Sex Games and Second Life Players :: Should you care about sex in video games?

I totally disagree with your conclusion that videogames train children to enjoy killing. It has been explored, poked, disected and tested to death by researchers all over the world. Each with varied and inconclusive findings. While no media is safe whether games, television or other. Laying blame on one media without looking at the others is kind of one sided. I've been playing video games for 39 years and have yet had an urge to kill. Actually I'm kind of exhausted with it after 30 minutes and often opt to play a sports or casual game like tennis or even bowling. As do the others I've talked to. If anyone is to blame, it should be those parents who didn't take the step to research a game before buying it, talking to their children about why they can't have a certain game or even having the courage to tell the kid "no."

According to the National Institute on Media and Family in 2008, Parents have received an incomplete for their lack of knowledge or willingness to observe the rating systems which have been posted on the backs and fronts of every game cartridge. Consoles have parental controls in which they can password the console to only play a certain rated game.

But then again. Here's the problem. On several occassions I've been in stores that sold video games, where I personally witnessed the clerk telling the parent that the game was not for children and the parent told them to shut up because that's what their child wanted. (I.E., gave it to them to stop the begging and tantrums.)

Now sex. Yes its rather disturbing that sex sells. But look at the other media. Look at the cartoons your children watch. Doesn't that female character look a bit too robust? The male characters are always lusting after them? Like say the cartoon BRATS? Or Family Guy? What about reality television shows bringing out the worst in the contestant or subjecting them to inhumane and sometimes degrading circumstances that are becoming acceptable to the public like Scare Tactics. What about the music everyone listens to? My friend didn't know what "My Lumps" or "Let's get retarded in here" by the Black Eye Peas really meant until she read the lyrics. But its too late because her 10 year old knows the words by heart and actually desires to dress like Fergie.

So ... to blame one and not the other and to not look at both sides of the coin is stereotyping. Look beyond the popular bulletins you find on google and wikipedia. Look at the statistics for yourself not what the sites say. Find the source and derive your conclusions based on cold hard facts not inconclusive findings.

"Behavioral Psychology" is what i mean here in my conclusion.. On that note let me explain you few fact and findings..


In July, 2000, at a bipartisan, bicameral Capital Hill conference in Washington, DC, the AMA, the APA, the AAP and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) issued a joint statement saying that "viewing entertainment violence can lead to increases in aggressive attitudes, values and behavior, particularly in children. Its effects are measurable and long-lasting. Moreover, prolonged viewing of media violence can lead to emotional desensitization toward violence in real life ...


Dr. Brandon Centerwall, professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington, has summarized the overwhelming nature of this body of evidence. His research demonstrates that, anywhere in the world that television is introduced, within 15 years the murder rate will double. (And across 15 years the murder rate will significantly underrepresent the problem because medical technology developments will be saving ever more lives each year.)

Centerwall concludes that if television had never been introduced in the United States, then there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults. Overall violent crime would be half what it is. He notes that the net effect of television has been to increase the aggressive predisposition of approximately 8% of the population, which is all that is required to double the murder rate. Statistically speaking 8% is a very small increase. Anything less than 5% is not even considered to be statistically significant. But in human terms, the impact of doubling the homicide rate is enormous.

There are many psychological and sociological processes through which media violence turns into violent crime. From a developmental standpoint we know that around the age of 18 months a child is able to discern what is on television and movies, but the part of their mind that permits them to organize where information came from does not fully develop until they are between ages five and seven. Thus, when a young child sees someone shot, stabbed, beaten, degraded, abused, or murdered on the screen, for them it is as though it were actually happening. They are not capable of discerning the difference, and the effect is as though they were children of a war zone, seeing death and destruction all around them, and accepting violence as a way of life.

From a Pavlovian, or classical conditioning standpoint, there is what Dave Grossman has termed the Reverse-Clockwork Orange process. In the movie, Clockwork Orange, a sociopath is injected with a drug that makes him nauseous and he then is exposed to violent movies. Eventually he comes to associate all violence with nausea and is somewhat "cured" of his sociopathy. In real life millions of children are exposed to thousands of repetitions of media violence, which they learn to associate with not nausea but pleasure in the form of their favorite candy, soda, and a girlfriend's perfume as they sit and laugh and cheer at vivid depictions of human death and suffering.

Finally, from a behavioral perspective, the children of the industrialized world participate in countless repetitions of point-and-shoot video and arcade games that provide the motor skills necessary to turn killing into an automatic, reflexive, "kerplunk" response, but without the stimulus discriminators and the safeguard of discipline found in military and law enforcement conditioning.

Thus, from a psychological standpoint, the children of the industrialized world are being brutalized and traumatized at a young age, and then through violent video games (operant conditioning) and media violence (classical conditioning) they are learning to kill and learning to like it. The result of this interactive process is a worldwide virus of violence.

A hundred things can convince the forebrain to take gun in hand and go to a certain point: poverty, drugs, gangs, leaders, radical politics and the social learning of violence in the media. But traditionally all of these influences have slammed into the resistance that a frightened, angry human being confronts in the midbrain. With the exception of violent sociopaths (who, by definition, do not have this resistance) the vast, vast majority of circumstances are not sufficient to overcome this midbrain safety net. But, if you are conditioned to overcome these midbrain inhibitions, then you are a walking time bomb, a pseudo-sociopath, just waiting for the random factors of social interaction and forebrain rationalization to put you in the wrong place at the wrong time.



Book to Review: Click below link to read what other have to say...

Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call To Action Against TV, Movie & Video Game Violence -- by Lt. Col. David Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano, New York: Crown Publishers(by Dave Grossman, Dave Grossman, Gloria DeGaetano, Gloria DeGaetano)

http://american_almanac.tripod.com/gross310.htm

http://www.killology.com/art_beh_conditioning.htm

That was a very interesting video clipping. I have played GTA and I have frankly loved it, and I can't wait to play the new one! However, yes, children should be carefully administrated both, television/films and video games in this case.
But, anyway, this Second Life business sounds really shady and I totally think it should not be out there in this way at all. Pedophilia is and should be completely ostracised in all spheres.

Exactly Johnnyg. With open sites like Second Life, World of Warcraft and any other online gaming platforms. You're going to have what we already experience in real life ... people. Except online people are not afraid or as courteous as they may or may not be in real life.

But back to the topic, repeatedly the findings or inconclusive. According to an article on APA.org (which you find the story here: http://www.apa.org/science/psa/sb-anderson.html) in the findings of Craig A. Anderson PhD, a professor and director at the Center for the Study of Violence, wrote:

"Two features of video games fuel renewed interest by researchers, public policy makers, and the general public. First, the active role required by video games is a double-edged sword. It helps educational video games be excellent teaching tools for motivational and learning process reasons. But, it also may make violent video games even more hazardous than violent television or cinema. Second, the arrival of a new generation of ultraviolent video games beginning in the early 1990s and continuing unabated to the present resulted in large numbers of children and youths actively participating in entertainment violence that went way beyond anything available to them on television or in movies. Recent video games reward players for killing innocent bystanders, police, and prostitutes, using a wide range of weapons including guns, knives, flame throwers, swords, baseball bats, cars, hands, and feet. Some include cut scenes (i.e., brief movie clips supposedly designed to move the story forward) of strippers. In some, the player assumes the role of hero, whereas in others the player is a criminal.

The new debate frequently generates more heat than light. Many criticisms are simply recycled myths from earlier media violence debates, myths that have been repeatedly debunked on theoretical and empirical grounds. Valid weaknesses have also been identified (and often corrected) by media violence researchers themselves. Although the violent video game literature is still relatively new and small, we have learned a lot about their effects and have successfully answered several key questions."

Which I do agree most of the theories recycled findings and myths found on the internet, written by "expert" authors and the like. Many of the studies don't seem to factor in the child's home, school or personal life is like. Much like ghost or witch hunting if you go in looking for them your going to find them whether they actually exist or not because you will already be determine that you found one. If you go in with determination that the child's violent behavior is linked to a videogame you tend to ignore the many other possibilities that have added to the child's violent behavior. Face it, some children are just plain bad from the beginning. I used to babysit a 7 year old boy for a friend, who I know does not own any gaming console and never lets her child watch anything other than the Disney channel, loves to beat on people. There isn't a babysitting session with the boy who loves the backyardagains and veggie tales that I didn't go home with bruises or a blackeye. In the same instance I've also babysat a little 10 year old girl and 8 year old boy who both game and have played games like Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Metal Gear Solid and Pokemon. The two were well behaved. In fact after 30 minutes of gaming they often find a book to read, play a board game together, pretend to movie stars or simply went outside to play. The blame game is a double-edged sword as mentioned in the article written on APA.org and it also depends on the personality of the child to begin with.

But what I was stating is that children in general who are gaining access these mature rated games have access because the parent (not the gaming industry and not the government) allowed them to have it simply because they themselves did not take the time to ask the child why they wanted it (alot of times its because the picture on the cover looked cool rather than the content of the game) and researched the game before telling the child why they should or should not have it. Alot of times the child will be disappointed but together they can find an alternative and more appopriate game which will yield a better result than a resounding "No. Because I said so."

People shouldn't be quick to blame the entire gaming industry without looking at all the factors involved. It's bad enough gamers are stereotyped, virtually castrated and left trying to defend their rights to play a game than to have the game set to their maturity level banned because people believe only children play video games. There are more adults these days playing the games which is why the violence level is probably kicked up a notch or two and if anything have a separate store or section strictly for adult gamers instead of mixing all genres together.

Perhaps that would be a way to handle the situation. But to blame an entire gaming nation over content? That's silly.