doesn't make any sense. And again, I think this goes back to the
• 36:29
  idea that other scientists have largely found the opposite results to the small cadre of
• 36:35
  anti video game activists such as Anderson and One study on priming in video games
• 36:38
  had players play a game depicting driving and avoiding collisions on a road and another
• 36:43
  in which the players were a mouse avoiding a cat and what the researchers hypothesized
• 36:47
  that, based on priming, the player should more quickly recognize words associated with
• 36:52
  the genre of the game that you were playing. Makes sense, right,
• 36:54
  So you're playing a game where your cat and mouse, you're to recognize words
• 36:59
  that are related that. To say another way, players of the driving game
• 37:02
  should be faster associating words relates to their game categories. It is keys,
• 37:06
  wheels, roadsigns for driving and leash toy and food scraps for cat and mouse
• 37:09
  games. But not only did the players not half faster reaction times to their
• 37:14
  related words, they were slower at the related words than non related words,
• 37:17
  indicating a negative priming effect, so the opposite of priming in that situation,
• 37:22
  which is pretty cool. Yeah. So, whereas the other ones were indirectly
• 37:27
  measuring priming by creating a hypothetical scenario unrelated to what they were doing, I
• 37:30
  mean, except abstractly, and this one they created a direct priming comparison of
• 37:37
  like to like, where you should have add basically a very easy, observable
• 37:42
  robust effect, and they didn't get it. And that was because what that
• 37:45
  means is that there was not a robust effect and that priming is not happening,
• 37:49
  at least not in the way that those other people were hypothesizing. Right
• 37:52
  would right, These kind of go in order. The next one is a
• 37:54
  two thousand and seven meta analysis that found significant publication bias, and the study
• 38:00
  is that were likely to get published if they had a positive correlation rather than
• 38:02
  studies that had a negative one, meaning that when these studies were being done
• 38:07
  and showed no connection between video games and violence, they weren't being published as
• 38:10
  often as the ones that were showing that correlation. That is super important because
• 38:15
  that's telling you, like, you know, there's research out there, but
• 38:17
  it's not showing like, what's actually happening now. A two thousand and seven
• 38:22
  experiment randomized one hundred and three young adults in the groups of no video games
• 38:25
  and non violent video games, violent video games were the player is a good
• 38:30
  guy, and violent video games in which the player is a bad guy.
• 38:32
  So you've got four groups there. Afterward, they exposed the players to a
• 38:37
  frustration task, one designed to frustrated participant, which is just sounds like a
• 38:40
  personal hell for me, And they found that the players with the most history
• 38:45
  with violent video games were less likely to exhibit hostile behaviors during the frustration task.
• 38:51
  So this is what this study found. This study found that they put
• 38:55
  people in different categories, they intentionally frustrated people, and the people with the
• 39:00
  least violent or hostile behaviors were the people that played violent video games. Yeah,
• 39:06
  and who had like the longest history of playing violent video games as well.
• 39:08
  Yeah, Because it actually didn't even matter what group they were necessarily a
• 39:12
  part of, if they had a long history of playing violent video games,
• 39:14
  and whether or not they were just less likely to exhibit hostile behaviors when you
• 39:17
  tried to frustrate them after playing a lot of those games. Right, we're
• 39:22
  still in two thousand and seven. Two thousand and seven Swedish study reviewed one
• 39:24
  hundred and sixty one papers on violence of video games. Without going into it
• 39:30
  in depth, the short summary is that most studies did not attempt to control
• 39:32
  for factors that were the most likely to impact the violent behavior, or they
• 39:37
  had other methodological flaws that made them impossible to interpret in any meaningful way.
• 39:43
  One of the more interesting findings was when they looked at twelve longitudinal studies and
• 39:47
  most people are going to know, but that just means they collected data over
• 39:51
  many years to look for trends over time, but only three of those twelve
• 39:54
  studies included data about mental health and home life, and two of those three
• 39:59
  found that those factors accounted for violence, and the video games did not.
• 40:04
  So out of one hundred and sixty one papers, they didn't even look at
• 40:07
  mental health as a relevant factor for violence, and the ones that did that
• 40:10
  was the factor that accounted for violence. Amazing, that's a huge amount of
• 40:15
  papers to do, Like, because I was just reading the men analysis.
• 40:17
  That was like they looked at nine hundred papers and ended up with eighteen that
• 40:21
  they could review. Like that happens a lot. Yeah, and so you're
• 40:24
  talking one hundred and sixty one that were included in the study. That's a
• 40:27
  lot. Yeah, the longitudinal part is really important because then that actually looks
• 40:30
  at like maybe people say, Okay, well, maybe it looks like it's
• 40:34
  fleeting because it's short term. You play a game and then you test them
• 40:37
  and they don't really show violence, but maybe the effect compounds over time.
• 40:40
  And we now have two studies showing that that's not the case, That they
• 40:45
  that the longer that they go on, the less likely they have any history
• 40:49
  with violence, actual violent behavior. Amazing, all right. In twenty twelve,
• 40:52
  a study found of six five hundred eighth graders. I found that when
• 40:58
  you controlled for things like home life stability, the history of trauma and challenging
• 41:01
  behavior, and mental health, any associations between violent video games and violence shrank
• 41:06
  significantly. So you found that like, oh, there were these other things
• 41:09
  home and mental health that led to more violence, video games not so much.
• 41:14
  What this meant was the kids who were more violent around violent video games
• 41:17
  were just generally more violent. Yeah, And it would be like taking a
• 41:22
  bunch of left handed people that were also illiterate and then showing them that they
• 41:25
  were poor spellers and concluded that it was because they were left handed. They
• 41:30
  were poor spellers because they were alliterate, and they just happened to be left
• 41:32
  handed. The violent people just happened to be playing violent video games. They
• 41:37
  were doing aggressive things because their life circumstances foster aggression. That's simple again.
• 41:43
  Mental health, home life seems to be a running theme here that pretty much
• 41:46
  accounts for it whenever they look for it. A twenty fifteen study by Marki
• 41:51
  and colleagues in a journal published by the American Psychological Association conducted four time series
• 41:58
  analyzes on violent crimes and video games and found not only that there was no
• 42:01
  link, but they reported being surprised when they found a negative correlation between video
• 42:07
  games and violence, meaning that playing violent video games and contact and experience with
• 42:12
  them was actually correlated with decreases and violent behavior. You know, it just
• 42:17
  makes me go back to like politicians need to take basic science tests. Yeah,
• 42:21
  to be able to make laws on stuff, they just got to be
• 42:22
  able to pass up basic scientists Like you have to be able to read an
• 42:24
  article and interpret it, yea. And if you can't do that, then
• 42:27
  you don't get to make decisions on this sure, all right. So another
• 42:30
  twenty fifteen study had participants play games that were either violent or non violent and
• 42:35
  intuitive and easy to play, or violent or non violent but difficult and unintuitive.
• 42:39
  They found that people were more likely to be aggressive when the game was
• 42:43
  difficult, regardless of whether the game itself contained violence, So it didn't matter
• 42:46
  that was violent, it was just kind of frustrating to play again frustration tests.
• 42:51
  Further, the more skilled gamer was, the less likely they were to
• 42:54
  be violent even when they were playing a difficult, frustrating game. Seemingly increase
• 43:00
  game time decrease their reactivity to frustrating situations. It's actually highlighted another potential flaw
• 43:05
  in the studies that tried to link violent video games to violence, that they
• 43:08
  either made the non violent games easier or at least in control for the difficulty
• 43:14
  of the game, which is a factor that contributed. Yeah, just another
• 43:16
  study showing that the more contact people have with these the better they are handling
• 43:20
  frustration and situations that might otherwise invoke violent behavior in someone who has maybe predisposed
• 43:27
  toward it. Playing video games at least on these studies is like the third
• 43:30
  or fourth one now to suggests that it actually decrease the reactivity to those types
• 43:36
  of triggers. Speaking of reactive triggers, prepare yourself for ads. We have
• 43:49
  yet more research history to unpack, So let's get into a twenty sixteen by
• 43:52
  Cunningham and colleagues. This was actually intended to validate previous lab experiments that did
• 43:59
  show the violent games increased aggressive behavior. However, Cunningham and colleagues found that
• 44:04
  not only was there no causal link between exposure to violent video games and violent
• 44:07
  crime, but there seemed to be that decrease in violent behavior from playing violent
• 44:13
  video games. Right. And again, I think it's worth noting that,
• 44:15
  like overall crime, you know, we have seen for decades that like violent
• 44:20
  crime is decreasing except for when we hit twenty sixteen, and some of these
• 44:23
  studies are showing that even despite that like slight increase in violent crimes, we're
• 44:28
  still showing kind of that trend. Now, to go further, an intensely
• 44:31
  comprehensive twenty eighteen study by Zendel at All conducted a series of experiments with three
• 44:37
  thousand participants examining the priming effect of violence in video games, the relative violence
• 44:43
  of the video game violent word associations and other aggressive behaviors. So and of
• 44:47
  three thousand, just to remind everybody, yeah, once again, there was
• 44:51
  no correlation between exposure to violent video games and aggressive this none. They found
• 44:54
  none in three thousand people. Now, it's not worth really getting into a
• 44:59
  hugely hence way. But for those of you super nerdy people or those who
• 45:02
  are interested in the scientific process, there's been a trend recently in people preregistering
• 45:07
  their studies. What that means is that they can't try and rewrite the outcome
• 45:12
  of their study if it doesn't show what they wanted to show, because they've
• 45:15
  already basically logged it with a scientific board of people who then kind of holding
• 45:20
  onto it, and then they kind of have to just stick to their analyzes
• 45:23
  that they were going to do. So with that in mind, a twenty
• 45:27
  nineteen study pi Psi Bilski something like that. Imagine a lot of consonants and
• 45:32
  whys yes to jumble together in a soup. So that person and Weinstein they
• 45:37
  went the extra mile and they preregistered their study, which meant, as I
• 45:42
  said, committed their experimental design, hypothesis, measurement, and methods for scrutiny
• 45:45
  by a form of scientists prior to beginning data collection so that they couldn't later
• 45:51
  change their narrative to match the data. They included one thousand four participants and
• 45:54
  analyze real plane data to correlate the relative violence of video games and instances of
• 46:00
  violent behavior, finding again, no correlation at all, oh man, And
• 46:05
  that's twenty nineteen, So we're getting caught up here. So another study compared
• 46:08
  aggressive behaviors to the reality of violence using rag doll physics that uses simulations to
• 46:14
  depict realistic, lifelike movements of human bodies compared to cartoonish unrealistic violence like Golden
• 46:20
  Eye on NCC four and saw no correlation to aggressiveness based on how real it
• 46:25
  appeared. Other analyzes, even by the Secret Service, found that school shooters
• 46:30
  played relatively fewer video games than their peers. So we're finding studies from all
• 46:36
  different communities they're saying the same thing except for this Anderson fella right, that
• 46:39
  basically there is no relation, no relation. Yeah, okay, last point
• 46:45
  here on our scientific studies, and then we'll get to starting to turn the
• 46:49
  ship toward toward a conclusion. I found this graph that compared the amount of
• 46:53
  money spent on video games per capita and the rates of gun violence in the
• 46:57
  United States, Canada, the Netherlands, the UK, Australia, France,
• 47:01
  Germany, South Korea, and Japan. And this actually put the United States
• 47:06
  at or tied for nearly dead last in video games spending. Those other countries
• 47:09
  outspend us by a lot, or at least maybe one tied us, but
• 47:14
  some of them, but most of them outspend us by a ton on their
• 47:16
  video games, including violent video games. However, the United States was three
• 47:22
  had a three times higher rate of gun violence than all the other countries,
• 47:25
  whereas the countries that spend the most on video games, which was Japan,
• 47:30
  South Korea, and the Netherlands, had among the least gun violence. It's
• 47:34
  actually ninety six times less for Japan. Now that is to be fair.
• 47:42
  Yeah, So to be fair, most of the other countries only spent a
• 47:46
  little more than the United States on video games and also had low rates of
• 47:50
  gun violence. So say number one, I mean, it just goes.
• 47:57
  It goes to show that like time and time again, where there's this narrative
• 48:00
  where people just are are trusting people who are not experts on it. I
• 48:02
  mean, you have this narrative that comes out from people that just don't know
• 48:06
  what they're talking about, and they glom onto it because it sounds scary and
• 48:08
  it's an easy scapegoat, and at the end of the day, they're wrong.
• 48:12
  All the data suggests otherwise ninety six times less. Yeah, that's crazy.
• 48:17
  Oh, it's so frustrating living in a scientifically illiterate country. God well
• 48:23
  as scientists and specifically as behaviorists, let's look at this from like a behavioral
• 48:29
  perspective. And I think they're like looking at because I think we're gonna be
• 48:31
  really grounded to like, what is someone what's really happening, what are they
• 48:36
  really doing, and getting really focused on the actual behaviors, what those behaviors
• 48:40
  look like, and how they function for someone when they're playing video games,
• 48:44
  and how that relates to things like violent behavior. And I think it's important
• 48:47
  to breakdown what is happening behaviorally when someone's playing the game to understand its potential
• 48:52
  relation to violence and aggressive behavior. Right, So there are things that they
• 48:57
  are doing generally, and there are things that are doing specifically. Now,
• 49:00
  specifically, when someone is playing video game, they're usually sitting or laying down,
• 49:04
  They're staring in one direction, barely blinking, pressing some buttons, moving
• 49:08
  knobs, probably drinking Code Orange mountain dew. And they probably snack on unhealthy
• 49:13
  foods. So that's usually like the context in which a video game is played
• 49:17
  in most situations. Did they have Code Orange? I thought it was only
• 49:20
  Code red. Did I say Code Orange? I meant to say Code red.
• 49:22
  I but listening to the band Code Orange a lot lately, so that's
• 49:24
  probably where that is. Okay, I thought maybe you're thinking of Agent Orange.
• 49:27
  I don't know if there wasn't Orange mountain dew. I don't think it
• 49:29
  was Code orange though, all right, Well, anyway, that was the
• 49:31
  specific part. So then they control to some extent the movement of images on
• 49:36
  a screen, usually to complete some sort of task. They might see cig
• 49:39
  images of blood or other visa or violent actions, or they might see other
• 49:44
  things of course, like coins flying up in the air and disappearing above their
• 49:46
  heads, etc. Free guys. Kind of a fun depiction of like a
• 49:51
  lifelike depiction of video games in that way, But that's just that's sort of
• 49:54
  then what they see when they're staring ahead on blinking at the screen right now.
• 49:58
  Generally they are often given some objective and a way to earn points and
• 50:01
  resources. Then they practice pressing buttons at time intervals to complete their objectives while
• 50:07
  earnings the most points. Like, that's really kind of the things like some
• 50:10
  achievements, some points you're trying to do some goal, Like every video game
• 50:15
  is just like a goal towards something, right, Yeah, unless you're playing
• 50:16
  Animal Crossing, then it's just kind of like the most zen Nirvana game ever.
• 50:21
  That's really great. Yeah, Often players get into a flow state in
• 50:24
  which they are primarily focused on completing their objective, whatever it may be.
• 50:29
  What their characters are doing and what they see while doing it are kind of
• 50:32
  incidental. Yeah, it's really just about like complete thing, do thing like
• 50:37
  whatever that might be. There's some motivation to like have objects on screen align
• 50:43
  in a particular way to produce outcome on screen right, and how exactly it
• 50:46
  looks kind of doesn't matter if we're speaking generally about what the experience is of
• 50:52
  just doing it right right. So it might be things like harvesting corn or
• 50:54
  building a house. It might be things like wielding a saber to slice a
• 50:59
  bunch of people in half. The point is that you accomplish task A by
• 51:02
  doing task or accomplished task B by doing task an. It's just kind of
• 51:07
  the gist of it, right, So, no matter how realistic the graphics
• 51:10
  become, we understand intuitively that it's not real. We are actually practicing those
• 51:15
  behaviors in those contexts. Right. If we could learn these behaviors effectively from
• 51:20
  games, then we should. I should be able to competently handle a gun,
• 51:22
  a sword, a boomerang, a grappling hook, an alien laser sniper,
• 51:27
  and probably fly a plane. And I can confidently tell you that I
• 51:30
  can do none of those things with any amount of competence. Have you tried,
• 51:34
  though, just the alien laser snipers? Oh yeah, yeah. I
• 51:38
  should also be desensitive to violence. But on the contrary, as I mentioned,
• 51:42
  I'm a pacifist and I've gotten to the point where real blood actually makes
• 51:45
  me nauseous and queasy. And I hate watching anything performed or on screen when
• 51:51
  I know or believe that someone is actually getting hurt. I don't. I
• 51:54
  don't want to watch it. Like I can't. I can't sit down and
• 51:57
  see it. I have trouble watching the news for this reason times, like
• 52:00
  I just I can't emotionally handle the site of harm actually happening to people.
• 52:06
  I don't think it's funny. I don't think it's fun I don't have that
• 52:08
  gross like not not gross. I mean like I'm not belittling people here,
• 52:13
  but I don't have that impulse to look at gross things. I fure very
• 52:17
  very traumatical, not not very traumatic in the sense that, like other people
• 52:21
  have experienced trauma, but like I just I avoid it so much because it
• 52:24
  makes me feel so horrible. It's super aversive for you. I get it.
• 52:28
  I think the only like you know, I never understood like people popping,
• 52:30
  but like one thing I do understand is like if somebody has like a
• 52:34
  dilated pour of winer, I'm like, Okay, that looks satisfying, that
• 52:36
  looks really good. But like other dow, I'm like, yeah, I
• 52:37
  don't like gross things either. I'm just like it. Like I remember watching
• 52:40
  Fear Factor. Yeah, I would gag when people would like start gagging on
• 52:44
  screen, Like I don't like watching people here, but like even people being
• 52:45
  uncomfortable. Oh no, I don't like that, so but I will.
• 52:50
  I would quite happily like just shred the crap out of like you know,
• 52:53
  use my sword to dismember some alien, split them, you know head detail
• 52:58
  and yeah, and let their guts spill all of the ground and stographic doesn't
• 53:02
  bother me in the side, it is because like I know, there's a
• 53:05
  difference between that and reality, right, like right, not a big stretch.
• 53:09
  That's a very easy thing to do. I think to your point too,
• 53:13
  like practicing the actual behaviors or even witnessing them in their actual setting are
• 53:16
  much more effective than forming those new habits. Like so, you're not going
• 53:20
  to get that from sitting and playing a video game where you're just pressing buttons
• 53:22
  unless it's like a simulator, right, And we in simulators are very different,
• 53:25
  like when you have like flight simulators that are designed to be like a
• 53:29
  particular context and in a safe space, But simply pressing buttons in a simulation
• 53:32
  are not the same thing, particularly when the motive is actually to solve a
• 53:37
  puzzle and not just kill people, right, Like, that's it's a very
• 53:40
  different kind of experience, right exactly. Further, if the theme of the
• 53:45
  video games influences behavior, then we should have had an explosion and people people
• 53:50
  starting to work on farms after Farmville came out, and actually we have had
• 53:53
  a we're struggling to find enough farmers to feed all the people in our country
• 53:58
  and in the world. You know. In the day, Pennanteller did this
• 54:00
  really interesting bit on their TV show Bullshit, and when they gave a ten
• 54:04
  year old an assault rifle to shoot it targets, the kid pulled the trigger
• 54:07
  once, put the gun down and started crying. The poor kid. Also,
• 54:10
  in response to politicians assinine claims and calls to create realistic games, Pedanteller
• 54:16
  designed a game to reflect reality, which was just an uneventful, real time
• 54:21
  simulation of an eight hour drive through the empty desert between Tucson, Arizona,
• 54:24
  and Las Vegas. Sounds like a blast. Yeah, that's the actual the
• 54:30
  whole game. You just sit on a bus drive from point point. That's
• 54:34
  great. It takes eight hours. They just have the landscape rolling slowly by
• 54:37
  as you go. It's fantastic. I love that. Yeah, that's a
• 54:39
  realistic video game. And I actually think that they've they've like updated the versions
• 54:45
  of like new graphics and stuff. I think there's actually some Easter eggs and
• 54:47
  like some of the songs that will play but anyway on the radio that is.
• 54:51
  But yeah. And I forgot to mention when we were talking about this
• 54:52
  kid on that episode that they did that this was a kid who loved playing
• 54:57
  like first person shooter games. Yeah, And the moment this kid actually held
• 55:00
  a gun, he was like, I don't want anything to do with this.
• 55:02
  This is terrifying, right, and like, yeah, it did not
• 55:05
  have the intended effect of turning him into some monster, like it hasn't for
• 55:08
  the millions of other people who also play violent video games. Right. I
• 55:13
  have not gone to join a ninja clan to fight a rival ninja clan in
• 55:17
  internal combat to protect the realm I have. That's not happened yet. I
• 55:21
  don't believe it. I see your membership card in the back of Oh yeah,
• 55:23
  yeah, yeah, I'm hanging out with sub zero because I like the
• 55:25
  color blue. Well, we should probably take a moment to recap our thoughts
• 55:30
  on this and first suffer through some more ads. All right, what are
• 55:43
  I take homes here? What have we learned about violent and violent video games?
• 55:46
  Really? The main take on point of all of this is the research
• 55:50
  in our understanding of behavior pretty clearly show there's no correlation between violent behavior and
• 55:54
  violent video games. Like we just don't see that. And if there is
• 55:57
  one, it is that there is some evidence people playing violent video games are
• 56:00
  less likely to engage in violent behavior less likely. But what does predict violent
• 56:06
  behavior is trauma, mental health issues, being a victim or a participant of
• 56:10
  or in aggressive behaviors. Like that's that's what you're going to see a lot
• 56:14
  of those kind of predictors, those factors. But going after video games as
• 56:17
  a boogeyman does not lead to meaningful outcomes to protect kids. It actually takes
• 56:22
  attention away and resources away from factors that are causing violent behavior. It takes
• 56:25
  away research funds that are like is now people are going, okay, like
• 56:29
  we've got a research just to prove that you're wrong, because this is very
• 56:31
  clearly wrong. And that's just more money that can be spent on doing like
• 56:34
  research that would be helpful for someone. Yeah, So rather than doing research
• 56:37
  on what does lead to violence and understanding those factors, we are spending all
• 56:40
  the time and wasting time on that research that shows the video games simply do
• 56:45
  not lead to violence time and time again, study after study. I mean,
• 56:51
  there is no other take on point for me other than like, violent
• 56:53
  behavior is not caused by video games hands down definitively. Yeah, I mean
• 56:59
  things, this world will look very different and video games could be that influential.
• 57:02
  I mean, honestly, it kind of goes back to like and we
• 57:06
  talked about subliminal messaging in a very early episode a long time ago, and
• 57:09
  subliminal messages like they just like if they work, the effect is so so
• 57:15
  tiny it's almost negligible, if not completely negligible, And like you do get
• 57:21
  that little bit of a priming effect sometimes, but like the millions of dollars
• 57:24
  that you would have tried to spend on advertisements to like get subliminal messages of
• 57:28
  cost, like your return on investment is basically nothing. You just you just
• 57:30
  threw money out right down the toilet and flush it away. And like you
• 57:35
  can't get it with subliminal messaging. But you also don't even get it with
• 57:37
  this like explicit sort of graphic depiction because that's just not how behavior works.
• 57:43
  We don't learn that well from like these total mock scenarios that are just sort
• 57:49
  of puzzle solving. Now you might get much better at solving puzzles, sure,
• 57:52
  and probably like figuring out how like designers are going to align task be
• 57:59
  to be complete did by finishing task A first, and you'll start to like
• 58:02
  look for those patterns and how those puzzles are arranged, and you'll probably get
• 58:06
  really good at that. Maybe video game players are better at escape rooms.
• 58:09
  I would love to see if someone's done that study, right, But it's
• 58:13
  just like the actual behaviors are engaging in do not. They're not close enough.
• 58:17
  They don't simulate the scenario close enough to make it have even behavioral sense
• 58:22
  that you would have those outcomes. And then the research bears that out too.
• 58:25
  You know, we can go into anecdotal reports about like growing up in
• 58:30
  a video game generation and like the rise of like mass shootings in the last
• 58:34
  few years. Like we can totally do that and you could see that,
• 58:37
  you know, like our generation of people and like the generation of kids that
• 58:40
  kind of grew up from the eighties till now grew up with video games as
• 58:44
  being kind of this like the omnipresent activity that has existed. Now you're not
• 58:49
  seeing me go out and eat a bunch of yellow dots, and you're not
• 58:51
  seeing me go join ninja clan, and we've already kind of established that,
• 58:52
  right, But the truth is it's like you're finding the countries that spend more
• 58:58
  time and more money on video games have less violent crime. So there's like
• 59:01
  this negative correlation. So like it's the polar opposite of what people are saying
• 59:06
  about video games. In the United States, we are spending less money and
• 59:08
  having more violent crimes occur than any other country at this point in time.
• 59:13
  So I just it just it's one of those things where it's I wish people
• 59:15
  would just read like I wish like any of these people that were like making
• 59:19
  these claims would just read sure and they would find these answers. Yeah,
• 59:22
  all right, Well I think we could probably, as I said at the
• 59:25
  beginning of this, we could talk about video games all day and that would
• 59:29
  be fun. But we're going to go ahead and I think close it out
• 59:31
  now because our objective here was to explore the research between violence and video games,
• 59:37
  and I think that we're pretty conclusively found that video games do not cause
• 59:40
  violence. And as I said, I would be compelled by sufficient evidence,
• 59:44
  and it just doesn't exist. So like until that evidence is there, and
• 59:47
  it's gonna it has a lot of other evidence to overcome. At this point,
• 59:52
  I'm going to be on the side of where the science says, which
• 59:53
  is that video games do not cause violence. And we like to give a
• 59:57
  recommendations. We like to recommend some things. Sometimes those recommendations are on theme.
• 1:00:01
  Sometimes they're completely unrelated. Mine's going to be completely unrelated. But before
• 1:00:06
  we get into those recommendations, I would like to say that if you liked
• 1:00:09
  what you heard today, you would like to support the show. You can
• 1:00:12
  join us on Patreon, pick up some merch like and subscribe, leave rating
• 1:00:15
  and review of People who join us on Patreon get these extra perks. They
• 1:00:17
  get early release of episodes, they get add free episodes, they get behind
• 1:00:22
  the scenes content, more open to suggestions of new things people like to see.
• 1:00:25
  If we get enough patrons, we're going to hang out with you all,
• 1:00:29
  maybe we would do something where you get to sort of sit in while
• 1:00:30
  we're recording and you can sort of see the sausage being made. If that's
• 1:00:34
  a thing you're into, Yeah, and that might be a fun thing that
• 1:00:36
  we do for patrons. Who knows. We're up to suggestions, but you
• 1:00:38
  feel free to join us over there. Thanks to the people who have already
• 1:00:43
  supported us on Patreon. Mike m Megan Layla, Mike t Justin, Kim,
• 1:00:47
  Josh, The Daily BA, Brad, Stephanie, Olivia, and Brian.
• 1:00:52
  Thank you all so much for being who you are and helping us do
• 1:00:54
  what we do. Absolutely you are why we do what we do. And
• 1:00:59
  then I've always got to say thank you to my team. Editing and production
• 1:01:01
  by Justin Greenhouse, writing, fact checking by Shane Jess and myself. And
• 1:01:06
  now let's get to some recommendations. Recommendations, all right, So my recommendation
• 1:01:19
  is very on brand now because of this game, I have gone and bought
• 1:01:22
  a sword in the Shield and I have traveled to High Rule. This video
• 1:01:24
  game is called Zelda, a Link to the Past. It is a Super
• 1:01:28
  Nintendo game. It is not Tears of the Kingdom, which is a new
• 1:01:30
  one. It is a Super Nintendo game and I never played it when I
• 1:01:32
  was a kid, but I've been playing it lately and it's really good.
• 1:01:37
  It's like one of the best video games I've ever played. It's so much
• 1:01:39
  fun. There's so much to it. Like if you're not familiar with it,
• 1:01:43
  there's like this really cool thing where you feel like you beat the game
• 1:01:45
  and you beat the last Boston and it goes like, oh, there's the
• 1:01:47
  dark world and there's like three quarters more of a game. Yeah, like
• 1:01:52
  hidden in this game. It's so good and it's like really complicated and a
• 1:01:55
  lot of fun in a very expansive world. So I strongly recommended it.
• 1:02:00
  Fun. Yeah, I love that game when I was a kid. Okay,
• 1:02:02
  I'm recommending as I'm want to do. I Actually I'm surprised it took
• 1:02:06
  me this long, but I'm recommending the Guardians of the Galaxy Volume three movie.
• 1:02:10
  Excellent, excellent. So my experience of this was I loved Guardians of
• 1:02:15
  the Galaxy. The first one I was like game changer, this is like
• 1:02:17
  the new direction. Volume two I was kind of I was a little more
• 1:02:21
  lukewarm on I didn't love it quite as much. It was like, had
• 1:02:23
  a lot of fun stuff, but there are some things that I sort of
• 1:02:27
  like, hey, I don't know about all of that, but it was
• 1:02:29
  still good, Like it was still you know, perfectly great as a movie
• 1:02:31
  goes. Yeah, I just liked the first one first. The third one,
• 1:02:35
  Wow, does it go in a different direction. And it is just
• 1:02:37
  I don't know how to really just describe it, except it's just it's so
• 1:02:40
  different. It's so creative. It's so I don't know, they handled it
• 1:02:45
  so well. I loved how they wrote the story. I loved how the
• 1:02:49
  adventure played out. But it really felt like, let's see what else we
• 1:02:52
  can do with these characters beyond just put them in these situations where they're like,
• 1:02:55
  oh, now we're going to come together and team up and put some
• 1:02:59
  people out. It's actually more like, well, let's rally behind this other
• 1:03:04
  cause that's kind of incidental to the fate of the universe, but does happen
• 1:03:07
  to tie in with sort of the big bad And you know, I don't
• 1:03:09
  know. I just thought it was it was such a unique, refreshing take
• 1:03:14
  on the story, and I thought it was very well done. Love the
• 1:03:16
  characters, love the development. Yeah, just really cool. So Guardians the
• 1:03:20
  Galaxy Volume three awesome. Yeah, it was a perfect end to that trilogy.
• 1:03:24
  And you know, the Christmas Special was a lot of fun too,
• 1:03:27
  and you saw glimpses of like leading into like the fun of this story.
• 1:03:31
  Yeah, like you could kind of see, like, you know, it's
• 1:03:34
  like, oh, this is what the Guardians are about, like their dysfunctional
• 1:03:36
  family, and they work really well together when they decide to work really well
• 1:03:38
  together. Yeah. I think that's the thing. You can tell they all
• 1:03:40
  really care about each other, right, and that was like a really powerful
• 1:03:44
  thing. Where the Avengers are like just like a team of people that were
• 1:03:46
  like big egos, right, that's kind of what you find. But Guardians
• 1:03:49
  is like they love each other. They love each other and they care about
• 1:03:52
  each other, and they would go to the ends of the universe to do
• 1:03:53
  something to say of just one of them, And I thought that was really
• 1:03:57
  powerful. Yeah, so that's my recadation. I love it. I think
• 1:04:00
  that is all we have for this episode. Anything else for you before we
• 1:04:03
  close out? No, I think that covers it perfect. This is Abraham
• 1:04:05
  and this is a shame. We're out. See you. You've been listening
• 1:04:10
  to Why We do what we do. You can learn more about this and
• 1:04:13
  other episodes by going to WWDWWD podcast dot com. Thanks for listening, and
• 1:04:19
  we hope you have an awesome day.