Study: video games desensitize people to violence

But violent games make you more mature!

The key thing to remember here is that the "real violence" they show is just movie/TV violence, which everybody knows is fake. I'm sure that has a large effect on how the results turned out. They should have used another group that watched violent TV/movie clips throughout, or better yet, used clips of actual violence or war footage.

What?! Who says? Say it again and I'll give you a beating.

Good! One less thing to wreck one's day!

But no real incidence of violence was actually involved, making the whole business meaningless. You can desensitize people to all sorts of simulated things. Does it change their behavior when the real thing is encountered?

I've watched people beaten and murdered on TV for over forty years now. Yet something so simple as one person slapping another in real life still gets my attention.

Without desensitizing, it would be impossible to play the games. Every gunshot would be as shocking as the first and you'd be unable to take action. This is vital to real life as well. Try working in a noisy industrial plant if you cannot become accustomed to the noise. Unless you wear ear protection so extreme as to simulate deafness, you'll be reduced to a nervous wreck if you cannot become less sensitive to to the mechanical violence around you.

I'm glad I'm desensitized to violence. That way, when shit does go down, such as an accident, I'm not standing around going "Oh my God, Oh my God" and instead actually stepping up to do something about it.

On that note, there is a very obvious line between being desensitized and being heartless. Just because someone doesn't bat an eye at a tragedy, it doesn't mean they don't care.

~HotShotX

And the Duh of the day goes to Iowa State. I wonder how much money was wasted on this study. Of course these things desensitive us to violence. But people are going to read this and say "Oh it makes them kill things." I've played dozens of games involving killing others, and I can't even kill insects, much less bigger things.
And then there's people like my mother who can't even watch me play Shadow of the Colossus because she's afraid my character will fall and die. Oh, them crazy old folks.

(21 years old, btw)

Now this makes much more sense then saying video games causes violence.

However, I do wonder just how far the desensitization goes. I mean, we all know we're used to gory images on TV but, then again, it's either A.) Not real or B.) Detached from our everyday lives.

I wonder how someone who is desensitized this way would react to the same scene of violence that takes place right in front of them. Real violence has real consequences.

Only recently have games had the graphics to really make it seem real. Shooting polygonal models or pixel based aliens wasnt that big a deal.

I will kill whoever made this study! RAARGGH!

Sounds about right. One time after playing 5 consecutive hours of Katamari Damacy, I got in my car to go grab some food. The strangest thing happened when i got into town. Everytime i saw a pedestrian crossing the sidewalk, a person riding in a bicycle, or a group of school children, I would edge my car into their direction hoping to stick them to my wheels. Long story short, I stopped playing Katamari Damacy in favor of less mind warping games such as Postal 2, Doom 3, Prey, and Sesame Street Killer.

I buy that violent media could raise one's tolerance of the idea of violence, but I don't see why that would automatically be considered to be a bad thing.

What benefit does being shaken by violent acts offer? Isn't it best to be able to rationally think about violence instead of being lead by blind terror?

Ludology at work!

So now that begs the question: Is being freaked out at violence a good thing or a bad thing?

Again no serious conclusions can be drawn from that either except how you DEAL with a violent situation and I would make the argument that being desinsitized is the better option.

Where's the news in this? I remember when I was younger playing Mortal Kombat 3 and 4 in the Arcades. Initially, seeing a Fatality would make me cringe a little inside and my heart would beat harder. A funny thing happened though, I got accustomed to it, really accustomed. I live in the Caribbean and I am used to sunny climate but if I go to Alaska to live, I will get used to the cold over time. Why people get paid to do these studies is beyond me. As always, we also have to look at the game being played; I think “subjecting” people to Street Fighter and manhunt will bring some differing results, don’t you think?

I'm not desensitized to real life violence at all, despite playing Fallout, Killer Instinct, Resident Evil games, etc. Once just listening to people discuss suicide made me pass out. And thinking about real life violent actions disturbs me a bit.

Since when was violence a bad thing? Could have sworn all we did since the dawn of man was kill and terrorize.

Me? I'm all for violence. The more the better.

It isn't a matter of the medium but user. Violent videogames in the purest sense is not harmful as say illicit drugs. With drugs, nobody should use it at all, there isn't a question of how fit a person is to use it. With games, what should be looked at are the people. Some people just cannot handle what they see, or the quantity in which they consume the violence. Another thing to look at again, is what the game is exactly. Mortal Kombat on the Atari 2600 and Mortal Kombat Armageddon will have different effects on people, no?

I'm sure professional soldiers and surgeons would be considered "desensitized" to violence. Does that make them evil?

Of course soldiers aren't necessarily evil because of this desensization but psychologically they will be different as are you and I when we continue to kill people in Metal Gear Solid and get headshot after headshot in Unreal. For the purpose of illustration: If I bring my grandmother in the room while I play May Payne and she sees me mowing men down with an Uzi, she’ll want to know what all that is about. It may shock her, but it’s really nothing compared to other stuff in videogames but more importantly, it’s second nature to us and these subtle things show how videogames do, in fact alter our psyche not unlike how listening to Rap music makes you more likely to curse or accustomed to if enough that if someone curses you, you won’t be that appalled and in the heat of the moment, you’ll let a few words fly out that you wouldn’t say otherwise.

You present the study innaccurately... as do the psychologists themselves. Videogames, a 2 dimensional representation of violence, desensitized you to violent videos, a 2 dimensional representation of violence.

This says absolutely nothing about the effect videogames have on your reaction to actual experienced violence, which engages many more senses than video can.

When I play a game with weapons I'm not thinking in the sense of violence, I'm just thinking that these are the tools the game is giving me to complete my tasks. If they replaced a grenade with a squishy ball, I might feel like it doesn't really make sense that my character defeats his enemies with a dog toy, but I wouldn't play the game any differently nor would it make me feel any less violent.

"We're used to gory images on TV but, then again, it's either A.) Not real or B.) Detached from our everyday lives."

In the world we live in that's not necessarily true anymore.What about September 11th? PLEASE do not let this get into a political debate about who is right over there, but I have relatives living in Israel. And my parents watch the news all day long, and unless there is some major devolopment, all they talk about is how people on this side are dying and how people on the other side are dying and I just don't get the point of watching this sad news if there is nothing you can do to help. So even if there is violence around you, unless there is something you can do about it, it's best, not necessarily to ignore it, but to not let it get to you, and I feel that is an often understated positive effect of the desensitization caused by violent videogames.

Oblivion and Halo 2 are my second and third games ever, I played mature games non-stop. Yet a lot of time I feel bad after killing an insect that wasn't bothering me.

I wonder if there's a connection, they should do a study!

Heh. DNF. Funny.

Is this really a bad thing? Desensitized people are far more calm in the face of an emergency whereas someone who was sheltered their whole life would lock up when any form of chaotic situation were to occurr. Desensitized people make excellent surgeons and EMTs. Overly sensitive people do not.

I've played videogames for most of my life, and real life violence still freaks me out.

I've never been in a situation where I needed to do something about it, but I've seen limbless people lying in the street dead after an accident and I still can't get it out of my head.

dunno what would happen if I actually needed to do something about it though

Look I've been saying this for years and im not a psyche major. It's true just face it...I've been playing violent video games for a long time. Honestly when I hear about people dying or see people dying it doesn't face me. Now here's a thinker...what if the government knows this? Imagine for a second that the government has known this for a long time now. Who are the people out there in Iraq right now fighting the war? People our age...we've got 20 year olds out there killing people that probaly use to play video games. Is anyone catching up yet? I know it seems far fetched but imagine using games to desensitize kids to violence. It's essentially like turning use into killing machines. You can ask any special forces operative what's the one thing that will get you killed in a firefight...hesitation. By desensitizing people like me to violence I won't hesitate in a firefight because I'm not afraid of the consequences. Just sit down and think about that for a minute. In fact I think you should start a thread on this Joystiq.

Video games dont desensitize me and I play many m-rated viloent and bloody games and i watch violent movies but I am not desensitized. If anyone has seen the hills have eyes where they girls are being raped i had to shut it off. I never finished watching it because no matter how many bad videogames i play i will never watch that and think nothing and not care.

lol! wtf did they bother doing a research WITHOUT research xD

If you enter a totally dark basement, you wouldnt see shit..right? but if you stay in the basement, ill bet you will adapt.
On the other hand, if you enter your house while its sunny outside..you wouldnt go blind once u got inside, would you? Obvious, i know

btw, not one research about "gaming=violence" has to date been approved. why? to few ppl participated in the research,bad quality of the research methods/not accurate enough, or time from start to end of research not long enough.

sry for this stupid post, but i have had enough of this violence in games BS!

So instead of going outside to kill someone,wait for the ambulance, steal their car and burn over their dead asses..i figured i could blow off some steam by posting in here:P

This is absolute garbage. Absolute, complete and utter codswallop. I'm not even entirely sure what that means, I just like saying codswallop. Say it with me - cods-wallop.

At any rate, I see nothing in this research that states (much less proves) that video game violence desensitizes you to real violence - just violent imagery in movies and video games.

Which is true. I watched Saw II and Hostel not long ago - both some of the goriest movies to come out as of late. And I laughed. I saw a guy's ankles slashed with a scalpel, an electric screwdriver drilling into his legs, and a woman's face taken to with a blowtorch. It was hilarious.

Back in the day, when the original Half Life was state of the art, I used to revel in beating the scientists to death, and then pounding on their lifeless corpses until they exploded into bloody chunks, and then hack at the chunks until they exploded into smaller chunks.

Which all sounds horrible to non-gamers, I'm sure. It's the kind of statement that, if made by a 12-year-old boy, would send the press into overdrive and probably give Hillary Clinton and Jack Thompson a thundering, simultaneous orgasm which would send shockwaves throughout our solar system, likely decimating all but the largest of its planets - Jupiter.. Saturn, perhaps.

But there's one fundamental premise that people like these can't seem to grasp. IT'S. NOT. REAL.

That's really all there is to it. Kids as young as 5 know full well the difference between fantasy and reality. And in my mind, books, movies and video games don't blur that line - they accentuate it. It's only things like mental disorders, drugs, alcohol and medication that cause your mind to lose its grip on reality - video games, on the other hand, hone it, so that when something is fake, it's instantly recognized as such. Which is why violence in games and movies doesn't faze us.

Show me REAL violence, however, and that's an entirely different story. Show me a drink-driving ad where a child gets hit by a car, and I'll giggle like a schoolgirl. Show me police footage of the same instance happening in the REAL WORLD, and I can literally feel the air exiting my lungs and my heart being squeezed by the chilling reality of it all.

We had a kitten that got run over a month or so back. It was dark, and being the man of the family, I had to go out onto the road to check that it was ours. I just stood there, staring down at the poor creature's lifeless form... thinking how different he looked, and hoping against hope that this meant it wasn't our kitty... But it was. I cried that night, and at least once a day for the week after it happened.

And this is a CAT we're talking about. Had it been a game, I probably would've kicked the body around to check out the ragdoll physics, laughed at the way it's head clipped through the road surface, and then found some way of dispatching the body in the most gruesome way possible - preferably with some form of explosive, if the game allowed for such.

So don't tell ME that games desensitize you to real world violence.

We know the difference between the real world and the escapist worlds we vanish into for a few hours a day. It's people who don't play games that we should be afraid of. The people with REAL knives, and REAL guns. People with ulterior motives, who are quite happy to exploit the concerns parents by trying to villify a harmless pastime of ours for the sake of a few votes and a slightly more bloated paycheck.

I guess they should be glad we ARE desensitized to real life violence... It may well only be our instinctive fear of blood that keeps many of us from taking our Half Life crowbars and paying Jack Thompson a visit.

Who said that being desensitized to violence is a bad thing? It doesn't mean we feel less empathy, or emotion. If anything, you could argue that those 'desensitized' to violence are more likely to react rationally in an emergency situation.

This studies are all somewhat ridiculous anyhow, since they didn't take a control group of people, and beat a guy to death in front of them, and then take a group of gamers, and beat a guy to death in front of them, and then measured who was more disturbed.

There's just no way to measure stuff like this. Even assuming that every single person operates from an emotional constant, how do you measure fluctuations? These studies are complete crap, and give real science a bad name.

Dr. Anderson has made a cottage academic career out of finding links between video game violence and aggressive or overtly violent behavior. He started looking at TV, I believe as an undergraduate, and then move on to games in the early 1990s. It's not that the link is not possible; it's not that *some* evidence doesn't point that way in *some* studies. It's that *all* of Anderson's work finds a strong link between game violence and aggression. There's no gray, no question, no inconclusive study.

Not a chance. Death in a video game is nothing remotly close to death in real life. If anything, a videogame adict would be able to handel it less because they are used to clean kills and bodies fading away after a few seconds.

This will likely sound nutty and abstract, but I'm thinking this might factor in say, 10, 15, 30 years from now when there is a direct link to the brain, bypassing all senses and causing you to feel like you're really there. THEN I think this is going to be a real problem, as confused or unstable people might not be able to tell if it's life, or a movie/game.

In the here and now, I get a little concerned with the odd feeling you have sometimes when you might need to focus a bit and realize your are REALLY driving a car, versus playing PGR3 or something at home a few minutes earlier. The quick subconcious hit that suggests "this is only a 'try' and maybe not REAL life," causing you to maybe risk things in real life a bit more. Many years ago, I found myself driving a little recklessly out of a arcade parking lot one time after playing the driving game Daytona with 7 other friends for like 3 hours. (But then again, I drove pretty recklessly anyway!)

As this stuff gets more realistic, it might get nuts.

Somehow I missed Grimm's comment above - if you've seen 'Fahrenheit 9/11' you might recall the scene where the soldier dude says rolling into Bagdad was 'like Grand Theft Auto.' And consider 'America's Army,' the government-funded game.

Just saying. For some people, there MIGHT be a correlation between games and desensitizing.

V1L3:

Outstanding comment. You deserve a star for that one.

I was going to comment on this post, but after reading YOUR comment, I no longer feel I need to. You covered everything I feel about the situation and things I didn't even realize I felt about it.

I've got an alternative conclusion: "Witnessing violence desensitizes people to witnessing violence". There, more generalised, in light of the data on other media. And about as big a psychological revelation as "if you eat potatoes for long enough they get boring".

True. Same with violent movies; any overexposure to violence or any emotion will have an effect on the psyche, even those "harmless" books.

Why are they trying to prove the obvious? Perhaps these studies will be used in future trials.

True. Same with violent movies; any overexposure to violence or any emotion will have an effect on the psyche, even those harmless books.

The amount of desensitization will be much lower than witnessing any real-life tragedy, but you already have a set of images in your head that you can compare it to.

In some ways it's a good way to prepare for the worst (especially in movies that involve loss or the effects of time), but I haven't encountered any gangs carrying rocket launchers thus far.

Why are they trying to prove the obvious? Perhaps these studies will be used in future trials.

Of course. My post doesn't show up unless I accept it twice. Good times!

Back when I was, like, eight, I played Goldeneye 007 -all the time-. I really liked the runway stage because I could run over people with the tank and hear them squish. Years before that, I enjoyed playing with armymen in the sandbox. I had "world wars", and killed many an armymen. And magnifying glasses and fire crackers were always fun, though I needed my big brother's help with the latter.

I'd be willing to bet any male here has a similar childhood. And most of us here aren't violent. People say that children cannot differentiate reality and fantasy. I disagree. It is a terrible fallacy that is accepted as fact. Children CAN differentiate between reality and fantasy. However, something that children have that most adults lack is imagination. Why sit there watching TV and vegetating when you can be sword-fighting a pirate in your very living room? Children enjoy having fun, and pretending you're an archmage is a lot more fun than sitting there as a weak little kid with no freedom doing nothing.


The only thing, I think, that causes violence, besides sick and/or demented and/or people with something wrong with them and/or the biggest one -- anger, is actual violence. Violence in the home is the biggest encourager of violence. If you look at 99% of criminals, they all had shitty childhoods. Childhoods where their dad got drunk every night, or he beat their mom, or the parents simply didn't love them very much. Everyone, save for the few people who really do have problems, can differentiate between fantasy and reality. Reality, however, is a harsh place, and fantasy is much more appealing. Because of that, people should be held accountable for their own doings.


And lastly, my final statement: Doctors have to forcibly desensitize themselves to all forms of horrible deaths, violence, and gore. However, how many murderous doctors are there out there? Very, very few.

NOT TRUE, I have been playing videogames all my life (violent ones too of course MK being my favorite) a few yeas ago I was in a store just when it was robbed I was paralyzed by fear the guards had guns and manage to shot one of the robbers in the leg a few feet from me, as soon as I got the smell of blood I puked and almost faint.(hurray for me!)) the "Desentization" speech is bullcrap, your brain can distinguish between reality and pixels.

If any of you think that you've been desensitized to violence because of video games, please go here, then shut the fuck up:
http://72.232.207.82/~lebanon/