A recent interesting article I read (there's a link to it on the wikipedia
entry for Doom), actually stated that the corrilation between committing
violent crimes and playing violent games was not correct.
it was true that many sterriotypical psychotic personalities tend to play
games that require little interraction with other people since as
psychopaths they find personal interaction difficult, and thus played fps
and other games alone, however the proportion of none psychopaths who played
such games was far higher and there wasn't over all a corriilation found.
The big one was one of the more serious shootings that happened in an
American school in the 1990's, where it was discovered the offender had
played doom and it was believed that he'd created doom level mods to
resembles the insides of the school where he committed the shootings and
mods of the doom monsters to resemble his class mates. This however was a
media fabrication, and though he had! created doom levels (like literally
thousands of other people), none were of his school.
To be honest these days only the ill informed and naive tend to believe that
someone who plays a game about shooting people or fighting with melee
weapons would do the same in real life. The worry tends to be that playing
violent games increases anger and aggression, though i've seen a lot of
conflicting evidence on this.
Again though this is why I personally tend to believe that people treat the
subject a little too simply. I grew up playing Golden axe, double dragon (I
was about 6 or 7 when playing those two games), Ninja turtles arcade game,
Simpsons beatemup, final fight, street fighter 2, the Mortal combat series,
killer instinct, primal rage and slightly later on soul blade, and Eternal
champions streets of rage (though I was 17 before I got my mega drive).
My parents only ever banned me from playing games like Viz with a little
mild adult humour ( about the same level of jokes as the naked gun films),
when i was 9 or 10, and a couple of years later they relaxed on that since
they'd explained to me enough about adult relations for those, though I
think anything actually dodgy they'd have had a problem with. Though they
were always of the opinion that being up front helped, ---- indeed I only
developed genophobia in my late teens.
I thus grew up playing vaguely violent games at a young age, and I'm now at
least mostly a pasifist! I think I passed the age of "I saw it on tv so I'll
do it" when I was about 3! indeed I have a very early memory of my mum
patiently explaining to me that the show mallet's mallet used a soft rubber
mallet to bonk people on the head with so it didn't hurt, and thus I didn't
attempt to replicate this with a toy mallet :D.
This is why I said the simplistic, mechanistic monkey see monkey do idea
just seems unreasonable to apply to adult humans.
Whether however violent intentions or games that exist just! for their
violent spectacle are okay is another matter as I said.
Beware the Grue!
Dark.
---
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