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Natural Aversion To *Shoot To Kill* VS First Person Shooter Videogames
Posts
"okay. here is what i think about that. X is wrong"
gee why are you guys so afraid of the idea that X might be right?
"well, it's not, though. it's wrong"
is it??? or is it... right
"are you saying it's right, then"
i mean, i'm not saying that
I'm proposing that playing videogames such as Battlefield for thousands of hours might make it more likely for soldiers and policemen to *just shoot without deeper reflection*, not because of an increase of *will to kill*, but because the process has been streamlined by conditioning. Veteran players do better because they hesitate less. They read a situation, plan their actions, and execute - over and over and over again. In this, I think one would find a statically significant difference between videogame players and non-players in such situations, for example soldiers in wartime.
Like in a situation like the one depicted below, I think a police agent who's an avid first person shooter player would be more likely to act just like this police officer did. I think a non-player cop would be more likely to hesitate, on average.
Yeah, and all the fleas and ticks that try to latch on. If you're a hygienic fellow, I recommend carrying in your kit a spray bottle of rubbing alcohol, the real strong shit, to deal with the little bastards. Kills them almost instantly, so it's pretty quick and easy to get under the legs and around the genitalia before you start gutting.
Like, you can keep repeating the same thing in different ways, but it just doesn't seem like a sound argument based on current evidence.
If only one could find how the average hits fired ratio for soldiers changed since the emergence of competitive online first person shooters. For example comparing the average hits fired ratio of Sowjet soldiers in the Afghanistan conflict of the 80s, versus the hits fired ratio of US troops in the Afganistan conflict of the aughts.
Most studies I heard of focus more on if videogames are a trigger for violence, not if players handle violent situations differently than non-players. I think that's a super interesting angle to pursue. Circumstantial evidence, such as firing simulators being used as training methods for military and police do suggest that that should be the case, albeit that's purely my conjecture.
I feel most responders in this thread are talking past my point, and come at it from the more established angle of research, looking for a connection between increased violence and videogames, rather than how videogames do or do not change decisions and actions taken, if already exposed with a violent situation, which is what I'm trying to talk about. Does it make a significant statistical difference if a soldier or policeman is a player of first person shooter videogames or not? And what differences would that be?
I feel like that's stretching to make excuses for violence that's so much more easily (and studiously) explained by racism, toxic masculinity, fetishization of firearms, and power fantasies. You say you think these things, but unless you can provide some concrete reasons to think them, that statement carries no more weight than me saying "I think the moon is actually a secret space station piloted by the aliens who seeded this planet so they can observe our behavior."
Comparing historical hit ratios is useless. There is no way to account for differences between shooting technology across the measures.
Is a soldier firing a rifle going to have a better hit ratio than a soldier firing a smooth bore musket? How about a machine guy versus a scoped bolt action rifle?
You don't desensitize soldiers to killing by simulators and games. You do it by "othering" their targets. By making them seem less than human. And there's been quite a bit of study into that.
If anything, I could probably find a lack of studies regarding what differences there are between players and non-players of first person shooters in violent situations, specifically in soldiers and policemen. And if so, don't you think that's an angle worth researching?
Maybe soldiers should routinely play games such as Battlefield, maybe policemen should refrain from such a thing. Who knows? I'd sure like to know. That's all I'm saying.
And again, accuracy of fire is a completely different thing from the psychological willingness to shoot a gun. Video games improve hand-eye coordination, which in turn improves your ability to hit the thing you are trying to shoot. Psychology doesn't enter into it.
You can compare it to whatever you think the hits fired ratio should have been, given the level of technology and the average ability of the soldiers and the circumstances though. Just like they do in that quote in the OP.
I'm not saying that the psychology changes, but that the conditioning overrides the psychology, because you know, doing something for 10,000+ hours usually changes how a person operates. An action repeated endlessly for 10,000 hours is likely not under the same psychological scrutiny.
But I've got gut feeling and persistence on my side
if its good enough for television its good enough for internet forum debates I guess
I'd feel a lot better if you'd actually link to these supposed studies of the effect of playing competitive online first person shooters for 10,000+ hours on a statistically large enough sample base of soldiers and policemen. Thank you.
You don't get to slap largely unrelated ideas together to form a hypothesis and then demand ultra specific evidence to disprove it, that's not how anything works.
Science and sociology isn't "well these ideas look kind of complimentary, prove me wrong bro"
I spent 10,000 hours playing guitar hero 2 and now I'm the guitarist for Imagine Dragons.
Steam
No, you see all this time I spend foruming has conditioned me to engage with dumb threads on their (lack of) merit rather than just ignoring them as someone who hadn't had all this forum exposure would do. I mean, that's just my gut feeling, someone should really do some studies to see if that's accurate or not. I have a feeling it might be.
Guitar Hero desensitized me to the natural aversion to rock out
Then some friends invited me to play paintball.
And I remember standing around in the woods looking for people and thinking
"Boy, this is nothin' like playing a video game."
If you can't be bothered to put more effort into a topic than slapping your personal conjecture into a reply box and calling it a day, then I'm not sure why you expect people who've actually researched this in the past to do more than roll their eyes.
Fair enough, though I don't think it's asking too much to be pointed in the general direction of where I would find studies pertinent to the train of thought I put forth, respectively studies that do back up the notion that there is no merit to any of my conjecture, because so far there has been zero of that. Why should I give your dismissal of my ideas credit, if you haven't put forth any empirical evidence to the contrary either.
You just dropped your idle train of thought into to forum with nothing to back it up, nobody needs to have their dismissal of that idea you had while showering this morning validated.
If you're a college student, your library likely grants access to several comprehensive ones, and you can probably swing by to request the passwords for home use as well. If you're not a student, your local library should have subscriptions to research databases as well, although you'd probably have to do your research on the premises rather than at home.
I had this thought--what if a perpetual motion machine actually is possible and it's just everyone's belief that it's not that's preventing them from figuring it out. A university physics professor should totally give me money to look into that.
Now this is the kind of question I have come to expect around here, and I think it is one that deserves our attention.
I vote yes if it's Hitler.
the only time I ever fired a gun was a weeny little .22 and THAT scared the living crap out of me
I don't see how that helps determining whether or not first person shooter playing soldiers do miss on purpose less these days, or not. Or miss less subconciously, for that matter.
I did google the topic, and read a fair amount of excerpts over the years, but none of those even perfunctorily pursued the idea of how ADS-heavy shooters might or might not affect players who do perform these actions routinely in real life already. Like soldiers or policemen.
It's all about kids and youth and whatnot, and if games trigger violent behavior or not.
There it is
And if you want to connect the concept to police violence, as you seem to want to, well that's even easier because institutionalized racism is a hell of a way to other people.
basic googling will hit you mostly news reports and stuff, I think Didgeridoo is saying you should go a little deeper and look for actual research.
Googling and google scholar are not the same thing. Google does not return a lot of research papers on its own.
realistically, I think even Google Scholar is pretty lacking and you want to try some other databases through a school or library.
Why is being a soldier or a police officer a qualifier in this argument, though? Because they handle weapons more? Because more than 1 billion people in the world play video games, and you're saying that by playing these games, players are potentially desensitized to the act of firing and killing a human being when they pick up a gun. If a soldier shoots to kill, it's because of years of training and situational awareness that will tell them to fire, and even then studies have shown hesitation; they don't fire because they played Call of Duty and equated any of those situations to be even remotely similar to real life. Violence is violence, and if video games played any part in that then you would be able to find a correlation in studies done about any sort of real life violence and video games. The fact that the studies do not fit the narrow hypothesis your creating to support your argument is inconsequential.
Sure, that sounds plausible, and certainly would carry more weight, regardless of how ADS-heavy first person shooters affect soldiers and police, or not. However, it certainly doesn't disqualify the idea that ADS-heavy games might make a statistically significant difference in that same regard.
Videogame feedback loops are all about conditioning, so it's fair to assume, given the close relation between the virtual actions in these games, and the actual reality of a soldier or police agent projecting force in a war, or while engaging offenders, that this conditioning is statistically impactful.
That's exactly my question. Do ADS-heavy first person shooter videogames reduce the average hesitation reported? Does it impact the hits fired ratio, which could be interpreted as a reduced aversion to kill to shoot? If not psychological, then at the very least just by conditioning?
Making Johnny Protagonist shoot people in your living room in no way conditions you to be in an active warzone with a gun in your hands. I have played a ton of first person shooters, including Call of Duty, and I have fired actual firearms. If you dropped me into an active battle right now my instinct wouldn't be to lol420noscope headshot fools erryday.
It would be to get the fuck out of there.
Steam