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Ignoring the decades of research on violent television and video games, some of us were the adults in the room and chose to raise our children to not grow up thinking violence was an answer to conflict.
...not unlike previous fearful obsessions with Dungeons & Dragons, rock and roll, and any number of other things that society periodically chooses to wet its pants over.
Lol, not faulty at all. I stated "violent crime" not just gun crime nor just homicides nor just mass shootings.
Vermont has among the highest gun ownership rates, yet among the lowest gun crime. If your logic was correct, Vermont should have among the highest gun crime in the US.
Many countries in the world allow gun ownership, yet even adjusted for this, their violent and gun crime is a fraction of the US.
But yea, it is the video games that are at fault.
Maine is the same way, most households, especially outside of the Portland area, have guns and Constitutional Carry is the law of the land (as it should be). But according to FBI stats we are among the lowest crime rates.
However, from personal experience, I cannot completely discount the effects of immersion in video games. There was one night, when I was playing a game called 'Carmageddon' for several hours before I had to go to work. For those who don't know, the object of the game is to drive like a maniac, wrecking as many other cars and killing as many pedestrians as possible...with extra points awarded for 'creativity' such as crushing a pedestrian against a building in a power-slide (as opposed to just running them down directly).
I have a steering wheel and pedal set-up for enhanced realism. A problem arose when I had to leave for work and jumped into an actual automobile- I got about a mile down the road when I realized that I was driving just as aggressively as I did in the game I was playing a few moments before.
Now, I pride myself on my mental acuity and my ability to judge reality, but for a few fleeting moments this was absent. Fortunately, I recovered my wits before there was any property damage or injury to other people. But, it left me with the question, "What about other people who may have a more tenuous grip on reality?"
I now find it impossible to dismiss the possibility that other people, with defective reality perceptions, may be negatively influenced by participation in realistic violence in video games.
They were new, and the effects they might have were not clear. Some violent video games seem to glorify or normalize extreme violence and thus the concern that it might lead to people being more prone to violent acts in real life was not a totally unreasonable concern.
Why were parents so worried about "violent video games" back in the day?
Because those violent games were/are like brain washers to the kids - not to all, of course. In general, small kids are very innocent. Without guidance from parents, everything (from video games, social medias or in real life) enters the kids' minds will be absorbed easily, and they eventually want to put it into action.
I believe many members on here read a post in the current events about TicTok Challenge.
In my own city, in the '90s, there was this 12-yr-old girl who connected to a 23-yr-old guy on the My Space. They became gf and bf. Her parents did not approve the relationship and forbade her to see that guy. The guy made plans about what they should do, so they could be together. The girl listened to the guy and brought him home secretively to kill her whole family: her parents and her 6-yr-old brother.
And there were hundreds or thousands of cases of kids doing horrible things in the world because they were influenced by bad games or peers on social medias or in real life.
So there, you know the reasons why parents were/are worried so much when they see their kids to play with the violent games or chitchat so long on social medias. Of course, not all kids turn out bad because of those games or connecting with strangers online. Parents always worry about everything. We need to give guidance; but when the kids don't listen, we have to get help and pray. Eventually, kids grow up, parents cannot have control on them anymore.
constant viewing of violent material can make people (especially those with developing minds) hyposensitive to the dangers involved in handling weapons, vehicles, and other things that can pose a threat to themselves or others.
Hmmmm....ya think nothing happened? Really? Dare we speak of the uptick in mass shootings? The open riots. The stalking of a jogger to shoot and film his demise? I could go on and on.
Yes I am not so ignorant to think exposure to violence does not affect the young minds.
No it doesn’t affect the young minds because if it did it would change normally sweet and kind children into murderers.
You don’t gain violent tendencies from video games by playing them, people who hurt other people would do so with or without the games. Those violent kids were crazy before they even put hands on a controller or looked at a screen.
A mentally disturbed kid who lives in poverty and deals with bullying and abuse doesn’t just shoot up a school because he started playing video games.
I play video games at 31 and have played video games since I was child. Never once have video games made me violent but I can list a handful of abusive people I know and it’s because they’re mentally ill and not because they played video games.
My ex hardly played video games growing up, didn’t give two craps if his parents took his phone and was anti-social media and he was the most f’ed up person I’ve ever know with deep seeded entitlement and abusive traits.
Me on the other hand I’ve played video games since the Nintendo 64, I’ve had social media since I was 13 and a phone just as long and I’m way more active that he is on my phone and social media. I was so phone obsessed I kept a burner phone for when mine got taken that I’d just swap SIM cards with. I’ve never been in a fight, I’m extremely sensitive and cry easily, I won’t hit first but I’ll end a fight and I’m one the most bend over backwards shirt off my back kind of people I know.
Why were parents so worried about "violent video games" back in the day?
Because those violent games were/are like brain washers to the kids - not to all, of course. In general, small kids are very innocent. Without guidance from parents, everything (from video games, social medias or in real life) enters the kids' minds will be absorbed easily, and they eventually want to put it into action.
I believe many members on here read a post in the current events about TicTok Challenge.
In my own city, in the '90s, there was this 12-yr-old girl who connected to a 23-yr-old guy on the My Space. They became gf and bf. Her parents did not approve the relationship and forbade her to see that guy. The guy made plans about what they should do, so they could be together. The girl listened to the guy and brought him home secretively to kill her whole family: her parents and her 6-yr-old brother.
And there were hundreds or thousands of cases of kids doing horrible things in the world because they were influenced by bad games or peers on social medias or in real life.
So there, you know the reasons why parents were/are worried so much when they see their kids to play with the violent games or chitchat so long on social medias. Of course, not all kids turn out bad because of those games or connecting with strangers online. Parents always worry about everything. We need to give guidance; but when the kids don't listen, we have to get help and pray. Eventually, kids grow up, parents cannot have control on them anymore.
And that incident has zero to do with social media and everything to do with the behavior problems of that little girl.
Social media didn’t make her think it was okay to kill her parents and younger brother, her messed up mind did.
That girl was crazy long before she found TikTok and long before that guy ever came into her life, SHE sought out that behavior, TikTok didn’t cause anything social media didn’t cause anything. Stop putting the blame on anything but that girl and the guy she found.
Because it was easy to cheap shot with Liu Kang in MKII and parents didn't want their kids to rely upon cheap shots their entire life.
Now cheap shots and life hacks are encouraged.
But a little more seriously, fighting was, at one point in time, fairly common. Boys and sometimes men would settle differences in a scuffle. As that method of dealing with issues (because it scarcely achieves much) became less and less acceptable socially, parents looking out for their children wanted to make sure they weren't behind the times socially and leading a poor example. The games were seen as possibly undermining that education.
Kind of like now children are given significant teaching on how to respect different cultures, ethnicities and sexual orientations. There's now parental concern on early comedy from the likes of Dave Chappelle, Tracy Morgan, Chris Rock and Kevin Hart as infiltrating on that parenting and learning. (Not that parents teach as much as they used to, having lost the last rounds of obscenity and violent games....while religions came under fire and anti-drug groups became the butt of all jokes....there's more moral ambiguity now)
It's hard to be a parent now. The information flow is raw and unfiltered going into your child's mind. The school system appears to be plagued by special interest groups....and killing people in ever more realistic premises is now entertainment. There's no offsetting moral standard that rises above parental authority. And as any teenager knows, their parents are behind the times and idiots.
At any rate, that's why there was once outcry about violent games. Don't worry. The parents lost....so badly they've never assembled again since then. We can all look forward to being cared for by a generation of children formed by Game of Thrones, GTA and political morality.
People threat these topics as if they're entirely theoretical, making pronouncements of fact but never actually examining the facts. Well, here are some facts.
The first real impact of video games came in the 1970s, but they lacked the graphic technology for anything that could be construed as violent. Think: Pong. The Golden Age of video games emerged in the late '70s, soon leading to various shooter games - mostly vehicles at first, later depictions of peoples and aliens and whatnot. As the '80s progressed, first-shooter games appeared and depictions got more realistic, and allowed more visceral violence to be portrayed. Everything since has simply refined the realism.
Now consider the American homicide rate. Was it rising in the '70s and '80s and '90s? Sure was. It was also rising before videos games became significant in American culture, and well before graphic depictions of video game violence were technologically possible. Moreover, beginning in the first half of the 1990s, the homicide rate decreased even as video games became more graphically violent. Since then, spanning more than a quarter century, video games have become increasingly realistic and graphic and ubiquitous. And the homicide rate? It's just flat-lined.
Were video games a significant driver of violence, the homicide rate should never had dropped and then simply remained static.
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