Bricks Without Clay

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I’ve never heard anyone articulate the exact mechanism by which video games cause violent behavior. That’s why it’s common sense — you don’t have to think about it too much. But the usual word used is “desensitize”. The frame presumes natural empathy on the part of kids — an inclination to see people as living beings with feelings that need to be taken into account as we live our lives. Video games are an indulgence in this frame. They put disposable non-people on the screen — objects that look and act like people but have no feelings and are therefore okay to carjack or whatever. And the theory, as far as I can tell, is that too much of this indulgence makes them less sensitive to the humanity of the real people they interact with.

It gets a little muddled, because objectification and aggression are two different things. Even if video games cause objectification, it doesn’t follow that gamers will be violent to the people they objectify, any more than they’d be violent towards the rest of the objects in their lives. Video games have to simultaneously numb empathy and cultivate aggression in order to be dangerous. If an object pisses you off, you are more inclined to throw it out a window than you’d be if it were a person.

The model of desensitization is legitimate in many respects. It’s certainly neurally plausible. What about the model of aggression? When people talk about violent video games, they talk about aggression like it’s a muscle. The more often you’re aggressive, the easier it is to be aggressive.

But if that’s not the right way to model anger and aggression, what is Jon’s alternative?

And, as it happens, crime rates are down in almost every category. I don’t think they’re down because of violent video games, but simulated mayhem certainly hasn’t created a spike in bad behavior, either. Our culture has always needed a way to express the violent impulses that are part of human nature. Once we had Grimm’s fairy tales, now we have Death Trap 9: Everybody Dies Horribly.

He says, “Our culture has always needed a way to express the violent impulses that are part of human nature,” but he doesn’t take that claim very seriously in the rest of his argument, which is a good thing. A common word used to express the harmlessness of video games is “release” — people build up aggression and they need to release it in a controlled way every once in awhile so they don’t explode in an uncontrolled way. It’s a totally different dynamic than the idea of aggression as a muscle. It’s more like a balloon.

The lack of physical activity in video games makes them just as ineffective for venting aggression as they are for reinforcing bad motor programs. It’s been a long time since I played video games, and I’m about as aggressive as a stick of butter, but I don’t remember feeling particularly soothed after a Street Fighter II tourney. Even on the rare occasions when I won. Because tapping plastic just isn’t very purgative. That’s why we have sports and moshing.

So at the heart of this issue are two opposite conceptualizations of how aggression works: muscles vs. balloons. For a sciencey version of this, see Zoltan Kovecses’ work on metaphors of anger. You can see the same conceptual divide in debates about sex ‘n drugs: are they healthy releases of natural inclinations, or are they slippery slopes?

I’d be curious to see whether the additional motor reinforcement that comes with playing video games shows up with games that have nothing to do with killing people. I’m thinking Dance Dance Revolution here. Suppose you go dancing with someone and the next day you buy them a copy of DDR. You watch them as they became more proficient, and then, after they out-boogie the final boss and save the princess (or whatever), you take them dancing again. What if they danced like they were still playing the game? Things like that happen — when you perform the same motor actions in one context (the arcade), you might reflexively perform them in other contexts (a nightclub) if they trigger that first context in your head. Now imagine a version of Grand Theft Auto that comes with a plastic gun that you use as a controller. Would the DDR experiment portend bad things for a game where players physically hold a fake gun and pull an actual trigger to shoot pretend cops?

Probably not. But I wouldn’t blame someone for arguing ‘yes’.

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