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The shooter who committed the atrocity last month in New Zealand joked that video games had forced him to do so. He is right. This statement is ridiculous. This is no different from the similar blame thrown at the media through the ages, and there is now research to prove the opposite.
The Christchurch Mosque Shooting Manifesto, Brenton Tarrant, is full of jokes and jokes, some intended to signal similar animated opinions to racist racists on chan's advice, such as / pol /, and others. to provoke the reaction of alarmed media and political leaders.
During his long, dislocated incursion that exposes him to being a racist and uneducated psychopath, Tarrant states, "Spyro the 3 m dragon has learned ethno-nationalism. Fortnite has taught me to be a killer and use dental floss on the corpses of my enemies. "
The third game Sypro the Dragon was released on PlayStation in 2000. The series is aimed at children and does not teach ethno-nationalism. Fortnite is an award-winning game released in 2017 that features a very popular player-to-player mode, in which one can "floss", which is a victory-like dance movement that is designed to show off. His caricatural style certainly does not represent a realistic violence.
Tarrant took the piss. He made fun of fools who claimed that violence in the real world was caused by video games and was starting to say a lot of reasons why he had actually killed dozens of innocent people. They realized that he hated Muslim immigrants.
Each shoot raises once again the chorus that seeks to impute the depravity of today's youth to violent video games. It happened after Christchurch. Politicians accused video games in 2018 after a shootout in Santa Fe. Pennsylvania lawmakers are considering a tax on violent video games, saying it would help prevent shootings in schools. Following the shooting of 2018 in Parkland, Florida, the Kentucky governor said that it was caused by the "culture of death" celebrated in video games, television, movies and music. Donald Trump also blamed video games and students at a Miami school were convinced to get rid of their violent video games. In 2013, after filming Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, a nearby city bought a ritual video game and an engraving.
It goes back a long time. After a school shooting in 2005, Katherine Newman, a professor of sociology and self-proclaimed expert on the social roots of school shootings, told reporters that the shooting was following a video game "scenario", and that There was anger inside and a murderous rage that expresses itself in a manner familiar to our innumerable video games. "
The shooting of the Columbine High School in 1999 was closely associated with video games, as the shooters themselves had not only claimed to play games like Doom and Quake, but had also referred to Doom before and during the massacre. Subsequently, Senate hearings were held on the "marketing of violent entertainment to children".
What followed was a sort of witch hunt for all those who looked like, dressed or acted like the Columbine shooters, who afflicted a large number of children who did not conform to the standards expected of their children. parents and their teachers. Some children have actually been placed in therapy because of their identification with the video game culture.
In 1994, the Mortal Kombat and Night Trap games sparked the moral and regulatory instinct of senior politicians. Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman said, "These games are not the hallmark of a civilized society."
It's always like this, as Louis Anslow has wonderfully told, with newspaper headlines, Chronology. Mother Grundys and defense lawyers systematically seek to blame the latest media for the corruption of their beloved children. In the 1970s and 1980s, television was accused of violence and murder. In 1957, the mother of a young accused accused of murder invoked the murder of radio serial publications. Before that, in the 1940s and 1950s, comics were the culprits of juvenile crime. Horror comics were banned in the United Kingdom in 1955. In 1948, the United States was the scene of a series of comic book fires, having been linked to several murders. In the 1930s, gangsters were recruited among "early young people fed the poor tariff of the cinema". In 1927, a double murder was reported on the radio, which made the killer say that he felt strange inside. At the end of 19th In the last century, lawyers accused of murder often accused dime novels of corrupting boys.
As with their predecessors, impulsive responses and anecdotal evidence about video games obscure the truth. What are the odds that an unhappy person who commits an heinous crime out of anger and frustration do not watching movies or playing video games depicting violence? Almost everyone does it. In a 2018 Pew Research Center study, 97% of boys and 83% of girls reported playing video games. More than half of the top-selling titles contain violence, and they are truly more realistic than Mortal Kombat.
A study on school violence in the United States between 1974 and 2000, conducted by the US Secret Service and the US Department of Education following the shooting in Columbine and published in 2004, found that only 59% of the attackers in the schools were of interest to the violent media. all types, including books and movies, and only one-eighth was interested in violent video games.
Some studies claim to link violent video games and aggression. They focus mainly on the short-term effects, which can be explained by the adrenaline rush or "priming effect" that one would expect from such games. We find the same reaction in people who have just played a competitive sport.
Most of these studies are based on artificial laboratory experiments, in which nonviolent "aggression", such as gestures or sound explosions, is delivered to consenting opponents. None gave an ax to the tested subjects and told them to go to town. And none of them found a causal link, which suggests that higher levels of aggression push people to prefer violent video games, that a third factor is the cause of both, or that the results are rather meaningless.
A more recent longitudinal study by Simone Kühn et al., Published in the prestigious journal Nature, studied a cohort of young adults over time to eliminate short-term priming effects and to determine whether violent video games have a long-term influence on attitudes, behavior and well-being mental.
With the help of a battery of more than 50 psychological tests, the researchers concluded that there was no significant change between a group playing a violent video game, a group playing a non-violent game and a control group not playing at all. There was also no difference between the test results shortly after playing and the test results two months later. These results, they argue, "provide strong evidence against the often debated negative effects of violent video games."
In two studies (available free of charge for the enterprising researcher) published in the Communications Journal In 2014, psychologist Christopher Ferguson compared the frequency and severity of violence in movies to the real rates of homicide in the United States and the consumption of violent video games in relation to youth violence rates in this country. country.
Mastering such factors as population density, maintaining order and prosperity, he found a positive correlation only for mid-twentieth-century films. At the beginning of the century, the correlation was almost perfectly reversed, and since the 1970s, the increase in violence in films has been correlated with a decline in homicide rates. Similarly, the consumption of violent video games is associated with lower rates of violence among young people.
There is simply no statistical or experimental evidence that violent video games, or violent media in general, cause violence in reality, and some evidence that they do exactly the opposite.
Modern online games are often very social. Like any social interaction, it will influence those who engage in it. Some exalted guardians of public morality, like Prince Harry, believe that games such as Fortnite are simply "created for drug addicts" and would like to see them banned. While the obvious goal of game designers is to attract, engage and retain users, this is a simplistic view.
Those who are in contact with ordinary people, who have in fact asked Fortnite about their parents and their teenage children, come to radically different conclusions. At least 61% of the teens surveyed played Fortnite. Less than a quarter of parents worry about the time their kids play at Fortnite. Just over a quarter of parents worry about the level of violence in sport, but only 7% of children share this concern.
The most striking fact is perhaps the fact that half of the players surveyed said that it helped them to keep in touch with their friends and to learn the team work. Four in ten said it helped them to bond with a sibling.
After school and home, social games like Fortnite are the places where today's kids are looking for a sense of community and fun. Instead of hanging out at the mall or wandering the streets, they get together and socialize with the help of cell phones, computers and game consoles.
Jennifer Senior, a mother interested in her child's video game and columnist for the magazine New York Times, came at the opposite conclusion Prince Harry reached.
Of course, video games can be addictive, and playing time is certainly excessive, but the same goes for television, comics and Dime novels. Limiting play time is no different than limiting the time that children are allowed to watch television or go to the movies.
Asking for taxes, regulations or prohibitions because of an erroneous moral panic only serves to set a precedent for government control over the media we choose to consume. It is an unjustifiable violation of the right to freedom of expression.
Every new media or technology brings with it these people – usually elderly, but from across the political spectrum – who think it corrupts youth. Yet each generation ends well. The problems they face are not caused by violence in video games, movies or television, but by the parents concerned and the politicians who are involved in the fray. DM
Watch Pauli van Wyk's cat play the piano here!
Not really. But now that we have your attention, we wanted to talk to you a bit about what happened to SARS.
Tom Moyane and his acolytes bequeathed South Africa with a Tax deficit of 48 billion rand, in February 2018. It's the only thing that grew up under the Moyane mandate … the year before, the hole had been 30.7 billion rand. And to fund these gaps, you know who has to cough? You – the South African taxpayer.
It was the remarkable work of a team of investigative journalists, Pauli van Wyk and Marianne Thamm of Scorpion as well as our great friends at amaBhungane, the SARS captors were finally emptied of the system. Moyane, Makwakwa … a lot of them … gone.
But our work is not finished yet. We need more readers to become Maverick Insiders, the friends who will help to ensure that a lot of additional investigations are taking place. The contributions go directly to the growth of our editorial team and the guarantee of a sustainable future for Daily Maverick and Scorpio. We can not rely on advertising and we do not want to limit access to those who can afford a paywall subscription. Membership is not just about contributing financially – It's about how we defend the truth, together.
So, if you feel so inclined and want a way to support the cause, join our community of Maverick Insiders…. you can see it as the opposite of a sin tax. And if you're already Maverick Insider, tell your mother, call a friend, whisper to your beloved, shout at your boss, write to a stranger, advertise it on your social network. The battle for the future of South Africa is launched and you can join.
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