Video Game Violence

Episode Transcript
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(00:03):
You're listening to Why we Do whatwe Do? Welcome to Why we Do
what we Do. I am yourtwo bit host Abraham, and I am
your first person shooter host Shame Nice. We're a psychology podcast. We talk

(00:24):
about the things that people do,why they do them, things that animals
do, sometimes, general psychological phenomenon, and pretty much everything interesting there is
to know about human behavior. Ever, yes, today we're gonna talk about
a phenomenon that people seem to bereally upset about and seem to kind of
keep going back to, very similarto like the Satanic panic, and you
know, all kinds of things thatcome up true. And I think this

(00:45):
is one of those ones that isso fun because the subject itself is already
fun, right, and then wejust get to dispel a bunch of myths.
So this is the kind of episodesI like, nerdy things, Yeah,
dispelling myths. Life is good,inherent fun. Yeah, that's just
we're all about it. So thatis the thing. This episode is going
to come out on June seventh,which as some things notable for us to

(01:07):
celebrate and acknowledge. The very firstthing I would like to shout out is
that it is pride month, sohappy Pride Month, Happy Pride Month.
Yay. We are in full supportof this. What I would say is
I wish every month was Pride month. Yeah. And also, don't be
jerks, you know, Yeah,we realize that people are in danger,
so you know, support legislation thatsupports folks that belong to marginalized populations love
their namor because it doesn't matter whothey love. Yeah. And also Jesus

(01:30):
had two dads, so you know, I mean, everybody gets upset about
that and they forget that part.Indeed. It is also National Chocolate ice
Cream Day and Global Running Day.That'll seem a little bit incompatible. Man,
maybe you can make it work.Yeah, I don't know. I
mean, good luck, it's gonnabe a messy run or uncomfortable. It's

(01:51):
also National VCR Day, which youknow, as children of the eighties and
nineties big fans of that shout datedtechnology. It's also National Taylor's Day,
which I've been to a tailor exactlyone time and now those pants don't fit
me anymore. Yeah, growing oldsucks. There's also Love your Burial Ground
Week, to a delightfully maccabre sortof feel to it, but has to

(02:15):
do with, you know, respectingand acknowledging and sort of going out and
appreciating the intricacies of our past asthey are represented by tombstones, which is
kind of neat, super cool symbolism. And go back to listen to our
episode about burials, because we dida whole one on white people bury people.
So it's a fine episode. Facta lot of information there. Yeah,
it's also National Candy Month. Asa big fan of candy, I

(02:36):
like this, And it's also NationalIced Tea Month. But like, I
think it's really important to pin thisdown. Iced tea is fine. Sweet
tea is where it's at. Asa Southerner, it should be National sweet
Tea Month. There probably is likea National Sweet Tea something or other acknowledgement.
But I'm a fan of the icedtea not a Southerner, So I've

(02:58):
had the sweet sound Southern iced tea, and it is really good. When
I choose iced tea, I tendto choose not sweet iced tea, but
I do understand the appeal. Soevery restaurant that I ever worked at had
a version of sweet tea that wouldmake and the amount of sugar that is
put in it is I'm surprised thatthe sugar industry is not bankrupt. It
is. I mean, I'm notjoking when I say, like two three

(03:20):
full cups into a picture of icedtea, it's bonkers. Sure, wild,
Yeah, I think it's what's keepingthe sugar industry afloat dentistry too.
Yeah, there you go, indeed, But we're actually not talking about iced
tea, believe it or not.We're talking about something else. And I'd
like to set the scene here bytelling a story, and I would like
to make sure that we begin withtrigger warning. This story does include violence,

(03:42):
particularly gun violence, and that isnot the context for this entire episode,
but that if that is something youare uncomfortable hearing, you probably want
to skip ahead a few minutes wherewe start to get into the meat of
this topic. But that's what we'llbe starting with. So let's set the
context here. Yes, so itis probably already nine gres at ten am
on a Saturday, August third,twenty nineteen in El Paso, Texas,

(04:03):
a place that is very hot.Yeah, many people were already there shopping
or we're maybe just bored and neededsomething to do, or maybe they were
trying to get out of the daysalready mounting heat, and Patrick Wood Crusius,
a twenty one year old who musthave driven all night or perhaps arrived
a few days before from his homenearly seven hundred miles away in Allen,

(04:25):
Texas, a suburb of Dallas,pulled into the Walmart parking lot, wearing
ear protection and carrying a Wa Srten rifle and started shooting. Yeah,
he actually started shooting right as hegot his into the parking lot. The
manager who saw the shooting began announceda code brown to signal to employees to
start evacuating customers due to the activeshooter. Crusius sounds like that curse from

(04:49):
Harry Potter. Is crucio is whatit is? Similar? It's close enough.
Yeah, Crusius entered the store andproceeded to murder twenty three people and
injure another twenty three, and ofcourse he was arrested, charged, and
convicted for murder and hate crimes.Now, in response, then President Donald
Trump said, from the White Housequote, we must stop the glorification of

(05:11):
violence in our society. This includesthe gruesome and grizzly video games that are
now commonplace. It is too easytoday for troubled youth to surround themselves with
a culture that celebrates violence. Wemust stop or substantially reduce this, and
it has to begin immediately. Endquote side note, real quick shocking that
any of that was a complete sentence. True. I was actually going to
see if you had a good DonaldTrump impersonation voice that you could try.

(05:34):
I have opted out because I justhate him so much. Like it is
one of those things where I havelike such an intense rage towards this human
if you can't even call him thatthat I can't even like. I guess
it would be the closest be like, because I don't think that he says
words. But that's my thought onhim. So sorry, I'm gonna get
off my soapbox. Now that's mybias, clear on our bias, I

(05:56):
think. Yeah, all right,So that's his response. Current Speaker of
the House, so though it wasn'tat the time, Kevin McCarthy has similarly
echoed the sentiment, saying, quote, but the idea of these video games
that dehumanize individuals to have a gameof shooting individuals and others, I've always
felt that is a problem for futuregenerations and others. We've watched from studies
shown before of what it does toindividuals end quote. Now I'm glad that

(06:17):
you mentioned the studies, Kevin.Let's take a look at those, shall
we yes, But before we goforward, a few more things that we
need to know about Patrick wood Crusius. So prior to his cowardly, pathetic,
bigoted, disgusting murder spree, Patrickposted a manifesto to the eighth Chan
sub credit and which he outlines aswhite nationalist and anti immigration beliefs, including

(06:38):
the quote great replacement end quote,hypothesis shared and pushed by the likes of
Donald Trump, Kevin McCarthy, andBilbert creator Scott Adams, apparently of all
people. Awful yeah, weird thing. So this was a targeted spree aimed
at killing people of Mexican descent andprobably allies to them. Doesn't sound like
video games had much to do withit, but I digress. There is

(06:59):
a lot we could unpack with videogames. There's the effects on the brain,
video game addiction, even creative waysthat video games have been used to
teach and socialize people. Wacky weirdthings that people have done with video games.
I've actually seen a conference presentation andlinking video games and behavior science.
There's a ton a ton there.I mean, this could be an entire
podcast where every episode all we dois discuss things about video games because there's

(07:24):
so much content. But today we'refocusing on the putative relationship between video games
and violent behavior that politicians and otherslove to claim exists. Yeah. So
there are many, many, manyvideo games depict stunningly lifelike scenarios in which
the player is incentivized to wheel deadlyweapons against other players and NPCs or nonplayable

(07:47):
characters for those of you who don'tplay video games, and they have gotten
so incredibly realistic that if you wereto simply glance at a video game without
knowing what it was, it wouldbe understandable if you thought it was a
video of real bodycam footage, whichis a thing that just happened. There
was a video game that recently cameout that was filmed from bodycam footage that
perspective, and it had like theplayer aggressively beating up criminals, like and

(08:11):
it was so lifelike that they werelike, there were people that were like,
the ethics of this are weird.Yeah, and that was kind of
where that went. Did you seethe Unreal Engine five video game thing that
they did sort of a proof ofconcept, someone like going into like this
abandoned warehouse. Yeah yeah, yeah, why I mean it is shockingly real,
Like I actually think that there's ata point now where you could not

(08:31):
make it look more real. Itis as real as a video game,
Like it looks just like footage,like I mean, unbelievable. But we
all played Tony Hawk one, solike we know how real that was,
So you know what I mean,Like I think it couldn't really get more
real than that. He's seeing somebodyskate around in the circle for an hour
and a half because you got aperfect balance code. Fair. I will

(08:52):
say this to be fair. TonyHawk did like create like a whole situation
where like now skateboarders are like totallybonkers, Like it's it's wild to watch
skateboarding now because everybody was like aTony Hawk diday, we could do it
fair enough, all right, Sobias, I need to sort of just
get this on the table. Idon't really play video games that much.
I've started to sort of get backinto it and dip my toes into it,

(09:13):
but I do love them. Ithink we are both people who who
really enjoy video games, who haveplayed a lot of video games, and
I'm actually personally very thrilled that thereare so many video games, so many
different kinds of video games. ButI would be convinced with sufficient evidence if
video games were in fact linked toviolent behavior, that that would not be
an appropriate way to go, andthat we should maybe do something about it

(09:35):
if the evidence was there, Becauseas a scientist, I'm always open to
the data and the research, andI follow where the data tell me to
go. Yeah, as a videogame player myself, I also was never
very good at like the more realisticone, so like you'll catch me playing
as we were talking about before theshow, linked the Past or Sonic the
Hedgehog, or you know, stufffrom Saga and Super Nintendo and all that,
and then every now and again,I like the Switch games have been

(09:56):
really cool. So sure that's mybias. But I also grew up playing
Mortal Kombat and I haven't killed anybodyyet, so same, just the thought.
Yeah, and actually that kind ofleads us to a history of violence
in video games. So let's startto unpack and walk through the timeline here
and understanding violence in video games andwhat that's meant, what it's been,
and how people have responded to it. I love this graph that you included

(10:20):
in the notes, Like there's somereally this is really cool data. Yeah,
that one's going to be when itwould be referencing this graph that depicts
sort of violent crime in the UnitedStates over time. We want to be
referencing that a lot as we gothrough this. Yes, so let's start
in nineteen seventy six. We talkedabout this a little bit in the Tough
on Crime episode, and we've kindof covered this this little bit, But

(10:41):
in nineteen seventy six, violent crimehad been on a consistent increase for decades.
Nineteen seventy six is the first yearit decreases even a little bit,
and it doesn't decrease by much,but at the time, a very simple
tubit graphic game called Death Race isone of the first controversial violent games that's
ever been released. It is ablack background and there are two white two

(11:01):
D kinds of car shaped things thatwould run over humanoid shaped gremlins. And
what parents found so concerning about thisis that when the player ran over the
gremlin, it would make a ahsound and a little gravestone would appear,
which it's actually pretty interesting. Yeah, there's so little technology in this,
like it's so little programming, butit's like enough that they were like,

(11:22):
you know what we should do,we should program a tombstone here. I
think that's great. Yeah, andI think the image I saw is that
was was actually like a little crossthat pops up where they were run over.
Yeah, and I mean these arevery very crude shapes. I mean
they have very little detail. It'sbasically a side scroll but moving forward,
you know, an upscroll, sothat the top of the screen is like
where you're headed toward, if youwill, And so these little gremlin things

(11:45):
came at you. But anyway,because of this act sound and the tombstones
that would appear, that appeared justtoo gruesome to the parents of the time,
they really pressured heavily to have thisvideo game removed, and it was
it was successfully removed from stores.If only they had any idea what was
coming. Yeah. Now, innineteen eighty three, violent crime had continue

(12:07):
to surge in the United States,and for a second time, it decreased
slightly for a few years from aboutnineteen eight to nine eighty four. A
game called Custer's Revenge is released innineteen eighty three. And in this game,
a Custer character runs from the arrowsof Native Americans and proceeds to trigger
warning rape a Native American woman tiedto a pole four points. And this

(12:28):
game is protested and it flops,and no one could find that type of
behavior in the game amusing or fun. And I'm glad the game just is
not around, Like that's just nota good situation. Yeah, good riddance,
Let's not do that sort of thing. Yeah, all right. Nineteen
ninety three we kick into high gearwith the violent video games available. We

(12:48):
get three video games in nineteen ninetythree that are specifically worth mentioning. The
first one Night Trap. In thisgame, the players are trying to save
a woman from being captured and killedby monsters. Of course, the problem
that people have a night Trap isnot the fact that there's violence, and
there's not the fact that there's victimizationof women. It's the fact that the
women are scantily clad in these littlenightgowns and their pajamas and whatnot. Yeah,

(13:09):
so that's one doom is another onethat comes out at this time.
This is the first person shooter,depicting graphic, bloody explosions of monsters as
you basically walked through hell killing things. But yeah, if you've never played,
you're killing demons in hell. Yeah, that's what the whole game is.
Yeah, I mean it could becalled constantine, but they called it
Doom. Yeah, there's a MortalKombat, and this is the first video

(13:30):
game to feature a realistic, lifelikeviolence done to humans. Side note,
I'm not sure how realistic or lifelikeany of that was, but it's the
first thing that I guess came thatclose to us. So there's that it
was one of the first games,or it was like the first game to
have like character actors be in thegame, Like so when you the models
are like actual humans and actual actorsthat they filmed and put into the game,
versus like having sprites and stuff.So like, so that in itself

(13:54):
was like, oh, they're actuallyhurting humans, and you know, it
wasn't really it wasn't really that bad. Although side note, and I you
played this and I didn't, SoI tried to capture some images from Night
Trap to include our notes here,and it looks like that one was also
filmed and so you as the playerare sort of choosing. It's like a
choose your own adventure how the sceneplays out sort of thing. Is that
right? Yeah, So it's likeit's like a point and click kind of

(14:16):
like problem solving game, and itis filmed with like real life actors.
But when you look at it again, this was this came out in nineteen
ninety three, but it was filmedin the eighties, so it's very dated.
Like everything looks like it's the eighties. And like the whole thing is
you're supposed to set booby traps andstuff in the game to like prevent these
monsters or these people breaking into yourhouse from like hurting people. Like that's

(14:37):
really the whole game. It's justit's like it's basically like Home Alone for
adults. But like nobody's thinking sowell. But they were scantily clad and
all three of these games. That'senough. Yeah, that was the problem
because all three of these were broughtbefore Congress. They were in congressional hearings,
but the only one that was pulledfrom shelves was Night Trap. It's
so weird. So Sega had aMortal Kombat version that they like when you

(15:00):
punch people, they wouldn't bleed,they would just like throw a sweat off
of them. So like you couldenter Sega got around it though, because
you could enter a blood code andthen you had blood in the game in
the first Mortal Combat all right,Yeah, so like it was censored except
for there was a cheat code.But also Mortal Kombat is not realistic at
all. I mean, you're talkingabout people that throw flaming skulls at each
other, right, But all ofthis led to something called the e SRB,

(15:24):
and so this is a video gamerating board that ended up kind of
establishing rules and guidelines for content moderationin video games. And so that's when
you say like T for teens onvideo games, that's the esr B stuff.
Yep. Now, at this point, violent video games are just exploding
on the market. There are tonsof them. They're selling extremely well,

(15:45):
they're very popular, they're making itin two lots of homes. Nineteen ninety
five, US violent crimes are gentlybut steadily declining, and this game comes
out called Phantasmagoria. This is alsoa bloody sex crime game depicting violence of
women. Similarly, and rightfully,I think pulled from Shelves for its violence
depictions. Yes, also, andthis is something that like he has come

(16:07):
up multiple times across multiple episodes,and I think it's worth pointing out here
as this quick side note. Whenwe do talk about violence, it is
important to note that ads are alsoviolent. So I apologize that we're imparting
this violence on you, but hereare some ads we are back. So
we've been talking about the history ofviolence and video games, and we just

(16:32):
covered up through nineteen ninety five andwe're moving on from that, so or
we got into nineteen ninety five.At this point, there are way too
many games to even attempt to summarizethem all that are out. But we've
got things like Doom Quake, CastleWolfenstein, Redneck, ram Page, Nightmare
Creatures, and Resident Evil. Andthis is the point at which someone brings
the first lawsuit against video games.Did you ever play Castle Wolfenstein? I

(16:56):
did. Actually, that was oneof the few on this list I have
played. That game was super fun. I mean it was bonkers, but
it was super fun. Yeah,it is ridiculous. You know what,
I'm not going to spoil up foreverybody listeners, Go look at Castle Wolfenstein
and see what it is. Itis absurd. Yeah. Now, in
nineteen ninety eight is the first releaseof Grand Theft Auto, which really revolutionizes
the idea in a mainstream way ofwhat video games can be. It's incredibly

(17:21):
popular and sequels at additional games immediatelygo into development. I mean I remember
in the two thousands playing Vice CityNonStop. Yeah, it was one of
those games. It was like ittook it took the world by storm.
But nineteen ninety eight is the firstedition of Grand Theft Auto. Yep,
okay, nineteen ninety nine. Thereis another trigger warning for people who have
a hard time hearing depictions of gunviolence. Understandably, this is a short

(17:42):
one, so maybe I don't knowa minute in the head, alright.
So nineteen ninety nine, two studentsat Columbine High School and Colorado go on
a shooting spree of their school,and then it turns out later that they
found that the students were big fansof the Doom game, as most people
were, which causes a frenzied panicabout video game violence in relation to violent
crime. And although this was ahorrific tragedy, it should be noted at

(18:04):
this point violent crime in the USis the lowest it had been since the
nineteen seventies. That's a huge thing. And also, you know, there
was a lot of pre planning andstuff before they showed up. So yeah,
it's hard to say that like therewas, and we'll talk about some
of the studies and stuff, butdoom is not the problem. They were
not going to hell. Now.In two thousand and one, under pressure
from Congress and the public, theSurgeon General is tasked with conducting empirical research

(18:27):
to determine the extent to which violentvideo games cause violent behavior, and in
his study returns a few important findings. This is kind of where we're going
to start getting in some interesting data. A. Video games have no discernible
impact on violent behavior. This wasa study done in two thousand and one.
Okay, r B media depictions mayhave some impact, but it is
very small, only about two percenton average. And see, the most

(18:49):
significant risk factors are home life andmental stability. I want to make sure
that we pay to that mental stabilitypiece too, because that is a current
argument gun violence as well. Yes, that is true. Okay, so
we're at two thousand and one,and I think we're gonna have to kind
of skip ahead a little bit.Suffice it to say that over the next
couple of decades, despite an exponentiallygrowing population, exponential growth of availability in

(19:15):
sales of violent video games, ratesof violence and violent crime in the United
States continues to tick downwards to thelowest level seen since the nineteen sixties.
Interestingly, and this is just correlational. So there's no reason I think this
is causal. But I still thinkit's interesting if you look at the data,
whenever there is an increase in videogame sales, there's a small decrease

(19:40):
in violent crime, And whenever thereis a slump in video game sales,
there's a small increase in violent crime. Yeah. So I mean, just
take it, take it how youwill. I think it's just worth noting
that, Like I have this includethe little graph here, Like you see
the biggest jumps in video game salescorrelated, just correlated, not saying they're

(20:02):
cause late related, but just foodfor thought, correlated with the biggest decreases
in violent crime and vice versa.Like just on this graph, if I
look at twenty two eleven, twotwelve, like, those are the three
data points that stick out to methe most. Yeah, you see there
is a certain amount in twenty ten, violent crimes are low. Sales increase
in twenty eleven, and violent crimesdecrease, and then sales decrease in twenty

(20:25):
twelve, and there is a slightincrease in violent crimes. Yeah, super
interesting stuff. If you're looking atthe very first time we saw a decrease
in video game sales in two thousandand five, this graph starts at nineteen
ninety eight, is the first timethat violent crimes actually tick up from the
trend that they had been one.So they had been decreasing until two thousand
and four, and two thousand andfive, video game sales decrease, violent
crime slightly increases. So odd,so interesting, right, just a weird,

(20:49):
just a weird correlation. I thoughtit was useful to point out food
for thought. Yeah. Now,meanwhile, some states successfully temporarily are able
to ban or limit the sales ofviolent video games. These end up being
struck down the court for multiple reasons. Sometimes it's like interfering with businesses.
Sometimes it's freedom of speech, likethere's there's all kinds of stuff that kind
of like get involved here. Soa lot of times those violent video games

(21:10):
were still able to make it outinto the market. Yeah, and also
nearly impossible to regulate, Like ifa state that banned it next door the
state didn't, people just cross theborder and picked it up in a different
state and it like had no effectwhatsoever, you know. Or at this
point, like it's getting easier andeasier to order things online, Like they'll
just order it online, and it'slike that's not something they can easily regulate.
So right, Yeah, many politicians, parents, academicians, if you

(21:34):
will, speak out against violent videogames. And meanwhile, the scientists and
psychologists continue to run study after studyand are finding no link between playing violent
video games and violent behavior. Notreally, but we will dig into what
some of the research that Kevin wastalking about might have been some of those
studies. But I think it's importantto note too, violent crimes only started

(21:57):
to increase again in sixteen. Huh. Was there anything major that happened in
twenty sixteen that we are not awareof or that maybe is slipping my mind.
I can't think of anything in particularthat would have led to that what
happened in twenty sixteen, I don'tknow. I don't know either. I

(22:17):
guess we'll never know, but Ithink it's worth asking, and you kind
of already alluded this. We shouldask everybody have you played video games?
I played video games my whole life. I had a sega at a PlayStation.
I was obsessed with Tony Hawk,like I never played the games that
were like more violent games like Icould. I was really good at Mortal
Kombat, but I didn't really likefighting games. I liked platformers. I

(22:38):
like Sonic the Hedgehog. I likedMario A Super Mario Brothers, and I
like Tony Hawk a lot, andin Crash Bandicoot like I played those games
a lot when I was a kid. Sure, I never really got into
I think we had a PlayStation twoand I kind of left it like that's
where my video game kind of stuffleft, like I left it there.
And then when I got kids,I started playing the Wii again, which
was like, okay, I'm likesword fighting on an island with people,

(23:00):
but it's not not real sorts,you know, with we sports. That's
my experience playing video games in general, Like I played all those and you
know, I would tell you rightnow plays on it. The Hedgehog did
not make me run faster, andit did not make me destroy robots.
So two of the ones I probablyplayed the most is I played a lot
of Mario. I loved Mario prettymuch anything, And I also loved Halo.

(23:22):
When I on Xbox, Halo isa big thing. I played through
at least the first three Halo games. I played pretty religiously, you know,
campaign and multiplayer and whatever. Iloved. I loved all the Halo
stuff. And I also was apretty big fan of Resident Evil, and
specifically I really liked the Resident Evilgames that were very puzzly. Yeah,
it was like find a thing thatgoes with the thing, so you can

(23:44):
open the thing to get to thenext thing you need to find to finish
this other And there's a lot ofthis, like collecting stuff to solve these
little puzzles in the game, andthat I really enjoyed. And then just
the zombie theme is one that I'vetalked about before, is something I just
I really enjoyed. So I likedall of those. So the first person
shooter of Halo, I did playa little Call of Duty, but it
was not like a major thing forme. I was much more into the

(24:06):
synthetic Halo world. I thought wasa really fun concept. So that's why
I enjoyed that one so much.Yeah, I think that makes sense.
See, I was always like,you know, I was never very good
at like pointing and aiming. Likethere were and there were some games that
came out that were really cool.Like I remember being super stoked about Metal
Gear Solid, thinking it was reallyfun to hide in a cardboard box.
I remember Grant that Auto coming out, and not because I could like run

(24:29):
people over h people, but becauseyou could steal cars and just like just
hit ramps and stuff like that wasmore fun to me, right, Like
the Twisted Metal was an example ofthat, where it's like it's just a
ridiculous over the top game where you'relike there was never a point in time
where I was like, you knowwhat I should do. I should go
get an ice cream truck and puta rocket launcher in it. Yeah,
it's one of those things where Ialways had fun, but it was It's
like to me, it's like movieswhere it's like, you know, it's

(24:52):
fake, like you don't like yoususpend belief while you're playing it, but
then when you go back to reality, you're like it's fine. Yeah,
that's a great comparison. Actually,and I feel very similarly and I the
same thing as like I liked.I don't know, it's like problem solving,
puzzle solving a little bit, thatsort of thing about it. But
also, yeah, and I actuallyfeel like we've sort of danced around this
idea of playing violent video games,Like I thought. I thought they were

(25:14):
a lot of fun, the onesthat I did play. Yeah, but
I a poor violence. I wouldcall myself a pacifist, A mildly extreme
one. Yeah, that's what anoxymoron. Mildly extreme. Anyway, that
was at least my experience with it. But that's very anecdotal. We should
ask science, what do you sayscience? In this moment, I will
stand in a science For one thing, it is difficult to do research on

(25:37):
this because so many people play videogames. You don't have good controls in
place, and particularly among populations ofinterest, it's very difficult to gather that
information get those people into the studies. But I think it's worth asking the
question of like, what is theargument here? And essentially the argument is
that people are saying the violence andvideo games primes aggressive behavior, that it

(25:59):
functions as a practice or a habitbuilding around violent action and that it desensitizes
people to violence and lowers morality.That's what people are kind of arguing like,
it makes you want to be moreaggressive, it gives you practice and
habit forming activities to make you moreaggressive or around violent action, and it
makes you care about violent action less. Right. And the priming is like
giving someone a relation ahead of time, some kind of like experience ahead of

(26:23):
time that it's likely to affect themin the future. For example, I
randomly say strings and then ask youto name an instrument. You are likely
to say a guitar or a violinor a mandolin maybe yeah, as opposed
to something like a trumpet or adrum or something like that. And it's
just because the relation you have asstrings, and even though you weren't thinking,
oh, I should name a stringinstrument, and it was just like

(26:45):
that is now part of what's atstrength when asked to come up with something
random, and so it's more likelyto be And that's actually how some of
the mentalism magic tricks work because they'lldo a lot of priming to get you
to say or choose something very specificright now. Again, so we're digging
into the research part of this thescience, As we said in two thousand
and one, the Surgeon General conductedresearch which turned up no connection. The

(27:07):
data not only don't correlate, they'reactually inversely related. As we mentioned earlier,
as we're talking about that, superimportant to note. Yes, let's
go ahead and go into some ofthe studies, because there are studies that
seem to suggest this link between violentvideo games and violent behavior through that priming
effect, and so we don't haveto talk through a few of those really
quick. There is a two eighteenstudy that found that there was an increase

(27:30):
in violent behavior among teens who playedviolent video games, specifically that they were
more likely to be sent to theprinciple's office or getting fights. It's important
to notes when looking at this research, the effect was tiny. It was
technically statistically significant, but there wasvery very small change in the group that
was more likely too. It waslike two percent more likely to than the

(27:53):
other group or something. And sojust leaving out the actual number, they
just say more likely to it itsounds like a lot. It wasn't a
lot. It was just technically statisticallysignificant, right. Other important feature of
this study was that although they showedthere are more likely to get in trouble.
There was no association whatsoever between playingviolent video games and violent crime.
Okay, so that's a good placeto start. Now. Several other studies

(28:17):
also found causal links between violent videogames and violent behavior, mostly things like
hypothetical scenarios, brain waves, andheart rate. They've found that, but
never actual correlations too violent crimes.And that's really interesting to point out there
was never a causal link to violentcrimes or even correlational. Interestingly, almost

(28:37):
every one of them was from thesame author, Craig Anderson. Anderson has
been on a crusade against video gamessince two thousand and seven, producing study
after study at their study showing howexposure to violent video games cause violent behaviors.
Yeah, and so just to sortof talk a little bit more about
this because I don't I don't knowif I planned to bring it up again,

(28:59):
But as I said, it washypothetical. It was like after playing
violent video games, they would askquestions like, would you be willing to
if someone took something from you,squirt them with a water bottle, or
even give them an electric shock.They didn't do those things. They didn't
even pretend like they were doing thosethings. They gave them the hypothetical situation
of, like, do you thinkthat you would do those things right now?

(29:19):
And they saw that there was anincrease in people saying that yes,
they would was basically how they didit. And again there was no actual
association between actual behavior. It wasall that hypothetical stuff. That's so wild
to me. Now we'll say this, Okay, So, like going on
Anderson and his cronies, I feellike cronies is a good word. Minions
is another good word too, Butlike, yeah, his folks, his

(29:41):
research people, crones is good,cronies, minions, whatever you will call
them. They have been heavily andwidely criticized by the scientific community for overstating
his claims, as well as amyopic interpretation of his data. Basically,
what they're saying is is they're makingsweeping generalizations about data that they have a
very picular bias towards. Yeah,they kind of just did their best to

(30:03):
line up to get the results thatthey wanted, and everyone's sort of calling
bs on that. But I thinkit's probably worth also unpacking what the word
myopic means. Myopic is a reallygood word, right, It's one of
my favorites. Nice, I don'tuse it nearly often enough. One definition
of myopic is near sighted. Butthe yeah metaphorically, Yeah. The actual

(30:30):
definition that we're looking at here,though, is lacking imagination, foresight,
or intellectual insight. And the waythat I kind of look at it is
like myopic is it's very narrowed.Yes, it's like you almost like got
blinders on. You can't see anyother data or you're not willing to see
any other data because you are likeyou lack the intellectual insight to consider any
other options. Yeah, I'm veryfrequently use it. And heart used to

(30:52):
say like narrow minded, so hyperfocused on what you want to see that
you don't see anything else. Likeanother way to look is like single cited
right, like a cyclops. Youwouldn't say cyclopic, you'd say that cyclops
was myopic. I believe so.I maybe I don't know, I just
made that up. I just wantedto figure out how to talking about cyclopses,
cyclop cyclopics, cyclopads, yeah,cyclopeans. All right, we need

(31:15):
to figure out what the correct pluralof cyclopius nous is. And in the
meantime, and speaking of a lackof intellectualism here some ads. All right,
So, as promised, we havelearned that the plural of cyclops is

(31:36):
apparently cyclopes, or that's at leastthe generally agreed upon plural. Yeah,
I don't like that. If youwere just joined, I don't know how
you'd just be joining us right now. But if you were somehow just joining
us, you'd be not I don'tthink you would realize that we were talking
about video games, but we are. We just happened to also be talking
about cyclopes. Yeah, it's it'sa wild time over here at why we
do what we do. So talkingabout the literature around violence and video games,

(31:59):
the literature this doesn't actually and couldn'tactually measure violence. So and you'll
find this is like the case withlike a lot of violent crimes. A
lot of times it's very difficult tostudy violent crimes because they usually only happened
once, and so like, becausethey only happened once, you can't identify
trends among individuals. You have tolook at like other things, and they
doesn't really it's very difficult. Butwhat they do typically is because they can't

(32:22):
measure actual violence, they measure proxies. And one proxy was to ask about
thoughts and feelings related to violence.And like you just mentioned before the ad,
they were asking people after they playedviolent video games. They were asking
them whether or not they would dosomething that would be considered violent. Yeah,
and actually so I couldn't remember ifwe were going to bring this up
again, but essentially you're right thatwe did. What they did is they
had players in groups where the onegroup played violent games the other one played

(32:44):
non violent games. That they createda mock or hypothetical situation in which they
asked the players to think of harmingsomeone by either blasting them with a loud
sound or making them meat hot sauce. That was their violence that they did
to them. Right, They neversaw another person to have these things done
to them. They did not witnessor directly inflict any harm or see any
effects of harm. They were justasked about these these hypothetical scenarios. And

(33:05):
so sure, that also to meseems I mean, eating hot sauce seems
fundamentally different from shooting someone. Yeah, to me, at least maybe someone
else sees them as being similar,But I think they're different a little bit.
Yeah, it's not worth doing areally deep sidebar on this right now,
But there is probably a conversation tobe had about how people are to
one another when they're not face toface. So if I asked about,
like, would you do this toX person that you don't like, you'd

(33:29):
be much more willing to not faceto face that person say yes, I
would do harm to that person.Versus when you actually talk to someone.
It's really hard to bring that levelof cruelty to another person when you're standing
face to face with them. Andthis is actually kind of similar to road
rage. We see other people ascars and not as people, and like
people obviously do get they'll get outand they'll leal at each other, and

(33:50):
they'll get in fights, and horriblethings have happened. But in my experience,
limited as it is, and asbiased coming from me as it is,
as like, when you actually aretalking to someone and face to face,
I'm not screaming them calling them names, even if I'm mad at them,
right right, Like, I'm havingto sort of problem solve the situation.
And I think that that's a normalthing to do. Yeah, maybe

(34:12):
I'm unique. Yeah, I meanI feel like that's like a humane thing
to do. Yeah, I thinkone of the most important things to unpack
and have a discussion around is thata thoughts and actions are not the same
in a fundamentally important way. Weoften think and say things when we are
frustrated or in any state of highstress that we do not act on.
Okay, that's important, and bethe effect of people reported more violent thoughts

(34:35):
only lasted between about four to thirtyminutes. It was temporary, and so
watching a sad movie might also makeyou temporarily sad, but it doesn't cause
depression, right, And I thinkthat's an important thing. These are fleeting,
passing emotional moments. I will saythis too when you're talking about like
psychological intervention a lot of times,like one of the core fundamental things about
like doing therapy is that you understandthe fundamental difference between thoughts, actions,

(34:58):
and feelings, Like they all produceddifferent responses and when you're kind of like
examining them, and so they arefundamentally different. Emotional responses versus logical responses
versus behavioral responses are three very differentthings. Yeah, and they teach that
in basic psychology interventions, right,So I'm shocked that like psychologists are like
missing that well, the myopic antivideo game activists are missing it. Yeah,

(35:21):
yeah, for sure, another triggerwarning for violent gun violence. This
is a sort of single point here. So again, short after the Sandy
Hook shooting in Newtown, Connecticut,the media jumped all over the report that
the shooter at Sandy Hook was ahuge video game player. However, although
he did have some of the standardwhat you might call violent video games,
such as Call of Duty, whatthey didn't really report and a lot of

(35:43):
people didn't think about, was hisfavorite game that he played far and above
everything else. And what I sawin one place is as much as ten
hours per day was Dance Dance Revolution. Yeah, very different. Now,
that's not in the general category ofviolent video games that I'm aware of.
I mean, unless you are intodance fighting, Okay, is that something

(36:05):
you can do in dance dance?I don't think you can do in dance
dance, but you can do itif you are part of West Side Story,
okay. Or Grease. I feellike they dance fought in Grease.
Yeah. I think you're right.Okay, But I think that's an important
point. If your argument is violentvideo games, then we have provided there
are multiple cases where that has notbeen the situation. Like dance dance revolution
is not a causal thing for videogames for for like I'm sorry for shootings

(36:25):
doesn't make any sense. And again, I think this goes back to the
idea that other scientists have largely foundthe opposite results to the small cadre of
anti video game activists such as Andersonand One study on priming in video games
had players play a game depicting drivingand avoiding collisions on a road and another
in which the players were a mouseavoiding a cat and what the researchers hypothesized

(36:47):
that, based on priming, theplayer should more quickly recognize words associated with
the genre of the game that youwere playing. Makes sense, right,
So you're playing a game where yourcat and mouse, you're to recognize words
that are related that. To sayanother way, players of the driving game
should be faster associating words relates totheir game categories. It is keys,
wheels, roadsigns for driving and leashtoy and food scraps for cat and mouse

(37:09):
games. But not only did theplayers not half faster reaction times to their
related words, they were slower atthe related words than non related words,
indicating a negative priming effect, sothe opposite of priming in that situation,
which is pretty cool. Yeah.So, whereas the other ones were indirectly
measuring priming by creating a hypothetical scenariounrelated to what they were doing, I

(37:30):
mean, except abstractly, and thisone they created a direct priming comparison of
like to like, where you shouldhave add basically a very easy, observable
robust effect, and they didn't getit. And that was because what that
means is that there was not arobust effect and that priming is not happening,
at least not in the way thatthose other people were hypothesizing. Right

(37:52):
would right, These kind of goin order. The next one is a
two thousand and seven meta analysis thatfound significant publication bias, and the study
is that were likely to get publishedif they had a positive correlation rather than
studies that had a negative one,meaning that when these studies were being done
and showed no connection between video gamesand violence, they weren't being published as
often as the ones that were showingthat correlation. That is super important because

(38:15):
that's telling you, like, youknow, there's research out there, but
it's not showing like, what's actuallyhappening now. A two thousand and seven
experiment randomized one hundred and three youngadults in the groups of no video games
and non violent video games, violentvideo games were the player is a good
guy, and violent video games inwhich the player is a bad guy.
So you've got four groups there.Afterward, they exposed the players to a

(38:37):
frustration task, one designed to frustratedparticipant, which is just sounds like a
personal hell for me, And theyfound that the players with the most history
with violent video games were less likelyto exhibit hostile behaviors during the frustration task.
So this is what this study found. This study found that they put
people in different categories, they intentionallyfrustrated people, and the people with the

(39:00):
least violent or hostile behaviors were thepeople that played violent video games. Yeah,
and who had like the longest historyof playing violent video games as well.
Yeah, Because it actually didn't evenmatter what group they were necessarily a
part of, if they had along history of playing violent video games,
and whether or not they were justless likely to exhibit hostile behaviors when you
tried to frustrate them after playing alot of those games. Right, we're

(39:22):
still in two thousand and seven.Two thousand and seven Swedish study reviewed one
hundred and sixty one papers on violenceof video games. Without going into it
in depth, the short summary isthat most studies did not attempt to control
for factors that were the most likelyto impact the violent behavior, or they
had other methodological flaws that made themimpossible to interpret in any meaningful way.

(39:43):
One of the more interesting findings waswhen they looked at twelve longitudinal studies and
most people are going to know,but that just means they collected data over
many years to look for trends overtime, but only three of those twelve
studies included data about mental health andhome life, and two of those three
found that those factors accounted for violence, and the video games did not.

(40:04):
So out of one hundred and sixtyone papers, they didn't even look at
mental health as a relevant factor forviolence, and the ones that did that
was the factor that accounted for violence. Amazing, that's a huge amount of
papers to do, Like, becauseI was just reading the men analysis.
That was like they looked at ninehundred papers and ended up with eighteen that
they could review. Like that happensa lot. Yeah, and so you're
talking one hundred and sixty one thatwere included in the study. That's a

(40:27):
lot. Yeah, the longitudinal partis really important because then that actually looks
at like maybe people say, Okay, well, maybe it looks like it's
fleeting because it's short term. Youplay a game and then you test them
and they don't really show violence,but maybe the effect compounds over time.
And we now have two studies showingthat that's not the case, That they
that the longer that they go on, the less likely they have any history

(40:49):
with violence, actual violent behavior.Amazing, all right. In twenty twelve,
a study found of six five hundredeighth graders. I found that when
you controlled for things like home lifestability, the history of trauma and challenging
behavior, and mental health, anyassociations between violent video games and violence shrank
significantly. So you found that like, oh, there were these other things
home and mental health that led tomore violence, video games not so much.

(41:14):
What this meant was the kids whowere more violent around violent video games
were just generally more violent. Yeah, And it would be like taking a
bunch of left handed people that werealso illiterate and then showing them that they
were poor spellers and concluded that itwas because they were left handed. They
were poor spellers because they were alliterate, and they just happened to be left
handed. The violent people just happenedto be playing violent video games. They

(41:37):
were doing aggressive things because their lifecircumstances foster aggression. That's simple again.
Mental health, home life seems tobe a running theme here that pretty much
accounts for it whenever they look forit. A twenty fifteen study by Marki
and colleagues in a journal published bythe American Psychological Association conducted four time series

(41:58):
analyzes on violent crimes and video gamesand found not only that there was no
link, but they reported being surprisedwhen they found a negative correlation between video
games and violence, meaning that playingviolent video games and contact and experience with
them was actually correlated with decreases andviolent behavior. You know, it just
makes me go back to like politiciansneed to take basic science tests. Yeah,

(42:21):
to be able to make laws onstuff, they just got to be
able to pass up basic scientists Likeyou have to be able to read an
article and interpret it, yea.And if you can't do that, then
you don't get to make decisions onthis sure, all right. So another
twenty fifteen study had participants play gamesthat were either violent or non violent and
intuitive and easy to play, orviolent or non violent but difficult and unintuitive.
They found that people were more likelyto be aggressive when the game was

(42:43):
difficult, regardless of whether the gameitself contained violence, So it didn't matter
that was violent, it was justkind of frustrating to play again frustration tests.
Further, the more skilled gamer was, the less likely they were to
be violent even when they were playinga difficult, frustrating game. Seemingly increase
game time decrease their reactivity to frustratingsituations. It's actually highlighted another potential flaw

(43:05):
in the studies that tried to linkviolent video games to violence, that they
either made the non violent games easieror at least in control for the difficulty
of the game, which is afactor that contributed. Yeah, just another
study showing that the more contact peoplehave with these the better they are handling
frustration and situations that might otherwise invokeviolent behavior in someone who has maybe predisposed

(43:27):
toward it. Playing video games atleast on these studies is like the third
or fourth one now to suggests thatit actually decrease the reactivity to those types
of triggers. Speaking of reactive triggers, prepare yourself for ads. We have

(43:49):
yet more research history to unpack,So let's get into a twenty sixteen by
Cunningham and colleagues. This was actuallyintended to validate previous lab experiments that did
show the violent games increased aggressive behavior. However, Cunningham and colleagues found that
not only was there no causal linkbetween exposure to violent video games and violent
crime, but there seemed to bethat decrease in violent behavior from playing violent

(44:13):
video games. Right. And again, I think it's worth noting that,
like overall crime, you know,we have seen for decades that like violent
crime is decreasing except for when wehit twenty sixteen, and some of these
studies are showing that even despite thatlike slight increase in violent crimes, we're
still showing kind of that trend.Now, to go further, an intensely
comprehensive twenty eighteen study by Zendel atAll conducted a series of experiments with three

(44:37):
thousand participants examining the priming effect ofviolence in video games, the relative violence
of the video game violent word associationsand other aggressive behaviors. So and of
three thousand, just to remind everybody, yeah, once again, there was
no correlation between exposure to violent videogames and aggressive this none. They found
none in three thousand people. Now, it's not worth really getting into a

(44:59):
hugely hence way. But for thoseof you super nerdy people or those who
are interested in the scientific process,there's been a trend recently in people preregistering
their studies. What that means isthat they can't try and rewrite the outcome
of their study if it doesn't showwhat they wanted to show, because they've
already basically logged it with a scientificboard of people who then kind of holding

(45:20):
onto it, and then they kindof have to just stick to their analyzes
that they were going to do.So with that in mind, a twenty
nineteen study pi Psi Bilski something likethat. Imagine a lot of consonants and
whys yes to jumble together in asoup. So that person and Weinstein they
went the extra mile and they preregisteredtheir study, which meant, as I

(45:42):
said, committed their experimental design,hypothesis, measurement, and methods for scrutiny
by a form of scientists prior tobeginning data collection so that they couldn't later
change their narrative to match the data. They included one thousand four participants and
analyze real plane data to correlate therelative violence of video games and instances of
violent behavior, finding again, nocorrelation at all, oh man, And

(46:05):
that's twenty nineteen, So we're gettingcaught up here. So another study compared
aggressive behaviors to the reality of violenceusing rag doll physics that uses simulations to
depict realistic, lifelike movements of humanbodies compared to cartoonish unrealistic violence like Golden
Eye on NCC four and saw nocorrelation to aggressiveness based on how real it
appeared. Other analyzes, even bythe Secret Service, found that school shooters

(46:30):
played relatively fewer video games than theirpeers. So we're finding studies from all
different communities they're saying the same thingexcept for this Anderson fella right, that
basically there is no relation, norelation. Yeah, okay, last point
here on our scientific studies, andthen we'll get to starting to turn the
ship toward toward a conclusion. Ifound this graph that compared the amount of

(46:53):
money spent on video games per capitaand the rates of gun violence in the
United States, Canada, the Netherlands, the UK, Australia, France,
Germany, South Korea, and Japan. And this actually put the United States
at or tied for nearly dead lastin video games spending. Those other countries
outspend us by a lot, orat least maybe one tied us, but

(47:14):
some of them, but most ofthem outspend us by a ton on their
video games, including violent video games. However, the United States was three
had a three times higher rate ofgun violence than all the other countries,
whereas the countries that spend the moston video games, which was Japan,
South Korea, and the Netherlands,had among the least gun violence. It's

(47:34):
actually ninety six times less for Japan. Now that is to be fair.
Yeah, So to be fair,most of the other countries only spent a
little more than the United States onvideo games and also had low rates of
gun violence. So say number one, I mean, it just goes.

(47:57):
It goes to show that like timeand time again, where there's this narrative
where people just are are trusting peoplewho are not experts on it. I
mean, you have this narrative thatcomes out from people that just don't know
what they're talking about, and theyglom onto it because it sounds scary and
it's an easy scapegoat, and atthe end of the day, they're wrong.
All the data suggests otherwise ninety sixtimes less. Yeah, that's crazy.
Oh, it's so frustrating living ina scientifically illiterate country. God well

(48:23):
as scientists and specifically as behaviorists,let's look at this from like a behavioral
perspective. And I think they're likelooking at because I think we're gonna be
really grounded to like, what issomeone what's really happening, what are they
really doing, and getting really focusedon the actual behaviors, what those behaviors
look like, and how they functionfor someone when they're playing video games,

(48:44):
and how that relates to things likeviolent behavior. And I think it's important
to breakdown what is happening behaviorally whensomeone's playing the game to understand its potential
relation to violence and aggressive behavior.Right, So there are things that they
are doing generally, and there arethings that are doing specifically. Now,
specifically, when someone is playing videogame, they're usually sitting or laying down,
They're staring in one direction, barelyblinking, pressing some buttons, moving

(49:08):
knobs, probably drinking Code Orange mountaindew. And they probably snack on unhealthy
foods. So that's usually like thecontext in which a video game is played
in most situations. Did they haveCode Orange? I thought it was only
Code red. Did I say CodeOrange? I meant to say Code red.
I but listening to the band CodeOrange a lot lately, so that's
probably where that is. Okay,I thought maybe you're thinking of Agent Orange.
I don't know if there wasn't Orangemountain dew. I don't think it

(49:29):
was Code orange though, all right, Well, anyway, that was the
specific part. So then they controlto some extent the movement of images on
a screen, usually to complete somesort of task. They might see cig
images of blood or other visa orviolent actions, or they might see other
things of course, like coins flyingup in the air and disappearing above their
heads, etc. Free guys.Kind of a fun depiction of like a

(49:51):
lifelike depiction of video games in thatway, But that's just that's sort of
then what they see when they're staringahead on blinking at the screen right now.
Generally they are often given some objectiveand a way to earn points and
resources. Then they practice pressing buttonsat time intervals to complete their objectives while
earnings the most points. Like,that's really kind of the things like some
achievements, some points you're trying todo some goal, Like every video game

(50:15):
is just like a goal towards something, right, Yeah, unless you're playing
Animal Crossing, then it's just kindof like the most zen Nirvana game ever.
That's really great. Yeah, Oftenplayers get into a flow state in
which they are primarily focused on completingtheir objective, whatever it may be.
What their characters are doing and whatthey see while doing it are kind of
incidental. Yeah, it's really justabout like complete thing, do thing like

(50:37):
whatever that might be. There's somemotivation to like have objects on screen align
in a particular way to produce outcomeon screen right, and how exactly it
looks kind of doesn't matter if we'respeaking generally about what the experience is of
just doing it right right. Soit might be things like harvesting corn or
building a house. It might bethings like wielding a saber to slice a

(50:59):
bunch of people in half. Thepoint is that you accomplish task A by
doing task or accomplished task B bydoing task an. It's just kind of
the gist of it, right,So, no matter how realistic the graphics
become, we understand intuitively that it'snot real. We are actually practicing those
behaviors in those contexts. Right.If we could learn these behaviors effectively from

(51:20):
games, then we should. Ishould be able to competently handle a gun,
a sword, a boomerang, agrappling hook, an alien laser sniper,
and probably fly a plane. AndI can confidently tell you that I
can do none of those things withany amount of competence. Have you tried,
though, just the alien laser snipers? Oh yeah, yeah. I
should also be desensitive to violence.But on the contrary, as I mentioned,

(51:42):
I'm a pacifist and I've gotten tothe point where real blood actually makes
me nauseous and queasy. And Ihate watching anything performed or on screen when
I know or believe that someone isactually getting hurt. I don't. I
don't want to watch it. LikeI can't. I can't sit down and
see it. I have trouble watchingthe news for this reason times, like
I just I can't emotionally handle thesite of harm actually happening to people.

(52:06):
I don't think it's funny. Idon't think it's fun I don't have that
gross like not not gross. Imean like I'm not belittling people here,
but I don't have that impulse tolook at gross things. I fure very
very traumatical, not not very traumaticin the sense that, like other people
have experienced trauma, but like Ijust I avoid it so much because it
makes me feel so horrible. It'ssuper aversive for you. I get it.

(52:28):
I think the only like you know, I never understood like people popping,
but like one thing I do understandis like if somebody has like a
dilated pour of winer, I'm like, Okay, that looks satisfying, that
looks really good. But like otherdow, I'm like, yeah, I
don't like gross things either. I'mjust like it. Like I remember watching
Fear Factor. Yeah, I wouldgag when people would like start gagging on
screen, Like I don't like watchingpeople here, but like even people being
uncomfortable. Oh no, I don'tlike that, so but I will.

(52:50):
I would quite happily like just shredthe crap out of like you know,
use my sword to dismember some alien, split them, you know head detail
and yeah, and let their gutsspill all of the ground and stographic doesn't
bother me in the side, itis because like I know, there's a
difference between that and reality, right, like right, not a big stretch.
That's a very easy thing to do. I think to your point too,

(53:13):
like practicing the actual behaviors or evenwitnessing them in their actual setting are
much more effective than forming those newhabits. Like so, you're not going
to get that from sitting and playinga video game where you're just pressing buttons
unless it's like a simulator, right, And we in simulators are very different,
like when you have like flight simulatorsthat are designed to be like a
particular context and in a safe space, But simply pressing buttons in a simulation
are not the same thing, particularlywhen the motive is actually to solve a

(53:37):
puzzle and not just kill people,right, Like, that's it's a very
different kind of experience, right exactly. Further, if the theme of the
video games influences behavior, then weshould have had an explosion and people people
starting to work on farms after Farmvillecame out, and actually we have had
a we're struggling to find enough farmersto feed all the people in our country

(53:58):
and in the world. You know. In the day, Pennanteller did this
really interesting bit on their TV showBullshit, and when they gave a ten
year old an assault rifle to shootit targets, the kid pulled the trigger
once, put the gun down andstarted crying. The poor kid. Also,
in response to politicians assinine claims andcalls to create realistic games, Pedanteller
designed a game to reflect reality,which was just an uneventful, real time

(54:21):
simulation of an eight hour drive throughthe empty desert between Tucson, Arizona,
and Las Vegas. Sounds like ablast. Yeah, that's the actual the
whole game. You just sit ona bus drive from point point. That's
great. It takes eight hours.They just have the landscape rolling slowly by
as you go. It's fantastic.I love that. Yeah, that's a
realistic video game. And I actuallythink that they've they've like updated the versions

(54:45):
of like new graphics and stuff.I think there's actually some Easter eggs and
like some of the songs that willplay but anyway on the radio that is.
But yeah. And I forgot tomention when we were talking about this
kid on that episode that they didthat this was a kid who loved playing
like first person shooter games. Yeah, And the moment this kid actually held
a gun, he was like,I don't want anything to do with this.
This is terrifying, right, andlike, yeah, it did not

(55:05):
have the intended effect of turning himinto some monster, like it hasn't for
the millions of other people who alsoplay violent video games. Right. I
have not gone to join a ninjaclan to fight a rival ninja clan in
internal combat to protect the realm Ihave. That's not happened yet. I
don't believe it. I see yourmembership card in the back of Oh yeah,
yeah, yeah, I'm hanging outwith sub zero because I like the
color blue. Well, we shouldprobably take a moment to recap our thoughts

(55:30):
on this and first suffer through somemore ads. All right, what are
I take homes here? What havewe learned about violent and violent video games?
Really? The main take on pointof all of this is the research
in our understanding of behavior pretty clearlyshow there's no correlation between violent behavior and

(55:54):
violent video games. Like we justdon't see that. And if there is
one, it is that there issome evidence people playing violent video games are
less likely to engage in violent behaviorless likely. But what does predict violent
behavior is trauma, mental health issues, being a victim or a participant of
or in aggressive behaviors. Like that'sthat's what you're going to see a lot

(56:14):
of those kind of predictors, thosefactors. But going after video games as
a boogeyman does not lead to meaningfuloutcomes to protect kids. It actually takes
attention away and resources away from factorsthat are causing violent behavior. It takes
away research funds that are like isnow people are going, okay, like
we've got a research just to provethat you're wrong, because this is very
clearly wrong. And that's just moremoney that can be spent on doing like

(56:34):
research that would be helpful for someone. Yeah, So rather than doing research
on what does lead to violence andunderstanding those factors, we are spending all
the time and wasting time on thatresearch that shows the video games simply do
not lead to violence time and timeagain, study after study. I mean,
there is no other take on pointfor me other than like, violent
behavior is not caused by video gameshands down definitively. Yeah, I mean

(56:59):
things, this world will look verydifferent and video games could be that influential.
I mean, honestly, it kindof goes back to like and we
talked about subliminal messaging in a veryearly episode a long time ago, and
subliminal messages like they just like ifthey work, the effect is so so
tiny it's almost negligible, if notcompletely negligible, And like you do get

(57:21):
that little bit of a priming effectsometimes, but like the millions of dollars
that you would have tried to spendon advertisements to like get subliminal messages of
cost, like your return on investmentis basically nothing. You just you just
threw money out right down the toiletand flush it away. And like you
can't get it with subliminal messaging.But you also don't even get it with
this like explicit sort of graphic depictionbecause that's just not how behavior works.

(57:43):
We don't learn that well from likethese total mock scenarios that are just sort
of puzzle solving. Now you mightget much better at solving puzzles, sure,
and probably like figuring out how likedesigners are going to align task be
to be complete did by finishing taskA first, and you'll start to like
look for those patterns and how thosepuzzles are arranged, and you'll probably get

(58:06):
really good at that. Maybe videogame players are better at escape rooms.
I would love to see if someone'sdone that study, right, But it's
just like the actual behaviors are engagingin do not. They're not close enough.
They don't simulate the scenario close enoughto make it have even behavioral sense
that you would have those outcomes.And then the research bears that out too.
You know, we can go intoanecdotal reports about like growing up in

(58:30):
a video game generation and like therise of like mass shootings in the last
few years. Like we can totallydo that and you could see that,
you know, like our generation ofpeople and like the generation of kids that
kind of grew up from the eightiestill now grew up with video games as
being kind of this like the omnipresentactivity that has existed. Now you're not
seeing me go out and eat abunch of yellow dots, and you're not

(58:51):
seeing me go join ninja clan,and we've already kind of established that,
right, But the truth is it'slike you're finding the countries that spend more
time and more money on video gameshave less violent crime. So there's like
this negative correlation. So like it'sthe polar opposite of what people are saying
about video games. In the UnitedStates, we are spending less money and
having more violent crimes occur than anyother country at this point in time.

(59:13):
So I just it just it's oneof those things where it's I wish people
would just read like I wish likeany of these people that were like making
these claims would just read sure andthey would find these answers. Yeah,
all right, Well I think wecould probably, as I said at the
beginning of this, we could talkabout video games all day and that would
be fun. But we're going togo ahead and I think close it out
now because our objective here was toexplore the research between violence and video games,

(59:37):
and I think that we're pretty conclusivelyfound that video games do not cause
violence. And as I said,I would be compelled by sufficient evidence,
and it just doesn't exist. Solike until that evidence is there, and
it's gonna it has a lot ofother evidence to overcome. At this point,
I'm going to be on the sideof where the science says, which
is that video games do not causeviolence. And we like to give a

(59:57):
recommendations. We like to recommend somethings. Sometimes those recommendations are on theme.
Sometimes they're completely unrelated. Mine's goingto be completely unrelated. But before
we get into those recommendations, Iwould like to say that if you liked
what you heard today, you wouldlike to support the show. You can
join us on Patreon, pick upsome merch like and subscribe, leave rating
and review of People who join uson Patreon get these extra perks. They
get early release of episodes, theyget add free episodes, they get behind

(01:00:22):
the scenes content, more open tosuggestions of new things people like to see.
If we get enough patrons, we'regoing to hang out with you all,
maybe we would do something where youget to sort of sit in while
we're recording and you can sort ofsee the sausage being made. If that's
a thing you're into, Yeah,and that might be a fun thing that
we do for patrons. Who knows. We're up to suggestions, but you
feel free to join us over there. Thanks to the people who have already

(01:00:43):
supported us on Patreon. Mike mMegan Layla, Mike t Justin, Kim,
Josh, The Daily BA, Brad, Stephanie, Olivia, and Brian.
Thank you all so much for beingwho you are and helping us do
what we do. Absolutely you arewhy we do what we do. And
then I've always got to say thankyou to my team. Editing and production
by Justin Greenhouse, writing, factchecking by Shane Jess and myself. And

(01:01:06):
now let's get to some recommendations.Recommendations, all right, So my recommendation
is very on brand now because ofthis game, I have gone and bought
a sword in the Shield and Ihave traveled to High Rule. This video
game is called Zelda, a Linkto the Past. It is a Super

(01:01:28):
Nintendo game. It is not Tearsof the Kingdom, which is a new
one. It is a Super Nintendogame and I never played it when I
was a kid, but I've beenplaying it lately and it's really good.
It's like one of the best videogames I've ever played. It's so much
fun. There's so much to it. Like if you're not familiar with it,
there's like this really cool thing whereyou feel like you beat the game
and you beat the last Boston andit goes like, oh, there's the
dark world and there's like three quartersmore of a game. Yeah, like

(01:01:52):
hidden in this game. It's sogood and it's like really complicated and a
lot of fun in a very expansiveworld. So I strongly recommended it.
Fun. Yeah, I love thatgame when I was a kid. Okay,
I'm recommending as I'm want to do. I Actually I'm surprised it took
me this long, but I'm recommendingthe Guardians of the Galaxy Volume three movie.
Excellent, excellent. So my experienceof this was I loved Guardians of

(01:02:15):
the Galaxy. The first one Iwas like game changer, this is like
the new direction. Volume two Iwas kind of I was a little more
lukewarm on I didn't love it quiteas much. It was like, had
a lot of fun stuff, butthere are some things that I sort of
like, hey, I don't knowabout all of that, but it was
still good, Like it was stillyou know, perfectly great as a movie
goes. Yeah, I just likedthe first one first. The third one,

(01:02:35):
Wow, does it go in adifferent direction. And it is just
I don't know how to really justdescribe it, except it's just it's so
different. It's so creative. It'sso I don't know, they handled it
so well. I loved how theywrote the story. I loved how the
adventure played out. But it reallyfelt like, let's see what else we
can do with these characters beyond justput them in these situations where they're like,
oh, now we're going to cometogether and team up and put some

(01:02:59):
people out. It's actually more like, well, let's rally behind this other
cause that's kind of incidental to thefate of the universe, but does happen
to tie in with sort of thebig bad And you know, I don't
know. I just thought it wasit was such a unique, refreshing take
on the story, and I thoughtit was very well done. Love the
characters, love the development. Yeah, just really cool. So Guardians the

(01:03:20):
Galaxy Volume three awesome. Yeah,it was a perfect end to that trilogy.
And you know, the Christmas Specialwas a lot of fun too,
and you saw glimpses of like leadinginto like the fun of this story.
Yeah, like you could kind ofsee, like, you know, it's
like, oh, this is whatthe Guardians are about, like their dysfunctional
family, and they work really welltogether when they decide to work really well
together. Yeah. I think that'sthe thing. You can tell they all
really care about each other, right, and that was like a really powerful

(01:03:44):
thing. Where the Avengers are likejust like a team of people that were
like big egos, right, that'skind of what you find. But Guardians
is like they love each other.They love each other and they care about
each other, and they would goto the ends of the universe to do
something to say of just one ofthem, And I thought that was really
powerful. Yeah, so that's myrecadation. I love it. I think
that is all we have for thisepisode. Anything else for you before we
close out? No, I thinkthat covers it perfect. This is Abraham

(01:04:05):
and this is a shame. We'reout. See you. You've been listening
to Why We do what we do. You can learn more about this and
other episodes by going to WWDWWD podcastdot com. Thanks for listening, and
we hope you have an awesome day.

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