I’ve written in the past about Dave Grossman’s dim view of first-person shooter video games, and how they train young people to be quick, reflexive killers. Since Lt. Col. Grossman is the world’s leading authority on “killology” (a field he invented), I tend to take his view to heart — and feel guilty because I, you know, sometimes play “Call of Duty: World at War.”
So I’m slightly reassured to read this more positive account of the effects of such games, based on lab tests, in The New Yorker:
“This deviation from our regular life, the visceral situations we don’t normally have,” Nacke says, “make first-person shooters particularly compelling.” It’s not that we necessarily want to be violent in real life; rather, it’s that we have pent-up emotions and impulses that need to be vented. “If you look at it in terms of our evolution, most of us have office jobs. We’re in front of the computer all day. We don’t have to go out and fight a tiger or a bear to find our dinner. But it’s still hardwired in humans. Our brain craves this kind of interaction, our brain wants to be stimulated. We miss this adrenaline-generating decision-making.”…
Control, compounded by a first-person perspective, may be the key to the first-person shooter’s enduring appeal. A fundamental component of our happiness is a sense of control over our lives. It is, in fact, “a biological imperative for survival,” according to a recent review of animal, clinical, and neuroimaging evidence. The more in control we think we are, the better we feel; the more that control is taken away, the emotionally worse off we become. In extreme cases, a loss of control can lead to a condition known as learned helplessness, in which a person becomes helpless to influence his own environment. And our sense of agency, it turns out, is often related quite closely to our motor actions: Do our movements cause a desired change in the environment? If they do, we feel quite satisfied with ourselves and with our personal effectiveness. First-person shooters put our ability to control the environment, and our perception of our effectiveness, at the forefront of play….
The other way in which people combat the alienation that Twenge has identified is through increased social interaction. And gamers, over and over, claim that social interaction is one of their strongest motivations to play. That motivation even holds for the most dedicated gamers—those who are nearing the professional end of the spectrum. Far from isolating us in a virtual world of violence and gore, first-person shooters can create a sense of community and solidarity that some people may be unable to find in their day-to-day lives—and a sense of effectiveness and control that may, in turn, spill over into non-virtual life. In 2009, the psychologist Leonard Reinecke discovered that video games were a surprisingly effective way to combat stress, fatigue, and depression—this proved true for many of the same titles that critics once worried would be isolating, and would negative impact on individual well-being and on society as a whole. In other words, the success of Doom and the games that have followed in its footsteps haven’t sentenced us to a world of violence. On the contrary: for all of their virtual gore, they may, ironically, hold one possible road map for a happier, more fulfilling and more engaged way of life.
Personally, I think that’s a bit rosy. But I found it interesting, anyway. You should read the whole piece.
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Games are good. Jane McGonigal sees games (in general–not necessarily shooter games) as a means to solve the world’s most pressing problems. Gamers are persistent problem solvers and seek out collaborative solutions. Much of her argument syncs with the article you linked to–the idea of flow, control, and social interaction.
Here’s her Ted Talk:
Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world
Her book delivers more detail and evidence.
And here’s an example of how gamers can solve real problems.
So blaze away.
“they train young people to be quick, reflexive killers”
This is really the opposite. The first few generations of first person shooters were very fast. Player character would often moved at speeds that came close to a cheetah’s top burst speed, moving the character around 55+ mph. These were called twitch shooters and the genre is largely dead. [To be honest, diversity in the shooter genre is pretty stagnant these days. Look at the top 100 sales lists and other than Battle Field X or Call of Duty X, you aren’t likely to find another shooter. Casual games, sports, racing and even My Little Pony make up the rest of the sales.]
It was a mix of things that killed the twitch shooter. While processing power became faster and faster the player character was slowed down to ease up on the time it took to render massive scenes with thousands of images wrapped around hundreds of models on the screen.
The other change was the move from the PC to game consoles. Due to Fitt’s law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law) game developers had to not only change the speed at which the player character moved around in the game world but the speed that they were able to look around. This is because controller sticks can only be moved so far in so much time while mice have a limitless line they can move in at the top speed of the players hand.
The change wasn’t one way. As developers found that most of their revenue was coming from the consoles, they’d develop for these first and then backport it to PCs. To make up for these limitations developers added things like aim assist (in most modern FPS games, you really aren’t doing the shooting, the game is, by gently moving the reticle from target to target according to how you, the player, move).
More changes were made for the new target audience. Jumping was decreased for largely QA reasons. Sprinting was limited to accommodate balance in online team play. “Health” was moved to a time based model instead of a “health pack” model to make things easier on the player.
All of these incremental changes altered the FPS landscape. Yesterday’s “murder simulators” are today’s action movie simulators. You move from scripted sequence to scripted sequence in scenarios that vaguely ape 70 something years of war movies. You can find current examples that run counter to this, but they are becoming more and more rare in the games industry.
Very interesting, Jesse.
My point in saying “they train young people to be quick, reflexive killers” was to relate it to Grossman’s point, which is that the games do the same thing we did in shifting military training between WWII and Vietnam.
We overcame the human reluctance to shoot at another human — which prevented most soldiers from firing at the enemy in combat — so that he essentially shoots first (and shoots accurately) and worries about it later. Hence a lot of cases of PTSD, which Grossman demonstrated results NOT from exposure to danger, but from exposure to the expectation (or the reality) of killing the enemy.
Anyway, FPS games train players to do the same thing we so effectively train soldiers to do today, which is why our soldiers (and the soldiers of other countries that use these modern conditioning techniques) are deadlier than any others in the history of firearms.