Thursday, September 06, 2001

Gonzalo Frasca suggests the studies of violence in computer games are in fact dangerous and causes violence. Everyone in the field of computer game studies and you might add media studies in general are subject to this kind of inferior way of looking upon media: the so-called media effects. These studies might be dangerous in many ways. But the worst part is they are constructs of an academic myth, which stems from the stimuli-respons behaviorist psychology. In this myth cause and effect are directly connected. It is a myth because there is no real evidence of such a connection due to the many factors involved when people become violent. Likewise you cannot say for sure computer games do not influence people. They sure do. That is why this myth will keep to exist in spite of any common sense. Because lots of people have played computer games for years with out becoming violent at all. The common sense also tells us it is more dangerous to buy a gun than to buy a computer game. That is why we ban guns in Europe and for some reason we end up having fewer people murdered. An armed society is not a polite society, since any politeness stop when you are about to shoot one another.

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