Best Coffee Grinds yet Certis! Thanks for writing this insightful perspective.

I believe what you're saying... it's not what other things do to you, it's what you allow them to do to you. It's not an act on the part of those things, it's YOUR choice how you react to them. Even though it looks like the other person is yelling at you, their action is entirely nullified if you don't treat it as an attack. Same goes for games that throw screaming violence in your face. By themselves, the influences of the outside world, whichever form they manifest in, carry nothing. They're neutral. They're tools.

I'm not claiming greater wisdom than your teacher, far from it, but video games probably have more of an impact on your when you're worrying about their impact. Psychologically, if you worry about the state of mind video games puts you in, and you suspect it puts you in a violent mindset, you'll start looking for symptoms, and usually find what you're looking for, because you create it. That increases your worry and the psychological effects. Suddenly you've created an alternate reality that had no truth to begin with, simply because your mind gave it life.

I'm not bothered by the potential effects of video game violence. I may be a little more concerned with the waste of time they are, but that's a different subject. Having seen my share of real violence in videos on YouTube, like the rest of us have, even being disconnected from it by watching it on a computer screen, it has a tremendously different emotional effect on me. In video games, I know all I'm doing when I shoot someone is flipping a 1 to a 0 for a particular enemy AI. Add to that, video games really come nowhere near close enough to accurately reproducing the true-to-life humanity of a living being, and you can easily detach yourself from the violence of it, understanding it's not real at all.

But, for example, the YouTube video of a helicopter in Iraq (Warning: real violence) taking down insurgents... That one gets to me. This is about as detached as modern warfare allows you to get. Yet there is something unmistakably alive and human about the people in this video, and something terribly disturbing about witnessing their violent end... It's something that can't be replicated in video games. Even the COD4 level that looks like this comes nowhere near giving the same feeling this video does. Especially when you see the injured man who survived the initial attack rolling on the ground in pain. You can't see a single detail about him, but at that moment, he's dying and will soon be dead.

She is, of course, exactly right. It all has an impact, and you decide what impact it has on you. I am unabashedly detached from the great majority of video game violence. The only time video game violence bothers me is when the game gives you the opportunity to harm "innocent by-standers." Even though these collections of polygons are no different than your enemies, because they're not aggressive, and sometimes even fearful of you, it's hard for me to bother these people. It makes no sense to attach different values to these fake lives that bear no consequences on your real existence at all. But somehow I do let it happen.

Given that her direct contribution to the scope of this article is just two lines and the rest being my own perception, I wouldn't get too hung up on questioning my teacher one way or another. This is all my stuff, she's just a catalyst in this case. We talked about a great many things, but they weren't really relevant to a gaming site

Can I get the Filthy Skimmer version?

This got me thinking about a piece of wisdom I had read once that is supposedly a loose translation of Buddha.

Words I very much believe in and follow as much as I can in my life.
I guess I already did this even before I read these words.

Zen and the art of Apple Mac maintenance

It's all about defining the terms: "Impact," "importance," "waste," "gain," "loss." If you believe change is a fundamental aspect of the universe then you don't get too worried about these things and are then freed to really get to work.

Thanks for the article, Certis!

Great article Certis.

I will throw my two cents in behind nsmike. The difference between simulated violence and the real thing, even if only observed in a video after the fact, is palpable. Violence in video games, movies, etc., never concerned me, it's simulated. But watching the real thing gives me the shivers. I have slain many a polygon-formed foe, but have never been tempted to participate in any form of real violence. I don't even eat meat

Of course, the debate of violence in video games and censorship marches on. Many acts of violence have been attributed to games but I don't buy it. All of the debates, arguments and theories just dance around the true issue - that we are all ultimately responsible for our actions.

The teacher's response may have been concise, but it rings true. We choose what kind of effect things have on us.

Don't feel bad if you occasionally handle meat in a video game. That's fine. Go and play Burger Time, it's a great game. Oh, and by all means, Psychonauts. Musn't forget Psychonauts.

Yeah, I'm a lot the same way. Sure I enjoyed Halo and enjoy TF2. But as someone who has dealt with clinical anxiety and can definitely feel the slight differences in how tense I am, I know that violent games amp me up at the very least. And not always in a way that's just fun. Sometimes in a way that's plain unhealthy.

When I started getting seen for anxiety a couple of years ago one of the first things I did was to dial down my consumption of media that was violent or aggressive. Be it music, games, movie, tv, whatever. I could immediately tell a difference in how I felt, my temperment, my mood, everything. So I guess from where I sit, I don't see how it's possible to swim in the current of modern media and not be yanked one direction or another. I think it affects you. It affects me.

This is a bit too vague to be anything but a truism... with about the same force as Robina's aphorism.
Such a bald assertion requires something besides metaphor and simile to back it up.
On the contrary, violence and struggle is part and parcel of this existence. It will never change, as the universe is always going to present life with finite resources and infinite wants and needs. Life is a tarbaby. If life is a game, your only recourse is to accept the terms or quit playing. There's no magic third option.

While some gnostic quest to abandon material reality might please some, one should not forget that those that don't wish to go on this quest would have no problem with enjoying reality as it is.

There was an interesting problem faced by people keen on helping young and baby elephants. They raised them in captivity, then sent them out in the wild. Some time later, people were finding animals like rhinos completely massacred. Turns out it was the elephants. It seems that, in the wild, as elephants mature they get into fights with each other, and losing those fights triggers a decrease in their testosterone levels; being raised in captivity, and secured from aggression, actually made things worse for the young elephants, who went out to become killers.

Of course, I am in no way suggesting that this mechanism exists in people (I am unaware if anyone has looked, though). But if we're all having fun with metaphors, it's something to consider that we may be putting the cart before the horse. Violence is intrinsic to the human animal; perhaps, rather than games feeding that drive, it helps temper it... and tempering it is, of course, an impact.

One could make the argument that it's better for your soul or whatever to create violent games rather than just consuming them all the time. Something of yourself comes through that way, or alternatively, something is negated/transformed.

That's exactly what I took away from the article. I'm responsible for making my own choices about the media I consume and how it affects me. Does Call of Duty 4 make me more anxious, aggressive, or callous? I'm in a unique position to answer that question, and to make choices accordingly.

Being in law enforcement, I'm exposed to some pretty horrific content on a very regular basis. And not by choice, obviously--it's part of the job. One interesting thing I've learned about myself is that my capacity to handle the violence that makes its way across my desk at work is actually much higher than my capacity to handle violent content I experience voluntarily. I often can't sit through violent films and television without feeling wrong.

It took a few years, but now I'm largely at peace with the fact that I have a professional responsibility to witness and describe bad things. When I voluntarily expose myself to violent material, though, especially in the name of entertainment, the impact is often different. I don't feel so good about it. Despite their interactive aspect, I actually find video games much more unreal and abstract than I do most films, literature, and movies. Resident Evil 4 I can handle. Law and Order: Special Victims Unit is another story. I may be unique in this regard, but the point is, I make choices about what I play, see, hear, and read based on what I know about myself. It's up to me to choose wisely.