People don't want to understand eachother or see beyond black and white views. Get used to it this is how the world works.

proof ? see fanboyism

holy crap, I don't know what to say. She has convinced me that my favorite past time is making me want to kill people...

I love how they always look like they've walked of the set of an 80's soap series.

Just the way she is dressed tells you that this is an awful person.

I don't listen to doctors who refer to themselves as "Dr. [First Name]" Unless, of course, their last name is actually "First Name".

I remember the school career counsellor essentially telling me that getting that Dr. do-hickey in front of my name would be mind numbingly hard work and I'd need to be pretty damn sharp.

...I'm starting to think he might have been lying, though.

I killed three people on the way to work this morning from playing the ultraviolent, stop-and-arson spree 'Super Mario Brothers'.

Next time someone bumps into me on the street ...

"SENTRY GOING UP!"

"If these two ever team up it could lead to an extinction-level bullshit explosion."
I am cleaning up the soiling witch was a byproduct of intense laughter caused by that sentence.
Bravo Kotaku!

@Throtex:
I'm going carry a bone saw with me from now on.

oops ... "stomp-and-arson"

her and jack met on e-harmony

You know what, she is right, gaming does make me violent. Right now I wouldn't mind butting her in the face with the back of an assault rifle for being such an idiot.

The gamer knee-jerk reaction is sarcastic hyperbole and while it is funny it does little to give our argument credibility. The brain activity argument is probably the most threatening argument that our opponents have, depending on what areas of the brain they are. However I am currently writing a paper on Youth crime and the politics involved. Youth crimes are generally taken out of their true context and applied to youth as a whole. What this does is serve to subvert the true cause of incident and blaming video games for the behavior of children helps to take the focus away from the real cause. By saying kids are playing violent video games and turning into amoral monsters, real reasons for criminal behavior like poverty can be hidden which keeps the status-quo. They need to blame the current ills of society on youth and give an explanation for the youth's behavior that does not expose the truth. Its an easy out that takes the blame away from the small portion of the population who controls the majority of the cash.

Speaking of gun violence... um... apparently someone with what might be an assault rifle was unloading rounds at random targets in my quiet, well-to-do midwestern town this morning.

How much do you want to bet they won't bring up videogames, just because it will probably involve a crazy old man and not a teenager?

I guess we can hope for a non-gaming serial killing teen to prove those people wrong...

Isn't Halo rated Mature? It isn't designed for kids.

You know what is funny?

I just played Scarface were I am chopping up some good for nothing gang to bits. I loved that part. Then I went to have breakfast and fixed stuff in the house. Funny enough, I was not angry, just amused like a cartoon.

But now I read this Dr. Susan Bartel and I wanna punch a baby. Now thats violent.

Not as violent I get when I hear anything out of Bill O'Rileys mouth but hay! XD

Let's say they are right, let's say the video games are bad in every way.

What are we going to do? Kill a multi-billion dollar industry? I don't think sooooooo.

I guess, all they really do is piss off us & make some kid steal the 50$ out of his mothers purse to buy the game she won't buy him.

You know, I was watching Heroes last night, and there was a girl that could learn anything from just watching something on the TV. She saw a wrestler do some kind of fancy flip kick, and POW! She did it later that night. What Jack and this woman have been saying all along is TRUE! That show proves that if we see it on TV, we'll act it out in real life with 100% accuracy and precision.

@Arthois:

Hay, we got rid of all those nasty cigarettes and alcohol and...oh wait.

Oh, and I dunno if you live in America or not but when listing USD the dollar sign comes before the value. :)

@Granthunter: You do realize that correlation DOES NOT EQUAL causation. That is the most basic rule of psychology. Not only is this woman a fear monger, but she is also a terrible psychologist. The brain of course activates in different ways according to the activity at hand. A game that is action oriented will require activation that allows someone to react faster, etc. The opposite is true for say a puzzle game where one searches for combinations, etc. There is no such thing as 'negative' activation as she so confidently puts it. Just different.

Now, while all that is good, she's relying on information that she did not gather. In fact, the people that conducted the study were not satisfied with what they found. Game Politics had it right when they said that this was "pop psychology at its worst."

@Granthunter:

Poverty? What poverty?

Seriously, though. I don't think we, as a gamer community, need too be to worried about credibility when attacking such folderol as this; her arguments essentially refute themselves.

What all violent behavior has in common is brain activity that brings about violent behavior. Solution? Ban brains! Remove the wrinkly little things right at birth! God knows how much damage those things are capable of...then we'd all be safe!

I played Viva Pinata this morning, and now I want to kill pinatas.

@Amuro1X: Correlation and Causation are terms of art in statistics.

I can't speak for other people but videogames make me incredibly violent irl, this bitch is right!

@AMURO1X

Sorry to have sounded like I supported their reference, I do not. I was simply trying to state that arguments like "Games don't make me want to kill people, stupid bitches like this do" do little to make a well thought out counterpoint. Your reply to my comment does, I feel validated and will give myself a cookie. I do hope that more people will look at the connection between this and the politics of fear mongering through sensationalizing youth crime. My major point was that by blaming the game the kid played for their behavior and not other factors like where they were from, their home environment, parents,how they were treated at school these social issues go unnoticed. In this way they are using games as a means of selling all youth as violent and dangerous. The result is that the agendas of those who control the message can get pushed through that allow censorship while the true root of the problem does not get attacked. Why do they not want the root attacked? Because attacking the root might mean trying to balance out inequalities in society or relinquishing control over media and that would seriously cramp their style.

guess Halo is the thier new target. Im doing this project on this sort of topic and it seems that everyone that blame the shootouts and whatnot on videogames have no expert background to make those assesments

@ KMATTSON

Good point, but you never know when some one is going to reference something said in jest. Then some narrow minded drooling idiot fails to see how their arguments refute themselves. I will shut my mouth permanently now, pleasant day all.

Interestingly enough I'm not sick of these "gaming experts" and Jack,I find these articles as light reading even entertaining.Then I just go about my business.
These things only go to show us that the gaming industry is still young because it's always the prejudice 40-60 year old people who blame anything they can on violent video games because it's normal human behavior(I'm afraid of what I don't know and I'm too much of a stubborn old man to get familiar with it).
But do you know how the industry grows older?
The prejudice dies along with the "experts".Trust me in 20 years time there will be no more "I blame video games because my child abused me"

another expert, another opinion. this is very flawed.

@SidepocketPro:
Canuck.

In French dollar signs goes after, I'll never get use to put it infront. :s

@Amuro1X: I think I recall some research that kids who grow up playing a lot of videogames end up not using their prefrontal cortexes much, which means they are less stimulated, and later on in life, less developed.

Which makes it ironic, to me, that every exercise I have seen in Brain Age are designed to make you work your prefrontal cortex.

Anyway, I'm not pretending to be an authority of any kind here, and I invite someone with more knowledge to speak up, but I do think Granthunter is sort of onto something, in the sense that, in young people, brain activity can potentially mean that part of the brain gets more developed than it would in kids who don't have the same kind of brain activity.

I fear that we tend to argue on what seems to be obvious common sense to us: if you're not stupid, you won't be inspired by violent videogames to kill people. It's that simple, right?
Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Maybe there is something to this whole brain development thing. I don't know, but I sure would like to.

Show me someone who really loves playing games such as resident evil/half life/halo, who is also a qualified psychology expert, who is worried about the effects that they could have on people, and who has ideas about possible solutions (more/better than the ones that we already have), then i will listen.

until then, please fuck off, all of you cunts make me really angry. why, i'd like to shoot you all (hee hee).

Studies continually show that there is no relevance, I don't see what there is to discuss here.

The only case in which violence is bad is when the consequences are shown to be idealized rather than realistic. For example, it's bad when it demonstrates it's a way to be a reputable gangster, but the reality of it is that it can usually cause a cycle of gang wars that will either leave you or your friends dead.

Finally! A different entertainer!
I'm getting bored with JT, so any change is "welcomed"

What's left to say, It's the television networks which demand this hysteria, just look what else they throw on their insipid programming. Pure FUD and nothing more, just to scare the stay at home soccer moms.

To an extent, the existence of people like this woman and JT is almost a backhanded compliment to Games as an industry/passtime, gaming is finally relevant enough to pop culture in general to be attacked on a level with movies/music. We're getting it worse now, but this stuff is very comparable to the decency crusades of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. At least we're not getting it as bad as comic books did in the 50s, I'll take JT over Wertham any day (google "Seduction of the Innocent" if you don't know what I'm talking about).

"Real" experts don't make it onto talk television, because sensible/intelligent comments don't attract ratings.

"Dr." my ass. She doesn't have a PhD, and she isn't a psychiatrist. Her publications include Dr. Susan's Kids-Only Weight Loss Guide: The Parent's Action Plan for Success, and Mommy or Daddy, Whose Side Am I on?

She's a nobody prof at Central Methodist University in Missouri, with her main specialty in marketing. Hmmm, I wonder how sensationalized stories on the national media about video games turning kiddies into zombie murderers ties in with marketing. Well, if a "doctor" says so, it must be true. Here's her bio:

"Susan Bartel- Prior to joining the faculty at Central Methodist, Susan was a marketing consultant for a regional consulting firm, ran her own successful marketing firm, and served nearly 25 years in administrative positions. Susan has twenty years teaching as an adjunct instructor at several institutions teaching a variety of marketing and public relations courses. Susan received a bachelor's degree in education and business and a master's degree in counseling psychology from the University of Missouri-Columbia."

@exolstice: Amen!

@minister.of.rhetoric: You actually may have a good point. Research done on people playing Tetris (the most non violent video game of all) shows that the first few times that a person plays, the brain activates more. Later on, a person may be playing but there will be less activity in the brain. What does this mean? It means that glucose in the brain is being used more efficiently. I don't think this means that your brain is less developed but better accustomed to doing a certain task. In fact, that's the basic way that the brain learns anything, and gives fascinating insight into how the brain functions. How this applies to violent video games? I dunno. hah.

@Granthunter: Your absolutely correct and sorry if I came across as attacking you. (I guess I shouldn't get so sensational myself and read your whole post. heheh.) But one thing I see on the internets is people responding to these people not with well thought out retorts, but simple insults. Hopefully that isn't the sign of social degradation they so vehemently struggle to disprove.

@Fnor: Your right. But you see, a lot of what psychology is boils down to statistics. The information that we gather is usually done through surveys and experiments. Because it is impossible to do a case study on a large group of people, a lot of what you see in psychology is generalized information from a large group of people. This is where some danger occurs and you get people over-generalizing like this woman does here. Heck, you could say that as ice cream sales go up, so do murders. They correlate, but you'd be silly to think one caused the other.

man, all this talk about psychology reminds me that I should stop skipping that lecture to do stuff like read Kotaku and play video games. Kinda funny, no?

I've only killed like 3 or 4 people since I've started playing Halo 3, which is way down from when I bought Gears of War.

cunt

I'm curious how exactly she got on this show since she clearly isn't qualified to speak on the topic.

You know, having played Halo 3, it's pretty docile compared to other shooters. There's no dismembering, no blood, no huge amounts of gore or anything like that.

And not all children like those kinds of games. Sure, it's a forbidden fruit for many and taking it away will just spur more interest, BUT I'm sure kids and teens can enjoy games based on their favorite cartoon or something even LESS violent.

I know anecdotal evidence is crap in the long-run, but personally, though I'm 21, I enjoy games like Picross DS and Pokémon. When I was younger, I liked RPGs and puzzle games like Puyo Pop. I know I can't be alone in that respect. When I got older, I started enjoying more mature games... The occasional MGS or FFTactics which had storylines involving murder, heresy, betrayal, and GUNS.

Okay, so maybe most people aren't like me.

Anyway, I'm glad someone picked up on the fact that our "credible expert" is nothing of the sort. If only they would bring those facts to life on air, we could avoid embarrassing situations like this.

On a different note, I'm getting tired of people wanting to link EVERY SHOOTING EVER to video games, even when they're clearly not related.