Seth Schiesel

While researchers have devoted ample time to studying the emotional and psychological effects of virtual video game violence, the actual social behavior of players has largely escaped academic attention. That should change. The racism, homophobia and misogyny prevalent in many online game precincts can amount to emotional abuse. This is a phenomenon that needs to be better understood and more widely known.

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  1. shinichi Post author

    The Real Problem With Video Games

    by Seth Schiesel

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/13/opinion/video-games-toxic-violence.html

    Donald Trump has long claimed that exposure to simulated violence in video games begets violent tendencies in real life. “Video game violence and glorification must be stopped — it is creating monsters!” he tweeted in 2012.

    In the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., as the nation debated gun control, Mr. Trump returned to that theme. “We have to look at the internet because a lot of bad things are happening to young kids and young minds, and their minds are being formed,” he said. He went on to implicate video games in particular: “I’m hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts.”

    On Thursday, President Trump summoned video game executives to the White House to castigate them for the violence depicted in their products. The executives were joined by Republican members of Congress and by activists who have campaigned against violence in media.

    The White House meeting did not, however, include any social scientists who have studied the effects of video games. That would have been too problematic. Decades of research, after all, have failed to find any significant relationship between playing violent video games and behaving violently in real life.

    If anything, there may be a stronger connection between school violence and the sort of creative writing educators seek to foster. When the United States Secret Service and the Department of Education studied violence in schools, they found that 37 percent of attackers “exhibited an interest in violence in their own writings, such as poems, essays, or journal entries,” while only 12 percent exhibited an interest in violent video games.

    Video games do not create murderers. With his Thursday meeting, the president was merely engaging in political distraction.

    And yet Mr. Trump was absolutely right when he said that “bad things” are happening on the internet. Video games do have a big problem, but it is not stylized virtual violence. Rather, it is the bigotry, social abuse, sexism and other toxic behavior to which players too often subject one another when gaming together online.

    In other words: It’s not the content; it’s the culture.

    Listen to the voice communications of almost any popular online first-person shooter game and you will hear players constantly using racial and homophobic slurs. Make a mistake in just about any team-based combat game and it won’t be long before one of your teammates chastises you with some vile epithet. There is more than one game community where “Jew” is used as a verb, meaning to make money. In many games, women who speak up on voice communications are routinely mocked and harassed.

    While researchers have devoted ample time to studying the emotional and psychological effects of virtual video game violence, the actual social behavior of players has largely escaped academic attention. That should change. The racism, homophobia and misogyny prevalent in many online game precincts can amount to emotional abuse. This is a phenomenon that needs to be better understood and more widely known.

    In this respect, Melania Trump’s campaign against cyberbullying, largely rhetorical though it is, addresses a more serious problem than does her husband’s concern with virtual gunplay. But there is not much the government can do about this.

    Game companies, too, cannot be expected to constantly police the communications and communities of millions of players. Some companies, such as Blizzard Entertainment (the creator of “World of Warcraft”) and Riot Games (“League of Legends”), deserve credit for at least attempting to curb the toxicity of their customers, allowing conscientious players to report their obnoxious peers and then devoting personnel to reviewing complaints and disciplining consistently abusive players. But it is a gargantuan task.

    As with many cultural crises, it is up to everyday people, not politicians or executives, to generate true solutions. The real responsibility lies with the players themselves — and for younger players, to their parents as well — to confront the real problem with video games.

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